Nobody's Lady (13 page)

Darwyn laughed and stuffed another bite of the roll into his mouth, oblivious to the spray of crumbs flying from his open jaw. “Just how many women do you think visit the tavern?” The question was partially muffled by the bread, but his tone made it all rather clear.

“I don’t know. Dozens?”

Darwyn swallowed and shook his head. “Most women are pretty angry about the whole former-husbands-leaving-them thing.”

I dropped the crumbs to the side of the blanket, resisting the urge to brush the rest of them from where they’d settled across Darwyn’s tunic and trousers. “Then what
have
you been doing since we met with Jaron?”

Darwyn shrugged as a woman dragging her young son behind her entered the bakery door beside us. “Working. Sleeping. Eating.”

“Eating
at the tavern
.”

Darwyn raised an eyebrow and popped the last of his roll into his mouth. He chewed a few times before speaking. “You must really be interested in what goes on at this tavern.” He swallowed. “I’d love to visit this place you’ve invented. Sounds like the women fawn all over you there. Might be interesting to see how it feels the other way around.” He stared off into the passing crowd contemplatively, but I could see the mischievous glint in his eye.

I hugged my knees to my chest, not bothering to fix the skirt that bunched up as I did. “If you’re not courting women, then why hasn’t Jurij gone off with you?”

Darwyn studied me. “Probably because I haven’t been up to much lately. I mean, I’ve gone to the tavern a few times.”

“I knew it!”

“For drinks.” He coughed, and his cheeks darkened slightly. “With friends.”

“Have you seen Jaron there?”

“Yeah, sure. I guess
he’s
courting women. But there haven’t really been that many there to court. If you care about that sort of thing.” He genuinely seemed like he didn’t. “You think Jurij is avoiding Jaron?”

“Of course he is!”

“Even though he left his goddess—his former wife
—
of his own free will?”

I buried my nose in my knees. “It’s complicated.” I knew full well it was possible to feel disgust and affection at the same time.

Darwyn nudged my arm with his elbow. “It’s only as complicated as you make it, Noll.”

His gaze traveled from one passing villager to the next, a grin lightly touching his lips. He seemed happy. Happier than I’d ever seen him, though I couldn’t recall ever seeing his face, even after his Returning. I was otherwise occupied at the time, being trapped in the castle.

The door to the bakery swung open, and Darwyn’s mother stuck out her head. “Darwyn, how long does it take you to eat?” She had flour mixed between her black and gray tresses, and more than one lock of hair had fallen out of her bun. The flour reminded me of Alvilda’s sawdust, but I’d never seen so flustered an expression on the woodcarver’s face.

“Yeah. I’m coming.” He rolled his eyes at me as he stood. And he was certainly taking his time to stand.

“Just as useless as your father,” mumbled Darwyn’s mother as she turned to go back into the bakery. “I wish you hadn’t chased Roslyn away.” The rest of her rant went unheard as the door shut behind her.

Darwyn winced at his former wife’s name. The bit of happiness I’d seen was gone, replaced with as much seriousness as Jurij usually wore these days. He wove his fingers together and stared at them. “Roslyn was good at baking,” he said, answering a question I didn’t ask. “Me? Not so much. Even if I was raised by bakers. That’s why I get stuck with the delivering most of the time.”

“She lived here?” I hadn’t known. Maybe Elfriede or someone had said it, but I hadn’t paid attention to my friends’ love lives after they found their goddesses. Most goddesses wanted their men to move in with them. To help their parents with their professions, or just because it was what they were used to, and men would have no complaints.

Darwyn nodded. “Mother asked her. She’d only had sons, and they were all leaving. Roslyn’s parents already had Marden and Sindri to help with the tanning.”

Oh, right. Roslyn and Marden. Darwyn and Sindri. Two sisters paired with two brothers.

Darwyn loosed his fingers and ran one hand over his hair. “She liked it, so she said that was fine. She wasn’t here long. We’d only been married a short while before … well,
before
.”

