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Elwyn then checked on the Chicken Lady. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Perfectly fine. No need to fuss over me.”
“You’re not spitting up any blood? Any trouble breathing?” It was difficult to find any bare flesh she could casually touch to read the woman, as wrapped up as she was in her shawls. At least she’d left the chickens at home.
“No trouble at all. Now, you’re interrupting my eating.”
“You know how to find me if you need help,” Elwyn said before she joined Bryn to walk home.
Away from the market square, it was much darker. Elwyn wasn’t sure there would have been enough light to walk home without the lantern. She was glad they’d left when they did because the event was beginning to catch up with her now that she’d had time to think about it. As soon as they’d passed the last of the village houses and were nearing the bridge, she said, “I did it again. I completely missed something important. When she complained about the sore throat, I didn’t even examine her.”
“I’m not sure you’d have seen that just from looking in her throat.”
“But I have more tools than just my eyes. I do have a gift. Most healers do. It’s a kind of empathy. I can feel what a person is feeling, which helps me know where the problem is. That’s very helpful if the person can’t talk, but even if they can, feeling it tells me things people usually can’t describe for themselves. All I had to do was read her, and I’d have known exactly what the problem was, but I didn’t do that because I stopped trusting my gift after that other incident.” She gave a bitter laugh. “It seems that not using my gift because it failed me meant that I failed again.”
“Have you ever considered that you weren’t wrong before, that it wasn’t your fault?”
“He died, so I had to have missed something.”
“Did you get a chance to examine him afterward and see why he died?”
“I confirmed that he was dead. My gift doesn’t work on the dead, so I couldn’t read him, and I didn’t get a chance to do a thorough physical examination.”
“So he could have died for some other reason. The knight he’d fought against might have finished the job.”
“He had no new wounds. I know that much.”
“There are other ways of killing people.”
“Murder by poison seems unlikely. Knights may not be as honorable in reality as they are in stories, but I can’t imagine another knight murdering a tournament opponent, especially since the knight who died was the one who lost.”
“Could he have been killed to strike at his lord?”
“If so, his lord wasn’t the one who suffered from his death. His lord accused me.” She shuddered at the memory of shouted condemnations, with no one taking her side.
“Would anyone have benefited from getting you out of the way?”
“Most people barely knew I existed. I don’t see why it would be worth killing someone in order to falsely accuse me of murder. Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“I had grown close to the duke. He trusted me. I didn’t advise him, but he talked to me about issues at court, and the like. He said talking to me helped him organize his thoughts. It’s possible someone thought there was more to it than that and wanted me out of the way so they could have influence. If he was talking to me, then he wasn’t talking to them.”
“Could the baron who accused you have felt that way?”
That hadn’t occurred to her, and she couldn’t believe she’d never considered that the baron had been scheming against her. “He never liked me. I always got the feeling he thought I was turning the duke against him, though I don’t recall ever saying anything about him to the duke. The most I ever did was report that knight for his behavior at court. I mostly avoided the baron. It’s hard to believe that would be worth killing his own man for.”
“But it’s still possible that you had nothing to do with the knight’s death and your gift was never in question.”
It would be nice to think that way, but even if she convinced herself, she wouldn’t be able to sway anyone at court. “It would have been impossible to prove otherwise, and they were convinced enough to pursue me across the kingdom. If they’d merely wanted me out of the way and out of the duke’s good graces, they had that.”
“They might have worried you knew too much and could reveal the plot. You were a loose end that needed tying up.”
“I’m still a loose end. They merely haven’t managed to find me here yet.”
“Maybe they won’t. Maybe they won’t think to look for you here because they don’t know this place exists.”
They’d reached the cottage and the door swung open in greeting. “Thank you, Gladys,” Elwyn said as they entered and the door closed behind them. “The festival was lovely. I wish you could have seen it.”
