Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
My blood runs cold and my feet halt. The image of him raising that heavy iron skillet above his shoulder, with his sweaty, red face carved in rage and his swollen body shaking, explodes into my mind’s eye.
“Sorrel?”
I hear Merc say my name from a vast distance, and I’m too locked in to respond to him. I can tell by the way the cook stays put and tracks the maid through the crowd that he’s staked possession of the girl. It’s as if she’s a dog, not a person, and he’s checking to see if she follows her training. On her side, she constantly refers back to him with her eyes as she gathers used plates and empty tankards from tables full of men who tug at her felt skirt and laugh too loud.
“Come on,” Merc says as he takes my elbow.
Abruptly, the man in the dirty apron stares at me with a glower on his ruddy face, and I imprint his appearance. He’s ill-shaven, he has pockmark scars on his fleshy cheeks, and his thinning hair is combed over a bald spot. I can’t tell whether he’s of twenty years or forty, and I do not meet his eyes. Not the place or time—
“What’re you lookin’ at,” he demands before spitting on the floor.
“You want to try that again.”
Merc’s voice cuts through the din, and the man looks up, way up. His surprise suggests he was so busy tracking the maid and then glaring at me, he somehow failed to notice the man who’s with me, and I can tell the cook is going to fold and disappear back through that door even before he moves: It’s in the way his bluster crumbles, his shoulders cave, his posture sinks, nothing but a paper monster who nonetheless can kill.
Right before he ducks out, his nasty, beady eyes go to that girl, and I’m terrified she’ll pay for the mood he’s in and the interruption of my presence. The bastard. He’s the kind of man who only feels power when he makes someone smaller than him cower—
“Let’s go,” Merc says as the kitchen panel flaps shut.
As I’m drawn onto the steps, I look for the girl one last time. She’s all the way across the pub, balancing what should have been an impossible load of tankards and plates upon her frail shoulder. And then my view is obscured by the stairwell wall.
At the top landing, Merc glances at me. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you while you’re here, don’t worry.”
It’s the maid I’m concerned with, not me.
We start down the corridor to our room, passing by the doors of the working women. Even though my body is beside him and I’m walking, I am far, far away, back in my own past. As I was an orphan, I’ve always felt like the women I’ve helped on the birthing bed are my family, my sisters, even though they never could or wanted to acknowledge me afterward—and I wish now, as I always have, that I’d be able to protect them all, the pregnant ones, those who toil under cruel masters, the sick, the infirm, the unfairly accused and the terribly abused.
But there are just too many … and only one of me.
Forty-Six
For the Best.
As I step into the water closet once again, I feel as though weeks have passed. I shut the door most of the way, leaving the same crack I did before, and go to the sink, where I set the clothes I was wearing during the birth to a soaking. If Julion the golden nobleman knew where his fine togs ended up? No doubt he would have kept them in his saddlebags.
Then I head to the big basin. Dipping my hand in the water I had planned to sit in, I find it cold and pull the plug in the bottom.
Exhaustion settles in as the gurgling rises into the silence, and it’s only concern over infection that motivates me to start another run. Before I undress, I take a glimpse out into the bedroom. Merc is back where he was in the window seat, facing away from me, his legs bent, his boots once again pressed against the alcove’s wall. His pack is on the floor beside him, however, and a lot of his weapons are with it, the cluster of deadly metal objects arranged with the grips facing him.
His elbows are on his knees, and his hands are out in front of him. He’s flexing his fingers open and closed, and then he’s staring at his palms.
I wonder if he’s remembering the bundled bairn and I want to talk about the experience we shared. All of my previous near misses and dangerous saves have been nothing I could speak with anybody about.
As if I had anyone other than Mare?