Page 17 of Remmen

I honestly didn’t know what got me up. Some of it was the drink. Most of it was a week and a half of my empty office and the way his hands had shaken on that door. I put my mug down and walked over.

“Rauf, hello.”

His head came around fast, ready for something. When it turned out to be his name, in a friendly voice, he didn’t seem to know where to put it.

“How’s Mestyn?” I walked right up into the open space the whole room had left around him and pitched it like the most ordinary question on the planet, because it was. “Is he still at Otho’s? That was a hell of a wound.”

Rauf’s gaze flicked to the silent room, then back to me, like he was hunting for the catch. “He’s being a mean asshole. Won’t stay down.”

“Good. Mean means he’s got the energy to heal.” I nodded at the list wadded in his hand. “You trading? I think Karl’s just about done hiding behind the bar.”

The keeper’s head came up, caught out. A beat. Then, gruff: “What d’you need, then?”

Rauf handed over his list, conversations started up table by table, and I went back to my stool with my heart going like I’d sprinted there.

They let me sit down before they started.

“Anne.” Chloe wasn’t laughing anymore. “Honey. Those men are not safe.”

“That one hauled a bleeding friend ten miles to a doctor who won’t touch him,” I said. “How not-safe is he?”

“That’s exactly how not-safe.” Maisie, gentle, which was worse than sharp. “Kazan won’t tell me what happened out there when they all got free. Nobody will. There’s a reason those men live past the ridge and not in here with us. You’re new. You don’t know yet. We’re not being mean.”

“I know you’re not.” That was the trouble with it. Every warning was kind and every warning meant it. “I’m not going to fight you about it. I’m also not going to unsay hello to him.”

Nobody had a comeback for that. Chloe huffed and topped up my mug, which I took as us agreeing to disagree, and the night stitched itself back together over the top of it.

Later, loose, warm, three drinks past smart, Chloe came around to the only thing she actually wanted to talk about.

“So.” She parked her chin in her hand. “You and the mayor. He gave you the whole tour. Drove you out to the steads.”

“He’s the mayor. Showing new people around is the job.”

“Mm.” She didn’t buy a word of it, and she was right not to, and I couldn’t hand her the real thing for love or money. So I gave her a different real thing.

“He walked me to breakfast the other morning,” I said — true, and also nothing, which was the best kind of thing to hand a table. “Very gallant. Held the tavern door like I was made of glass. Told me to wear boots because it might get muddy.” I rolled my eyes for the audience. “Deeply romantic. I nearly proposed over the terrible coffee.”

They laughed. It landed, because it was true. It just wasn’t the true part. The near-kiss over the fields, the weight of him carrying me home, his mouth a breath from mine at my own dark door while I stood there wide awake and chose not to move, none of that was for the table.

I walked home under a sky with way too many stars in it, pleasantly drunk and not the least bit reassured, chewing on the one thing I couldn’t put down.

Four gashes, dragged. A bite bigger than any mouth in that room. And I’d just spent a whole night in a room full of the biggest mouths I’d ever seen.

Nothing a man did to another man left marks like that. And not one person in this warm, kind, hand-holding town would say out loud what did.

CHAPTER 7

ANNE

“What do you mean he’s not here?” I put my hands on my hips and stared at Otho like he’d grown horns. Okay, bad metaphor. I was still getting used to the minotaurs.

“I won’t chain my patients to their beds,” the doctor stated. “Frankly, I’m surprised he lasted three days. But even he could see his guts would fall back out if he didn’t rest. He called Rauf this morning and left with him on a buggy just after dawn. He’s my patient, not yours. You seem to be taking this…”

“When a patient undergoes a sudden trauma, I can help.”

“This is hardly the worst trauma he’s undergone. If you want to talk to him, you know where the farm is.”

I did know where the farm was. I’d knelt in its dirt with a man’s blood going tacky between my fingers, so, thanks, it was pretty memorable.