Page 25 of Remmen

Neither of us let go.

CHAPTER 10

REMMEN

I knew the taste of Anne now. It was worse than being gored.

For that first day… after… I kept to my office and sent out Korfas to take care of anything that needed seeing to. On the second, I had to go outside and I ran into her within five minutes. We froze in the street and anyone who looked must have seen what we were, what we’d done.

But after a brief stumble, Anne gave me a polite smile and moved on.

I forced myself to do the same. We could be nothing more than polite smiles to one another. There were rules.

The days after were their own kind of torture.

I learned her hours. When Anne bought her bread. When she carried her kit down to Maisie’s borrowed buggy. Which streets put her on my path and at what hour. I built my whole day around not being where she was. None of it helped.

Six years I’d spent teaching bulls to want only what they were allowed, and here I was at a dark window after supper with no honest reason to be, waiting for her light to come on over on the counselors’ row. It came on, small and yellow. I stood there a while after it did.

It held the better part of a week. Then I came around the side of city hall with my head down over a tally of winter feed, and she was on the steps, and the top one had gone slick with the morning’s rain.

Her boot went out from under her.

I didn’t decide to move. I had her before the small sound she made was fully startled out of her, one hand closed around her upper arm, the other flat to her back, holding her up off the stone. She weighed nothing. Her fingers had fisted in the front of my coat to catch herself, and her face tipped up to mine, close enough that I felt her breath stop.

She fit into my hands and I hated how well she did. Up close she smelled like the salve from her kit and under it like herself, and the morning’s rain had stuck a few dark strands of hair to her cheek. I wanted to move them off her face, and I knew exactly what my hand would want after, if I let it start.

Let go.

I didn’t. I held her there. Her heart was beating quick against my forearm, and mine had matched it without asking. Rain ticked against the street around us. I could feel her breath across the few inches I wasn’t closing. It would have taken nothing to close them.

Only when a bull called a good morning across the square did my hands remember whose they were. I set her on her feet. I stepped back, and it cost me more than it should have.

“Careful,” I said. Rough. It was all I had.

“Always.” Her voice wasn’t steady either. She went up the steps and through the door without looking back, and I stood in the road and couldn’t make my feet move for a moment.

Nezara found me two days later.

She came to the office with a folder under her arm, took the chair opposite mine, and waited. She’d watched a lot of settlements try, and not all of them had made it, and she’d put her name to the paper that brought the counselors here. I poured her the bitter root brew we all pretended was coffee before she said a word.

“The Agency has set a review,” she said. “End of the month. They’ll want to know the program is working.”

“It’s working.”

“They’ll want numbers, Remmen. How many men keep appointments. Whether anyone is getting better.” She slid a page across the desk. A single column, and a figure at the foot of it. “These are official sessions logged since the counselors landed.”

It wasn’t a lot.

But paperwork couldn’t show the true benefit of the program. “The work is real. I’ve watched Anne splint a break out at the steads with a man who wouldn’t say two words to Otho. Giles has one who won’t sit unless the door’s open. It’s real.”

“I believe you. But there are metrics that the committee needs. They will read the column.” She didn’t say it unkindly. Unkind I could have argued with. “Three counselors on a world that needs one is coin the Agency spends elsewhere. If the numbers don’t move, they redistribute.”

“Redistribute.” I gave the word back to her. “The posting was for a year. It’s been a month.”

“You signed for a year of the program, not a year of three counselors with empty books. We can send the extra where they’ll be used. I’d rather you heard it from me now than from a transfer order.” She turned her cup on the desk. “There’s Charter Day before then. The town will be in good humor. Give them a reason to be proud.”

She drank the bitter brew like it was a courtesy she was doing me. She’d spent capital to get these counselors here and did not enjoy being wrong in writing. “Move the numbers, Remmen, and I keep all three through the spring,” she said. “But if your men refuse to seek help, my hands are tied.”