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“So I’d have been able to see your cottage. Would there have been any lights inside?”
“It depends on what time you arrived. There might have been light showing if you came before I went to bed. You were far enough from the house that I might not have heard you in the garden while I was awake.”
She watched his face carefully as he considered this, but she could find no sign of artifice. There was a way she could test him, she knew. She hesitated because it was intrusive and questionable for her to do when it was merely for her benefit rather than to help him, but she had to know. She placed a gentle hand on his and said, “I’m sure it will come back to you,” as she opened her senses to read him. She immediately felt a wave of confusion and frustration. He wasn’t hiding anything. That didn’t mean he wasn’t an assassin sent to kill her, but if he was, he didn’t know it.
There was one other thing she read from him: affection. Toward her? Her gift wasn’t the sort that could tell her that kind of detail, but he had a warm glow of affection about him. Aside from the frustration about his identity, he was happy and balanced. She removed her hand from his before she could give in to the temptation to probe more deeply.
“I think I’m mostly worried about what I might have left behind and who might have hurt me,” he said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t mind staying here. In the village, I mean.”
She turned to look at him and found him looking back at her with a crooked smile. “It is a nice village,” she said.
“And we’d be happy to have an extra man,” Mair said with a glance back over her shoulder. Elwyn had almost forgotten she was there while she was pondering Bryn’s identity.
The cart stopped in front of the cottage, and Elwyn helped Bryn down before Mair drove away. “Well, we learned one thing, maybe,” Bryn said as they entered the cottage. “If that was where I was attacked, my attacker seems to have gone the other way. That’s good, right? If he wanted to kill me, surely he’d know where to go and would have been here by now.”
“True.” If it had been one of the baron’s men, Elwyn was fairly certain he wouldn’t have fled. So maybe Bryn had nothing to do with that.
Bryn rested while she opened the shop, and by dinnertime he showed no ill effects from the day’s exertions. He didn’t want to go to sleep immediately after dinner, so Elwyn brought a couple of cups of mint tea to the sitting room, and they sat by the fire together. She wished she had some kind of needlework to do, although she’d always hated being forced by her mother to do such things, just to have something to keep herself busy. It felt strange to sit totally idle. She wrapped her hands around her teacup, just to give them something to do.
Bryn must have felt the same thing. “I have a feeling that I would normally read in a situation like this,” he said. “Alas, we have but one book between us. Should I read it aloud?”
“Yes, please,” she said. That would prevent them having to make conversation and she wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally expressing her concerns about why he’d come this way in the first place or about what affection he might be feeling.
“I’ll start where I left off, so I’m afraid it might duplicate what you’ve already read.”
“I don’t mind. It will remind me what happened before I left off. I haven’t had a chance to read in days.”
“I’m sorry about that. I know it’s my fault, since you’ve had a patient who’s also a house guest. You’ve had no chance to just sit in your own sitting room and relax.” He cleared his throat and began reading. His voice was deep and pleasant, and as he read, she thought she detected a slight hint of an accent, probably from one of the northern counties. He read well, putting expression behind the words and even slightly altering his voice for each character. Elwyn closed her eyes and settled back in her chair, allowing his words to conjure images in her mind. It was almost like being at the theater.
She jolted out of the spell he’d woven when he paused to take a sip of tea. “Sorry, throat got dry,” he said, apparently noticing that she’d opened her eyes as though startled. “I didn’t realize reading was such thirsty work.”
“You do it well.”
“I wonder if I’m an actor. Was the armor a costume? But I don’t know why an actor would be roaming the woods in costume, far from any theater, and getting into a fight.”
“A dissatisfied audience member tracked you down?”
“How dare you!” he said in mock protest. “I would never leave an audience dissatisfied.”
“Would an actor be carrying a real sword, though?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t feel like I know much about the theater, though I could have forgotten, given that I’ve forgotten everything.” He drank more tea, and she tried to think of a way to lift his mood, since a dark shadow seemed to have come over his features. He recovered quickly on his own, though, smiling and saying, “It’s your turn.”
“For what? To read?”
“If you like. Or you could talk. Entertain me. I need to rest. Besides, I can’t talk about myself because that would be a short conversation. Tell me about you. You know how to mend a wound, but you’re running a tea shop. How did that happen?”
“That is a very long story.”
He settled back in his chair and stretched out his legs. “I’m not going anywhere, though it is possible that I might fall asleep, especially if it’s not an interesting story.”
“I did train to be a healer, but I don’t do that anymore because it turned out I wasn’t very good at it. So now I’m using the knowledge of herbs I gained from my training to blend teas.”
“That’s not a very long story.”
“I left out the boring parts.”
“You said you happened to stumble upon this place. Where were you coming from and why were you here?”
