Page 27 of Remmen

“You’ve got your asking walk on. I’ve known you too long.” He drove a staple home with one blow of the hammer. “Whatever it is, no.”

“We all need this. And if the others see that you’re trying…”

He was quiet a long time. The wind came across the pasture and pushed the dead grass around our boots.

“One hour,” he said finally, to the fence and not to me. “And you never raise it again.”

“That’s all I ask.”

CHAPTER 11

ANNE

I liked town festivals. I’d grown up in a place that marked Pine Day every November to honor the first pioneer who cut down a pine tree in Bender’s Grove. Was it an auspicious reason to celebrate? No, not really, but after three hundred years the town needed some bit of history to cling to.

Charter Day was a new celebration, and I didn’t need to read the sign proclaiming “Third Annual Festival” to know. The traditions hadn’t settled yet. So far, it was a crush of minotaurs and their handful of human brides, drinking cider and listening to the band on the newly constructed stage in the middle of town.

I was surprised to see Rauf and another one of the Butchers whose name I didn’t know milling around the edge of the festivities. I was even more surprised when Rauf nodded to me in greeting, but I recovered quickly and nodded back. I shouldn’t put him and his cohort into a box just because everyone else had. They deserved a chance.

The air around me seemed to change when Remmen joined in.

I didn’t have to see him to know where he was. That was the problem. All night there’d been a line drawn from under my ribs to wherever he stood, drawn tight when he crossed the square and gone loose when he came near and never, not once, letting me forget where he was. I could stand with my back to the whole crowd, laughing at something Chloe said, and point to him with my eyes shut.

I’d done that to myself. I’d climbed into his lap in a truck with the rain coming down and I’d handed myself this. Some nights, in my narrow bed over the office, I almost wished I hadn’t, because before I knew what his hands felt like I could at least pretend I had the wanting handled instead of the other way round.

Almost. On the bad nights the memory of him was the only warmth in the room, and I reached for it more than I should have.

Of course I’d done this. Crossed a galaxy to start clean, and fallen for the one male on the whole planet who could end my career with a rumor. I’d tried the safe version once, the sensible one. I’d bet everything I had on it being real, and come in a very distant second. You’d think a person would learn.

Maisie and Chloe had staked out the end of a bench near the snack table, and they watched me drift into their orbit with the look of two women who’d already made up their minds and were just waiting for me to catch up.

“There she is,” Chloe said. “Our very neutral counselor.”

“Extremely neutral.”

The band shifted into something with a beat, and the square turned into a dance floor by common agreement, boards laid over the churned mud, couples finding each other under the strung lanterns. Briar was already welded to hers.

Kazan found me first. He bowed like I was somebody fancy and walked me through something that was less a dance than him keeping three hundred pounds of celebrating minotaur from stepping on me. “Maisie says the buggy’s yours as long as you want it,” he told me, dead serious. “She also says if the mayor keeps looking at you the way he’s looking at you, she wants to be told first. Before the town. She was very clear on the order.”

“Your Maisie is a troublemaker,” I said, and he laughed like I’d confirmed something.

Lorkin took the next one. His horns were filed to blunt stubs for the forge and there was a spark in his eye I didn’t trust. “Chloe has a list of questions I’m supposed to be asking you,” he said.

“Are you going to?”

“No.” Lorkin shook his head. “If she wants to know, I think she should ask you herself.”

Across the square, at the ragged edge of the lanternlight, Zarcal stood holding a cup he wasn’t drinking from. He’d come to my office the day before, sat down in the chair by the window, hands loose on his knees, while I did paperwork and waited. At the end he’d stood, thanked me, his voice all gravel, and booked another hour for the next week.

I had no idea what it was I was doing for him, only that it seemed to be something. When he caught my eye now he dipped his head, once, and I gave it back, and neither of us made it into more than that.

I needed a minute where nobody was watching my face, so I carried two cups of cider to the dark edge of the square, where Rauf stood apart from all of it, watching the bright loud middle with no intention of joining it.

“You’re not dancing,” I said, and held one out.

He looked at the cup like it might be a trick. Then he took it. “Butchers don’t dance.”

“How are Mestyn’s stitches faring?”