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They went up the stairs, and lamps in their respective rooms lit as they parted on the landing. “Good night, Wyn,” Bryn said.
“Good night, and thank you for your help. I don’t think we would have saved her without you helping me move her around.”
“It was good to feel of service.”
She thought that was a strange way of phrasing it, but he was clearly exhausted. Perhaps he wasn’t as thoroughly healed as he liked to believe. He still needed rest, and all the activity preparing for the festival plus the dancing may have been too much for him. She knew she barely had the energy to remove her clothes and do a quick wash at the basin before she fell into bed.
He wasn’t in the kitchen when she came to breakfast the next morning, and she worried he’d changed his mind and left with the musicians. Surely he would have said goodbye or at the very least left a note. He wouldn’t have slipped away before dawn without a word. Even if he didn’t want a goodbye scene, he would have left some kind of notice for her so she’d know what had happened to him.
She’d eaten and had gone to the shop to see to a patient with indigestion from the festival before Bryn came inside. “Come look,” he said, taking her hand and bringing her out of the house and around to the side that overlooked the brook. A few small tables with chairs set at them had been arranged between the house and the brook. Some of the plants had been cleared away to make room for the tables, but it still felt like sitting out in a garden. “What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s lovely! But you didn’t have to do all this yourself. I would have helped.”
“It wasn’t that much. And I wanted to surprise you. We talked about it, and I think your customers will like it.”
“Where did you find the tables?”
“Around,” he said with a shrug. “There were some in the shed, in the storage part, not the workshop. I also found a few around the village. If anyone moves into some of the abandoned cottages, you may have to give them back.”
“Thank you. Even if the customers don’t like it, this will make a nice place for us to sit outside.” She noticed, though, that he had spoken of ‘you’ rather than ‘us,’ and she couldn’t help but feel like he was setting things up for her to function in his absence. That made sense, and she reminded herself that him leaving had been her idea. That didn’t mean she was happy that he seemed to have embraced the idea and was making preparations.
She wasn’t expecting a lot of customers the day after the festival, since she was sure most people would be recovering or cleaning up, but Mair, Hana, and Lucina arrived soon after she opened, eager to rehash the events of the night before. She took them out to the tables by the brook. “See what Bryn set up for me,” she said.
“You’ll have trouble getting rid of people now,” Mair said, taking a seat at one of the tables.
“I won’t put out lanterns for after sundown,” Elwyn said.
“Speaking of sundown, you two left early last night.” Mair winked and grinned.
“After a woman nearly died on me, I wasn’t feeling very festive. As I told you last night.”
“But you saved her,” Lucina said. “You didn’t feel like celebrating?”
“I didn’t really do anything to save her. I felt so helpless. She was lucky. I’m still wondering how she managed to inhale a chicken bone.”
“She must eat very enthusiastically,” Mair said.
“She was fortunate you were there,” Lucina said. “It is good for this village to have a healer. You have helped me.”
“You’re sleeping better?” Elwyn asked.
“Yes. I still have the nightmares, but they are not as bad. I took your advice and have been writing them down, and I have realized that most of them are not memories. They are exaggerations of what happened, or they are what I feared might happen but that did not. Thinking about that seems to have made them less frightening, so they don’t wake me up as often.”
“That’s good to hear.”
Mair raised her teacup. “Here’s to our healer! I haven’t had a cold since I started drinking your tea, and Lucina is sleeping better.”
“It’s nice to know I’m doing some good,” Elwyn said, looking down at the table so she wouldn’t have to look them in the eyes. She felt like she was hiding from them in not telling them the full story of why she had come to be there. In spite of what Bryn had suggested the night before, she still wasn’t sure she trusted herself. It just didn’t make sense for the baron to kill his closest ally in order to drive her away from court. It was nice of Bryn to try to make her feel better, but he didn’t know what had really happened.
“This village changed for the better when you arrived,” Mair said. “Not only are you healing people, but you’ve given us a place to gather, which has brought us all together, and that then led to the festival.”
“That wasn’t because of me,” Elwyn insisted. “You put together the festival, and it happened because there were musicians in town.”
“But I think you were the spark that started it all. Something about having a healer again made us feel like we’d rejoined the rest of the world, like our curse was lifted.”
“Curse?” Elwyn asked, curious.
“Figuratively speaking. Whatever it was that made people leave.”
