Book Two Chapter 3: What She Left

Book Two Chapter 3

What She Left

Roen had the dark honey open before the sun was properly up.

He made Sera’s tea as he did every morning, frostmint steeped long, but this time he spooned the new honey in instead of the pale, set it at her place, and went back to prepare today’s breakfast, fried dough, without appearing to wait.

She came down, finally fully healed from the encounter she had with the mass of darkness, and subsequently with the ground, a few weeks ago. She took her place at the bar and had a sip of the tea.

She stopped with the cup halfway down.

“Roen, what did you do to this?”

“Nothing… It’s the new honey.”

She looked into the cup, then at the shelf, where three dark jars now stood beside the pale one. He watched her as her eyes did the dance they did when some arithmetic was required; he, of course, had known they would. They were all tells: the colour of the honey, the time of year, the taste, and at the end, the price such a thing fetched at the back end of a market, all of it forming in her mind.

“How much?” she asked, already knowing the answer, Roen suspected.

He told her.

She held the cup. He had been braced for the lecture about coin, sense, and the difference between what a thing cost and what it was worth, and he had decided in advance that it would be worth hearing.

It didn’t come. Instead, she slowly drank the rest of the tea, set the cup down, and picked up her pen.

“Thank you,” she said, and then continued before he had the chance to reply, “Buy the man’s pale honey for the guests. This stays behind the bar. For me.”

“For you.”

“And don’t tell Bess what it cost. She’ll have opinions.”

It was, he understood, the nearest to an acknowledgement of their new situation she would come to this morning. He smiled at her, took the cup away to wash it, and found he was content to leave it at that.

The mushrooms, by the way, he left in the coldest place he could find, to make them keep a little longer. They were not for an ordinary breakfast, and he had not yet decided what they were for.

• • •

Velan Dayre came down not long after, in the same warm colours with the dust brushed out of them. She had slept, and it showed; the road had come off her face.

“That,” she said, stopping at the foot of the stairs, “is the smell I was promised.”

Roen cut the bread and set it in front of her with a dish of room-temperature butter and a tiny ceramic pot for the pale honey. He had bought the pot a few days ago at the market stall of an old woman from the village west of Millhaven. Velan ate the first slice quickly, then the second slowly, having discovered it was better than she had expected.

She asked good, normal, expected questions while she ate. How long had the inn stood? Who had built the south road? Whether the crossroads had always been a crossroads, or whether the town had been here first and made it one. They were innkeeper’s questions that wanted innkeeper’s answers, the sort any traveller might ask, and Roen answered them as any innkeeper would, and noted that not one of them was idle. She was building a picture. She did it pleasantly, well, even, with a smile, and she did not once ask about the glass.

That was the thing he marked most.

Somewhere between one question and the next, he had felt her reach — a small, patient pressure, gentle enough that she would not have expected him to notice. He gave no sign that he had, and buttered no bread, and let it pass through him like water past a stone, and kept the moment for later.

Milo came down with Nyx behind him, and the cat stopped on the third step from the bottom.

She did not come the rest of the way. She sat where she was, a small inquisitive cluster of dark with two glowing points near the top, held entirely still, and fixed her eyes on Velan, and the gold in them came up the way it came up at night. Milo went on to the bread without noticing. Velan noticed.

“Handsome cat,” Velan said.

“She keeps to herself, and she bites,” Roen said, which was true, and which was not what the woman had asked.

Velan held the cat’s stare a moment longer than was comfortable, and something passed between the scholar and the animal that Roen could not read. Needless to say, he did not enjoy that. Then Velan smiled and went back to her breakfast, and Nyx came down the last two steps and went out to the yard with her tail low, and did not come near the woman again.

• • •

When she had eaten, Velan asked the question Roen had been waiting for since the stairs.

“The corrupted ground south of here. Is it safe to walk?”

“The road past it is. The field itself I’d stay off. The ground’s strange, and there’s nothing out there worth the walk.”

“Strange how?”

“It’s glass and ash, mostly. People don’t like the look of it, or the smell.”

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“I expect they don’t.” She was already gathering her case and her satchel. “I’ll keep to the road. I came a long way to look at strange ground; I’d be poor at my work if I stayed in for the tea and the magically good bread.” The easy smile again. “Though I’ll want the tea after.”

He gave her the heel of the morning’s loaf for the walk and watched her go out into the autumn colour, south, along the road he had ridden a few times now, some of which had ended in what he privately filed under difficulties. She walked it without hurry.

• • •

Roen was wiping down the bar after breakfast, while Velan was still outside.

His cloth went over the cherry in slow circles and then under the lip of the wood where the polish never reached, and his thumb found something that did not belong.