Book Two Chapter 2: The Scholar

Book Two Chapter 2

The Scholar

The market had turned over so quickly, almost happening while Roen wasn’t looking.

A week ago, the stalls still belonged to summer: flat baskets of tomatoes, beans, herbs, berries of different varieties, and sweet pink-ish peaches. Today it was squashes the colour of old brass, the first hard apples not yet worth eating raw, but perfect for tangy preserves, walnuts that stained the forager’s hands brown to the wrist. He took an interest in the game birds hung in a row on the butcher’s frame, a ring-necked pheasant looked particularly interesting, but the price dissuaded him quickly. A jug of new cider had gone cloudy in what was left of the sun, and the smell of it reached him three stalls early. He was never a cider type of person, one of the drinks he couldn’t master, but he bought a small bottle out of interest. A few stalls down the chilly wind called, and he was glad of the vest he had on.

He slowly went through the rest of the market. There was no battle at the end of the road anymore, nothing to hurry towards, the inn was taken care of by Bess and Sera while he was shopping, and he had spent the better part of a year teaching himself to believe that. Two of the stallholders nodded to him as he passed, and he waved back. He was a known face now, the innkeeper from the inn by the glass, and somewhere in the last week, the nods had stopped being wary around the topic .

He bought three more things.

The mushrooms came first. They would not keep, and he had never seen them in this market. His breath stopped the second he realised what they were, and again when he realised the forager didn’t. Their stems were long, pale white, and thin, and the caps were barely bigger than them and in the same colour; they sat together in a bunch, clustered, coming out of a single base. He bought the two bunches available, paid what she wanted and left her a silver coin for the good service, from his personal savings rather than the inn’s money.

The knife came second. A smith at the end of the row was breaking his stall down early, and there, among the iron he hadn’t sold was a paring knife, plain enough that nobody had wanted it, with a simple old wooden handle, half-hidden by the billhooks. Roen turned it over once and felt the balance and steel, which he found to be better than anything else on the smith’s cloth. It had been folded by someone who cared, a long time ago, and had passed through enough hands since then that the care had long been forgotten, but with a bit of attention, this would probably become the best knife he had. He bought it for a rather low price and let the smith think he had got the better of the trade.

The honey came third, and he was less honest with himself about it.

It was the last pressing of the year, dark and slow, from a man who would have no more until spring. The inn went through honey; that much was true. It was also true that the pale honey on the shelf at home would do for everyone except Sera, but this, this would make a difference to her tea, so he bought the dark jar, for a price that was double the usual rate, walked a step in the direction of the next stall, turned back and bought two more. He made the decision knowing that she would not be happy about the price, but the few minutes of lectures about finances and smart spending he would have to endure would be worth it when she tastes it the next morning.

He had been drafting something for a few days now. Ever since that night on the roof.

He was aware of how absurd that was; the same person who addressed kings and armies without notes was writing a speech for a woman. For those days, he had carried a single conversation up and down the road to the market or to the well, or anywhere, to be honest, turning it, revising it, finding the better word and the right place to begin.

The trouble was that he was always precise about difficult things. This was definitely a difficult thing, especially for someone who had not had a conversation about his feelings towards another person in more than a hundred years, so his academic precision felt like the only responsible way to hold it. He wanted to say it correctly. It seemed to him no more than fair that before anything was decided, Sera should understand exactly what she would be deciding about.

He had most of it arranged in good order by the time the inn came into view.

• • •

The common room was in its afternoon lull. The market crowd had gone, the evening crowd had not yet formed, and the low gold light lay across the cherry wood. Bess was somewhere past the kitchen door. Milo’s voice carried thinly from the yard, explaining something to a goat that had no interest in it.

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Sera was at her corner table with the ledger open, and she didn’t look up when the door let him in.

Roen put the mushrooms in the cool of the larder and set the new knife on the bar, intending to sharpen it later and put the jars of honey on the shelf beside the pale, where she would see them. Then he crossed to her table, stood at it, looked her in the eyes and began.

“I’d like to talk about the roof.”

Her pen didn’t stop. “All right.”

“I’ve thought about how to say it. I’d rather say it properly than say it badly and spend an hour correcting myself, so I’m going to ask you to let me get to the end before you answer.”

“I’m listening.”

“What almost happened on the roof. I don’t want it to happen because the night was quiet, we were tired, the news was heavy, I was heavy with guilt, and you were close. That’s just the circumstances, and they aren’t a foundation for us. If it happens, it should happen because you’ve looked at the whole of the thing, the whole of me, with your eyes open, and you have decided for yourself, not me for you.” He had the order of it now, and it was coming the way he had built it. “You know what I am. You know the number, you know what I can do. You know that trouble will come. I need you to have thought about what the number means, what this time would mean, and, especially, the danger the rest of me might pose, not directly, but the future is not certain. I have stood at the end of a life I shared with someone, and I have shared the danger with that someone as well. I know precisely what it costs and how long the cost is paid. It would be unfair of me to let you choose this without first…”

Sera set the pen down.

She stood, put one hand flat to the table, and he stopped, because he thought she was going to tell him the timing was wrong, or to sit, or to slow down.

She leaned over the small distance and kissed him.

It was brief, no more than a single flying moment, and her hand never left the table. Then she lowered herself back onto the stool, looking his straight in his eyes, took up the pen, and continued in her ledger as if she had only reached across for a sip of tea.

Roen stood, stunned, where he was.