Chapter 13: The Conversation

Chapter 13

The Conversation

Sera and Hilde left before dawn.

Roen stood alone in the kitchen and listened to the hooves fade down the north road until the sound dissolved into the morning quiet. The inn was dark. Milo was asleep upstairs in the spare room, breathing slow and even through the floorboards. The bread was rising in the usual spot, the linen cloth over it shifting gently as the dough pushed against itself. Everything was still, and for the first time in days he had nothing to fix and nowhere to be and no excuse left.

He spent the morning cleaning things that were already clean.

He scrubbed the bar until it shone. The wood took the polish well — dark cherry, properly seasoned, with the deep amber colour that came from a hundred years of spilled ale and elbow grease. He made a batch of honey cakes with cardamom to fill his mind with the measurements rather than the topic he wanted to avoid.

The cardamom, by the way, was from a southern coast trader who’d passed through about three weeks ago carrying spices Roen hadn’t smelled since his first life. He’d bought her entire stock before she’d finished her first ale. Sera had written the expense in the ledger under *questionable* and given him a look that said she’d be revisiting this topic. She hadn’t. The honey cakes had shut that conversation down permanently.

The smell of cardamom and warm honey filled the common room as the cakes baked. The hearth ticked quietly. Outside, the market square was just beginning to wake up — a single cart rumbling across the cobblestones, the distant clang of the blacksmith’s hammer starting up for the day, a rooster somewhere on the east side of town offering an opinion that nobody had asked for.

Milo came down at ten. He’d slept in the spare room rather than ride home alone in the dark — Sera’s insistence, last night — and he’d surveyed the spotless common room and the reorganised shelves and the plate of honey cakes cooling on the bar with the slow appraising glance of someone about to make a comment.

“You seem nervous,” Milo said.

“I’m cleaning.”

“You’ve cleaned the same glass three times. You are nervous.”

*Three centuries of war and politics and court intrigue, and this kid reads me in ten seconds flat. I’ve fooled kings. I’ve sat across from warlords and given nothing away. A twelve-year-old with bread crumbs on his shirt walks in and sees everything. Ts.*

“Eat your breakfast,” Roen said with a dry, older than his body suggested sounding voice.

“Is this about the field?” Milo gestured vaguely south. “The thing?”

“It’s about a lot of things.”

“Sera’s going to ask you questions when she gets back.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to answer them?”

“…” Roen said, or didn’t, more accurately.

Milo took a honey cake, bit into it, and chewed thoughtfully. He had a habit of chewing thoughtfully when he was about to say something he considered profound. Roen had learned to brace himself.

“These are really good. You should be nervous more often.”

He took two more honey cakes and went outside with a book tucked under his arm, whistling for Brick, who had been eating the garden’s border herbs all morning with the serene entitlement of a goat who knew nobody was going to stop him. Milo sat on the front step and opened the book and began reading aloud to Brick about grain storage methods. The goat chewed rosemary and listened with what Roen chose to interpret as interest.

The inn was quiet after that.

Roen cleaned the same glass a fourth time and put it away. Took it back out. Held it up to the light. Put it away again.

*Three hundred and forty-two years old, and I’m polishing glassware like a young man waiting for a verdict or approval from his first love. Ts.*

The morning crept on. The cardamom smell faded into the deeper, older smell of the bread that had finished baking around eleven — warm crust, a little salt and earth. Roen turned the loaves out onto the cooling rack and tapped his finger against the bottom of one to test it. Hollow. Done. He left them to cool by the window, where the morning light caught the steam rising off them in faint pale ribbons, and he thought, for no reason he could articulate, of the bread Lira had ruined and laughed at and never once been ashamed of.

He went outside for a moment to clear his head. Milo had given up reading to the goat and was now arguing with Brick about whether the rosemary was a shared resource. Brick had a strong position. Milo was losing.

“You ate the whole patch,” Milo said.

Brick chewed.

“That patch was for cooking. Roen needs that for cooking.”

Brick chewed.

“You’re a menace.”

Brick chewed, then bumped his head gently against Milo’s knee in what could be interpreted as either affection or contempt depending on the observer.

Roen stood at the kitchen door watching this. The boy’s hair was sticking up where he’d slept on it. There was a smear of honey at the corner of his mouth that he hadn’t noticed. The goat was, again, eating his herb garden with the calm methodical destruction of a creature who knew that no consequences could possibly outweigh how good the rosemary tasted.

*This is mine. This whole strange small mess of a life. This is mine, and I am about to be told whether I get to keep it.*

He went back inside.

• • •

She came back in the early afternoon.

Roen heard the horse first — hooves slowing on cobblestone, the small shift of a tired rider dismounting, the murmur of Sera saying something quiet and patient to Honey before tying her at the post. He heard her boots on the path. The latch on the front door. The familiar small creak the door made when it swung wider than halfway.

His chest did something he hadn’t given it permission to do.

She came through the door with dust on her boots and road-tiredness in her shoulders and the folio no longer under her arm. She’d left it with the court. It was done.

“Filed,” she said. “Accepted. Investigation triggered. Harwick’s collection is frozen pending review.”

She said it flat. No celebration. Just facts. She crossed to the bar, sat down, and looked at him.

“Now.”

Roen poured two cups. Set one in front of her. Sat across from her, the width of the bar between them, which suddenly felt like both too much distance and not enough.

The common room was empty. Milo had taken himself outside an hour ago and stayed there, rather than coming in, because the kid had better instincts about when to leave a room than most adults Roen had known.

“How long have you been lying to me?” Sera asked.

No preamble. No easing in. Straight to it. She’d been building to this since the field and she wasn’t going to waste time circling.

“Since the night you walked in,” Roen said.

She absorbed that. Her fingers tightened on the cup, just slightly, then relaxed. She nodded once — like she’d expected it and it still cost her to hear.

“Are you dangerous?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t soften it. He could have said *not in the way you think* or *only to things that deserve it.* Both would have been true. Both would have been evasions. She’d earned better than that.

“Are you dangerous to us?”

Roen looked at her. At the green-gold eyes watching him without flinching, and the careful hair, and the ledger closed beside her elbow, and the hands that had wiped blood off his face in a field full of glass. She hadn’t run then. She wasn’t running now.

“No,” he said. “Never.”

She didn’t respond right away. Her fingers tightened on the cup, loosened, tightened again. She was running his answers through whatever framework she used to evaluate people — the same one she’d used on Brenner and Mathis and every merchant who walked through the door — and Roen could see the moment she reached her conclusion, because her shoulders dropped half an inch and the line between her brows softened.

Stolen novel; please report.

She drank her tea. Set the cup down. When she spoke again her voice was quieter, but not smaller.

“I’m not going to ask you to explain everything. Not today. Maybe not for a while. You’ll tell me when you’re ready, and I’ll decide what to do with it then.”

“That’s more patience than I deserve.”