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“No, not at all. I just thought that would be fun. What next?”
“That depends on the dance. You might move down the row and change partners, or you might work in a pattern with the people next to you. There’s usually someone who calls the dances, telling you what to do next. I wonder if there’s anyone in the village who can call a dance. Or maybe the musicians can.”
“What’s the difference between the country dances and the courtly dances?”
“The country dances tend to be more boisterous. At court, you glide and try not to look like you’re enjoying yourself too much.”
“I suspect I’ve never danced. Nothing about it is familiar. I don’t seem like a such a serious person that I’d never allow myself to have fun, so you’d think I’d have danced a time or two.”
“You might be a very important and busy person who doesn’t have time for dancing.”
“I hope not. That would be a sad life.”
A customer arrived, and they had to quit dancing to make tea. Bryn had a talent for selling the baked goods. He could usually convince a person that they absolutely had to have a cake with their tea, though Elwyn noticed that he stopped making sales pitches when they were down to only a couple left. She wasn’t sure what she’d do without him if he ever remembered who he was and went home. She was good at selecting the right tea for a person, but he was the one who had the knack for dealing with people and making them feel welcome. They made a lot more money when he was in the shop, and she suspected that a number of their female customers came to see him. She still hadn’t decided whether he was truly handsome, but he was definitely attractive when he smiled, and he had a way of making every woman feel special, her included.
That evening after dinner, they took their cakes—the two he didn’t sell—and some spiced tea to chairs they’d set out in the garden near the brook, where they could hear the burble of water flowing over stones near the bridge.
“If we cleared out some of the plants, we could put some tables out here overlooking the water,” he said. “During the summer, this will be a nice place to sit outside in the shade. Customers might come here just for that.”
“I don’t know if we have more tables. I’ll have to see what Gladys can find.” With a smile, she added, “Have you considered that you might have run a tea shop? You seem to be full of ideas for how to sell tea and make the shop more pleasant.”
“I thought when I fled in terror the first day that we’d decided I hadn’t worked in a tea shop. And why would someone who runs a tea shop be wearing armor, carrying a sword, and getting into a fight?”
She sighed. “I don’t know.”
“You’ve never done this, and you also know what you’re doing. You really have a talent for selecting just the right tea, the thing the person is craving at that moment, whether or not they know it. How do you do that?”
She might have confessed to some of the magic in her life, but she wasn’t ready to tell him about her talent, especially since she tried not to use it for its true purpose but was using it to select tea. That seemed so frivolous. It wasn’t as though she was refusing to use it to heal, though. She’d used it to help him, and beyond that it hadn’t come up. She’d yet to have a patient she couldn’t help without reading them.
“It’s the power of suggestion. If you tell someone you’ve chosen something just for them, they’ll think it’s exactly what they wanted.”
“Clever!”
They sat in silence, listening to the babbling brook, nightingales in the distance, and other sounds of a late spring evening. “I do like it here,” he said.
“It’s a nice place,” she agreed.
“I’ve got to wonder why it’s been practically abandoned. Don’t you think that’s odd?”
“Very odd. There’s a secret here. I don’t think anyone is hiding anything. I’m not sure they know.”
“It’s magic, I’m almost certain.”
“It doesn’t feel cursed. Things grow well. Animals are healthy. The people’s needs are met.”
“Maybe the people here now aren’t the ones who were cursed.”
“Do you really think that someone would have cast a curse that didn’t affect the smith’s wife?”
“Could she be the one who cast it?”
“I doubt it. Apparently, the reason she doesn’t like me is that my presence means things can’t go back to the way they were. She wouldn’t have changed the village with a curse, unless it was a curse that went horribly wrong. I also doubt there would have been a curse that didn’t affect the miller.”
“He’s not that bad,” he said with a laugh.
“No, he’s not,” she admitted. “I think he’s trying very hard to be what he thinks of as charming. Alas, he’s terribly wrong.”
“What would you think of as charming?”
