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“I don’t talk about anything truly important with anyone but you and Lucina. But I won’t tell her.”
Elwyn sighed. “I may have to tell her, since I’ll need more bread. It will be hard to keep people from noticing there’s an extra person at the house for long.”
Mair escorted her down the stairs and outside. She took a wedge of cheese from the cart and handed it to Elwyn. “Here’s my contribution. It didn’t sell today, so I might as well give it to you. But when he’s feeling better, I want to meet him.”
“If he agrees.”
Elwyn crossed the road back to her cottage and found Bryn dozing in a chair, the book lying on his lap. She laid the clothes on the other chair and slipped out of the room to bring the cheese to the kitchen. While she waited for him to wake up for lunch, she went outside to see to the garden. She inspected it thoroughly for any signs that the fight that had injured Bryn could have taken place nearby, but she didn’t see any trampled plants or disturbed ground. The only footprints she saw must have been his, but they were only visible from near the edge of the garden, under the trees, to where she’d found him. She couldn’t see how he’d come to that place because either the ground was too firm or any plants he’d trampled had sprung back since then.
“Where is it that you found me?” Bryn’s voice startled her, but she fought to hide her reaction before she turned around. He was dressed in the clean clothes, which were only a bit too big for him, and she thought he looked stronger and steadier.
“Over there,” she said, pointing. “I can’t see any sign of which direction you came from.”
“Could I have been dumped?”
“There are a few footprints just before you fell, and they aren’t deep enough to have been someone carrying you, so I think you got here on your own.”
He glanced in both directions. “So, either from the road, or from that direction.” He pointed toward the back of the garden. “What’s back there?”
“There’s a footpath that follows the brook past the mill and then up toward the castle.”
He shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted into the distance toward the castle. “Is the lord in residence? It looks like his flag is flying.” He turned to her and grinned. “Hey, I know that much. Maybe I am a knight.”
“The villagers claim they haven’t seen or heard from the lord in years. Given that he’s made no attempt to collect rents, I’m inclined to believe them. He must have left when everyone else did and didn’t bother to lower his flag. Or someone went up there and raised the flag to make it look like the castle is occupied.” She didn’t share her thought about him having been held prisoner there because she didn’t want to plant a potential false memory.
“What do you know about him?”
“Nothing. Not even his name or title, now that I think about it. They tend not to bother with names much around here. It’s just ‘the brook,’ ‘the lane,’ ‘the lord,’ and ‘the castle.’ As though there’s only one, so there’s no point in complicating matters.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to look around out here, in case something jogs my memory,” he said.
“Just don’t overdo it.”
“No worries of that,” he said with a wince.
“I’ll be inside. I’d better see to lunch.”
“I won’t be long.”
Him being outside was a relief, because it allowed the helper to get lunch on the table without Elwyn having to fumble through the tasks. The soup had been dished neatly into bowls, with bread and slices of Mair’s cheese on plates beside them. He came in soon afterward and waited for Elwyn to sit before he took his own seat. “Nothing,” he reported with a sigh. “As far as I can tell, I’ve never seen anything around here in any direction. It’s odd feeling so utterly blank.”
“You need more time to recover.”
“What if I never get my memory back?”
“Then you have a blank slate to start your life over again. You can decide who and what you want to be.” She had to admit, the thought was appealing. If she knew she would have her needs met, that she would have a way to make a living and a place to live, she might wish for that, herself. It would be nice to put her past completely behind her and start over again. It would be dangerous, though, because her enemies wouldn’t forget her, and not knowing them would leave her vulnerable. That was his situation, she realized. Someone had injured him, and he had no way of knowing who it was. Anyone he encountered could be the person who’d fought him.
“But what am I leaving behind? Are there people who depend on me? Is someone looking for me or thinking I abandoned them? That’s the main reason I want to know. It would be good to know whether I have a home to go to. Don’t you have to know what past you’re escaping to want to escape your past?”
“That is true. Losing your past should be an option you get to choose, not one forced upon you.”
“Though I suppose you wouldn’t know you had chosen it, unless you left yourself a note. My past couldn’t have been ideal if someone attacked me.”
“However, escaping your past would keep you from resolving the problems that made you want to escape it in the first place. They’d still be there, maybe getting worse.”
“In other words, I can’t fix what’s wrong if I don’t know what it is. Very wise.”
“But there’s nothing you can do about it now except rest and try to get better, and maybe your memory will return.”
