Chapter Five: A Village That Pretended (Thomas)

Villages behave best when they think they’ve been spared.

This one did. Doors opened with care. Windows lifted an inch at a time. Someone rang a bell that had survived three owners and one small fire, and the sound carried like permission. The war had passed close enough to leave fingerprints, but not so close that the village felt compelled to remember it honestly.

I noticed these things because I always do.

Eliza noticed the people.

She moved through the main road as if every face mattered, as if history were not an abstraction but a series of expressions she might need to recall later. Men tipped their hats. Women paused mid-task, eyes lingering just long enough to suggest concern without invitation. No one asked her name. That, too, felt deliberate.

Mercy peeled away toward the hearth in the tavern the moment we crossed the threshold. She belonged to rooms like this in the way some women belong to storms. Useful. Underestimated. Not to be cornered. She accepted a cup of something hot without comment and began to watch the room as if counting exits that were not yet necessary.

Eliza sat beside me at the long table near the wall. The wood was scarred with initials, dates, the small violences of boredom. She rested her hands on it, palms down, fingers spread, as if reminding herself the surface was solid.

“You’re quiet,” she said.

“I’m listening,” I replied.

“To what.”

I scanned the room again. “What’s missing.”

She smiled faintly at that, and I wondered how often she’d been told the same thing by people who thought they were being original.

A girl brought us bread and ale thin enough to apologize for itself. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t linger. She had learned which curiosities were safe to keep.

The village smelled like yeast and smoke and restraint.

“This place feels wrong,” Eliza murmured.

“Because it’s calm,” I said.

“Because it’s rehearsed.”

I considered that. The laughter was measured. The conversations avoided roads and directions. No one mentioned the sound of cannon that still echoed faintly in the trees like a bad memory refusing to fade.

“You’re not from here,” I said.

“No.”

“From anywhere.”

She met my eyes then. Held them. “Not reliably.”

That answer should have unsettled me more than it did. Instead, it landed with the weight of recognition. I had known men like that. Drifters. Couriers. People who arrived without belonging and left without farewell. They always thought the difference was choice.

Eliza was different. She carried absence the way some people carry maps.

Mercy returned with a bowl of water and began scrubbing her hands, methodical and unhurried. Her fingers were stained with green and something darker that water would not lift. She did not look at either of us.

“You pulled,” she said, to Eliza.

Eliza flinched. “I didn’t mean to.”

“No one ever does,” Mercy replied.

I cleared my throat. “Pulled what.”

Mercy glanced at me then, eyes sharp and assessing. “The moment.”

I waited.

She did not elaborate.

Eliza’s shoulders tightened. “I’m sorry.”

Mercy’s mouth softened, just a fraction. “Save it for when it matters.”

I studied them both, the way they orbited something unspoken, and felt the first stirrings of unease. Not fear. Calculation. Whatever they were navigating, it wasn’t the war alone.

A man at the far table laughed too loudly and then stopped himself. Another glanced at the door as if expecting it to open again. Time pressed against the windows and the village pretended not to notice.

I leaned closer to Eliza. “You’re safe here,” I said, because it felt like something she needed to hear.

She looked at me, expression unreadable. “For how long.”

I didn’t answer. Soldiers learn early not to promise durations.

That night, the village slept in shifts.

Eliza dozed in the chair beside the hearth, her body curled inward, as if conserving space. I watched her without pretending otherwise. The firelight caught in her hair, threw shadows across her face that made her look older and younger at once. Someone who had already lost something she hadn’t finished needing.

Mercy sat across from me, sewing by firelight. She did not look up when she spoke.

“You’re thinking loudly,” she said.

“I don’t make noise when I think.”

“You do when you decide.”

I considered denying it. Instead, I asked, “How long does she have.”

Mercy’s needle paused. “That depends on what you think she has.”

“How long before time takes her somewhere else.”

Mercy resumed stitching. “Time doesn’t take,” she said. “It collects.”

I did not like that word.

“You knew this would happen,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you let it.”

“Yes.”

I lowered my voice. “Why.”

She finally looked at me then. Her gaze was not cruel. It was experienced. “Because she needs someone who won’t make her the center of the world,” she said. “And because you need someone who will ruin your sense of scale.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only honest one.”

Eliza stirred, brow furrowing, as if dreaming against resistance. Without thinking, I stood and draped my coat over her shoulders. She didn’t wake.

Mercy watched me do it. She smiled, but there was no approval in it.

“She won’t stay,” Mercy said.

“I know.”

“And when she goes, she won’t go gently.”

“I know.”

“And you will remember all of it.”

That landed harder than anything else she’d said.

“I always do,” I replied.

Mercy tied off her thread. “Then you’re already involved.”

Morning came with birds and bread and the fiction that yesterday had been an exception.

Eliza woke slowly, blinking as if the world might rearrange itself while she slept. I handed her a cup of coffee thin enough to be hopeful. She drank it like it mattered.

We walked the main road together, not touching, but close enough to feel the shared heat. The kind of closeness that acknowledges consequence without naming it.

“You’re going to ask me,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you’re not going to like the answer.”

“Probably.”

She stopped where the road split, where the village ended and the world resumed its indifference. She turned to face me fully.

“I can’t promise anything,” she said. “Not time. Not safety. Not staying.”

“I’m not asking for promises.”

She searched my face. “You should.”

“I’ve lived through enough broken ones.”

That earned a quiet laugh.

“I bend things,” she said. “Moments. Outcomes.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“It costs me,” she added. “And sometimes it costs others.”

I thought of the field. The sound that should have killed me and didn’t.

“I choose my costs,” I said.

Her breath caught. “That’s not fair.”

“Neither is time.”

She took my hand.

Nothing moved.

No blur. No pressure. No correction.

She exhaled, relieved and afraid all at once.

“You’re a problem,” she said.

“I’ve been told.”

Time watched us from a distance, patient and bookkeeping.

For the moment, it allowed the village to pretend.

And for the moment, I stayed.