Chapter 16

Wren's POV

Hester was waiting at the end of the lane when the hired cart came over the rise, with her shawl clutched under her chin, and when she saw it was us she shut her eyes a moment and then came hurrying to take my arm.

Indoors, with the door barred, Briar told her all of it. The gate, the ruby, the women, the Prince, the Green Lamp. She left Adrian out. I watched her do it and said nothing.

Hester had gone gray by the end. "Beaten at a gate, and you in your condition. Thank the Moon for that prince, or I don't like to think." She sat down hard on the bench.

"I'm all right now." I leaned back against the bedhead with my hands on my belly. "Master Aske listened to them. There are two, Hester. Both strong."

"Two." She nodded slowly, as if I'd only told her what she already knew. "I said so. I said it the first week. Well, it's a blessing, but you'll take no more work, do you hear me? Not one stitch. We'll go short before I let you near that city again."

I nodded, because she was right, and because I couldn't have told her the rest.

It was Adrian's eyes I kept seeing. He had apologized very handsomely, and he had meant it. But he had watched me the whole time he was talking as if there was something under my face he was trying to make out.

This village wasn't safe now. If he had begun to wonder, it wouldn't take a man like him long to find his way here.

"Hester," I said, "when I'm steadier, in a day or two, I think we may have to go somewhere else."

She looked at me sharply, but she didn't ask. She went out to the hearth to put my draught on to boil.

Briar sat down on the edge of the bed as soon as she'd gone. "Miss, don't fret. He saw you once, at the moonstone, by torchlight, and that was three years ago. Today you were brown as a nut. He'd never know you."

"He may not know me." I turned my head toward the wall. "It's the Luna I'm afraid of. I lived under her eye for three years, Briar. She knows how I walk, and how I hold a cup, and how I hold my head when I'm frightened. If she ever caught the smallest shadow of it, she'd know. And if she found out I'm alive, and living an hour from Silverkeep..." My hands tightened. "She wouldn't let me be. And she wouldn't let them be either."

Briar looked at my belly and then at my face, and I saw her understand.

"Then we go," she said. "Wherever you say. I'm coming."

* * *

Adrian's POV

The morning after the binding, there was a young man at the Duskmere gate arguing with the porter.

He was a few years younger than I was, in a well-cut coat of dark green silk, with the soft hands of a man who did his work at a desk.

Two servants stood behind him with a stack of boxes and bundles at their feet. The porter came to me, red-faced.

"My lord. It's Lady Wynne's nephew, asking to see her. The Luna's given orders the lady's not to be disturbed. I've told him and told him, but he won't go."

The young man bowed. "My lord. Ellis Wynne. My aunt has been poorly these last years, and the Luna has always been good enough to let me visit and bring her a few things. I was here only last month. But today I'm told there's a new order." He gestured at the boxes. "Physic for the Luna's household, and a few pearls from the coast, and some ribbons for the young ladies, and a bolt or two of silk. Only let me go in and pay my respects to my aunt, my lord. I'll leave the things and go."

I looked at the boxes. Whatever trade he was in, he had spent a good deal of it here, all for the chance to sit an hour with a sick woman. I had lived long enough among people who gave nothing without a reason to know when someone meant it.

"Lady Wynne's unwell," I said. "She needs quiet. Come back in a while."

The light went out of his face. "Unwell. She's never been strong." He hesitated. "Then may I see my cousin, my lord? Posy? She'll know her mother's ill, and she'll be frightened. I'm her mother's kin. I'd only like to say a word to her."

I thought of Posy in her green coat with the pear blossom on it, saying, "I want her to come back."

"Very well. Come in."

I didn't mean to take him through the inner house myself. I called Mistress Tabb, who had been in the nursery since before I was born, and told her to take Master Wynne to Miss Posy in the garden, let them talk a little, and see him out. Then I went to my study.

My study windows look down on the back garden. I stood at one of them and loosened my collar.

Ellis Wynne stopped at the gate of the arbor and wouldn't go farther than that, very proper, and waited there while Tabb went in to fetch the child. As she turned to go, he put a hand on her wrist, quite lightly, and I saw a coin or two go into her sleeve.

Then Posy came flying out of the house and threw herself at his legs.

She was crying. He crouched to her level and wiped her face with his handkerchief and bent his head close to hers, talking. The fountain was between us and covered whatever he said, and I didn't try to hear it. A child crying for her mother was no business of mine.

After a while he gave her a little bundle tied up in paper, and she ran back into the house holding it to her chest. She was smiling. It was the first time I'd seen her smile since I came home.

I turned from the window.

Lyle's note was on my desk where he'd left it the night before. I had sent him the afternoon of the binding, straight from the Green Lamp, to ask quietly at the Gilded Thimble about a seamstress, and he had come back with all of it.

She lived in a village called Little Fallow, an hour's walk outside the north gate, with a widow named Old Hester. She was Hester's niece, from the country.

Her needlework was the finest for ten miles, and Mistress Rowe sent her what nobody else in the shop could do. Hester carried all the work back and forth and took the money. If the Hale gown hadn't been so hard to mend, and Rowe in such a panic over it, Hester would never have let the girl come into the city herself.

Little Fallow.

I would go myself. The trouble was that the Lord Marshal of the North could hardly ride out to a village for no reason, and so far I hadn't thought of one.