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“Unless they perfectly matched where you stepped, there was only one set of footprints heading to the village,” Elwyn said. She picked her way around the site of the fight. “There are hoofprints here—probably from more than one horse, and they seem to be leading away, back toward the road.”
“So I must have scared him off,” Brynn said.
“Or he left you for dead and took your horse,” Mair suggested. “If you won, wouldn’t you have taken your horse with you?”
“If I was barely conscious from pain and the loss of blood, I might not have been thinking clearly. I managed to stagger away and find help, and he recovered his senses to find himself alone, so he rode away with both horses.”
“I’m no expert at this,” Elwyn said. “All I can tell is that more than one person moved around a lot in this area, there are slash marks on a couple of the trees, there’s one set of footprints heading toward the village, and there are hoofprints leading away. Beyond that, I’m not sure you could tell.” She knew of people who could magically read a scene and re-create what had occurred there, but that wasn’t one of her gifts. “It looks like someone might have lain on the ground over there, near where the footprints began.” She pointed to the spot where the leaves and moss had been disturbed. “There might even be some blood on the ground there. The rest of the ground is too disturbed for me to tell if a second person ever fell.”
“So, we know where it must have happened, but still have no idea what happened,” Mair said.
Elwyn tried opening her magical senses, which were usually only good when she had direct contact with another person, but she might sense if magic had been used nearby recently. Bryn had been touched with magic, and if magic had been used on him here, she might be able to sense it. She thought she felt a trace of something magical, but it had been days, and the forest had its own magic, so it wasn’t a strong enough lead to make it worth the explanations that would be required to share it.
“Help me down,” Bryn said. “Maybe if I retrace my steps, something will come back to me.” He and Elwyn walked past the location of the fight so he could approach it the way he must have. They reached the fight spot once more, and he walked around that whole area, then followed his footsteps toward the edge of the forest, before turning back around and sighing heavily. “Nothing. None of this is familiar. As far as I can tell, I’ve never been here before. Maybe this wasn’t me, after all.” He looked down and added, “Though the prints do seem to match my boots.”
“Now what?” Mair asked. “We didn’t get as far as I expected. Where shall we have our picnic? There’s a nice little bridge not far from here. We can sit on the side of it.”
Since it wasn’t far, Bryn stayed out of the cart and walked with Elwyn, taking her arm and leaning slightly on her. “This is very frustrating,” he said.
“I can imagine. It must be disconcerting not knowing who you are.”
“At the moment, I’m more concerned about the fact that there’s someone out there who wants to hurt me, and I don’t know if they’re justified. What if I’m the villain here?”
“I find that hard to imagine.”
“But you don’t know me or what I’m really like. I don’t even know that. Maybe I’m only reasonably nice because I don’t remember all the things that make me a terrible person.”
“I think this situation has shown something of who you really are when everything else is stripped away, and you seem to be kind and intelligent. If you were acting as a villain, then you must have been miserable as you acted against your instincts.” A shiver of unease went through her as she realized that was exactly what she’d been doing for nearly a decade. Not that she’d been a villain, but she’d run away from her old life and her mother’s dreams for her to follow her calling as a healer, and then she’d left a life of helping ordinary people to be a duke’s personal healer and tend to people at court while she lived a life of luxury. It had seemed like a pleasant life, but she had to admit that she’d been unhappy deep down inside. “Let’s just say I understand something about that.”
He didn’t probe, for which she was grateful. She was barely able to confess it to herself. It would take her some time to ponder this realization before she was ready to talk to anyone else about it.
They had their picnic on the very spot where Elwyn had reached her lowest point and decided she wanted to live. It was a pleasant place—not necessarily a place where she’d want to die, but a good place to sit on a warm afternoon with friends. “While we’re wondering why Bryn was here,” Mair said, “what brought you down this lane, Wyn?”
“I didn’t want to be on the main road anymore, and this was the first lane I came across after I made that decision.” Had there been something pulling on her or calling to her? It hadn’t seemed like it at the time.
“I’m very glad you did,” Mair said, draping an arm over Elwyn’s shoulders and giving her a slight hug. “The village has become so much more fun with you here.”
On Elwyn’s other side, Bryn also draped his arm around her. “I’m also glad you did. I don’t know what would have become of me if I’d collapsed outside an abandoned cottage.”
But as much as Elwyn tried to enjoy the outing with her friends, she couldn’t help but worry about why Bryn and the person he’d fought had been on the lane to the village—if that was what had happened. She couldn’t think of any good reasons why a pair of armed men would come to this remote location. The main thing that came to mind was that they were looking for her. If they’d been sent by the baron, she could be aiding her own enemy.
Chapter 9
For the journey home, Elwyn couldn’t think of a good reason why she shouldn’t ride in the cart with Bryn instead of walking ahead or alongside it, but she wished she didn’t have to ride in the cart with him. Thinking of him as a potential enemy changed her feelings about him.
But when she looked at him, she couldn’t seem to see him as an enemy, as an assassin or investigator sent by the baron to find her. If that was what he was, he must have been miserable because without his memories he wasn’t at all the sort of person who could live that kind of life. He would have been going against his essential nature. That could explain why he’d lost all memory of his identity. Perhaps he’d been recruited and trained from childhood, forced into a life he wouldn’t have chosen for himself.
That was a nice story, but it was hard for her to believe. If he was an assassin, then he had to be one who operated more by stealth than by force. He didn’t have the body of someone who was trained for fighting and killing. He might be able to sneak up behind someone with a knife. Or his main weapon could be poison. He did know his herbs. Was he living in her home, waiting for a chance to poison her? She doubted Gladys would let him put poison in her food or drink, but perhaps she should be careful if they were ever away from home.
Now that she thought about it, how could she even be certain that he really had lost his memory? Without knowing anything about him, she couldn’t test him or try to trick him. She couldn’t call out his real name and see if he instinctively responded or feed him something he was allergic to and see if he knew to refuse to eat it. Could his amnesia all be an act to make him seem harmless? He really had been wounded, so maybe he was waiting until he was healed and no longer needed her before he poisoned her.
“I seem to have staggered quite a way before I collapsed,” he remarked as they emerged from the tunnel of trees.
“You weren’t wounded that badly. The main problem was the loss of blood, which would have taken some time to affect you,” Elwyn said.
“It must have been a moonlit night. Otherwise, I don’t know how I would have made it without bumping into things.” He rubbed the fading bruise on his cheek. “Or maybe I did bump into things.”
“It wasn’t quite a full moon, but there was some moonlight,” Elwyn said.