I studied him, cupping a hand over my eyes to shield them from the bits of sunlight that trickled across the tops of the buildings. “You don’t hate her.”

Darwyn blinked. “Why would I?”

I blinked back tears from the sun. “She bossed you around? You resented being forced to love her in the first place?”

Darwyn cleared his throat. “Well, sure, maybe. But she wasn’t so bad. And it wasn’t her fault.”

The door to the bakery opened and Darwyn flinched, but it wasn’t his mother. Two customers, the mother and son. The child’s arms were wrapped around a basket full of bread, but he stared at my carvings as he passed. His mother, oblivious to his slowed pace, put a hand on his back, guiding him in front of her.

“Darwyn! Now!” Mistress Baker’s voice made him flinch again, but the door closed and his shoulders loosened.

He grabbed the wolf he’d been playing with and tossed two coppers on the blanket beside me. Holding his purchase out in front of him, he turned the wolf this way and that. “This is good work, Noll. I like it. Reminds me of my favorite mask.”

I tucked that too-long bit of hair behind my ear and grabbed the coppers. I could feel my face flushing as I thought about all the fighting I did with the boy in that wolf mask. “Thanks. You didn’t have to.”

Darwyn gazed over the wolf he rolled between his hands to meet my eyes. “I don’t hate Roslyn. I don’t even dislike her.”

“You’re not at all the Darwyn I remember. I’d have thought you’d be, I don’t know—”

“More agitated?” He grinned, and I wondered if that was the grin he wore as a child, if this was the boy who was once my friend and annoying rival. He glanced back at his wolf before tucking it into his pocket. “I just don’t have feelings for her. Not like that. Staying with her wouldn’t be fair, don’t you think?”

I chewed my lip. “But how can you be sure you won’t fall in love with her again? What if all you needed was to spend more time with her, to learn to love her?” I sounded like the villagers back when they used to say the same things to me. Only now I felt like I knew what they meant.

“I would do anything for you.”

Now I was remembering my daydreams as if they were real memories.

Darwyn coughed. “Are you really counseling couplings to get back together now? Or are you wishing they’d stay apart? I’m not entirely clear on that.”

“I’m not
counseling
anything. It’s not really my business.”

“Right. But since you’re curious, I’m sure.” He laughed. “I’m
very
sure.”

Certainty was written all over his face, and I flinched, remembering something similar on Ailill’s face the last time I saw him.

Darwyn crouched beside me, balancing on the balls of his feet. “This thing with you and Jurij and your sister, it’s not really my business. But I think you were right to get Jurij out in the fields, get his mind off things.”

Two little girls squealed with excitement as they pattered up to my blanket, one bouncing up and down, her hand clutching something tightly. “Looks like you’ve got customers.” Darwyn stood and reached for the door as the girls crouched before my display of animals. “Get him to the tavern, Noll. You come too. Keep them both from drowning in ale and sorrows.” He saluted me and went inside.

Both?

“You have another squirrel! She has another squirrel!”

One of the girls shoved the squirrel in my face, interrupting my thoughts on what Darwyn might have meant. “Can I have him?”

“Sure. Two coppers.” It was the girl from a month or so ago, the one who’d wanted to buy something when her friend did, that same friend now digging through her pocket to hold up a wooden cat.

My new customer grinned sheepishly and held out her other hand, the one she’d clutched into a fist. “Can I pay with this?”

In her hand she held a yellow coin.
Golden
. Like the bangle Elric wore and the rings that held up the veiled curtain.

Metal a color I’d only seen with the lord and his brother.

My blood ran cold, and I swallowed, unable to speak, my heartbeat thundering in my head. I wrapped my fingers around the coin she held out to me and nodded.

“You and me.” Jurij pointed at me and then himself. “You want to go with me to Elweard’s tavern.” Buried beneath the exhaustion of a long day at the quarry, the look on his face was pained disbelief.

I rolled the golden coin between my fingers and the table. I didn’t make supper, or even start a fire. I was hoping that might be enough to convince him. “Fine. Let’s not go, then. There’s some bread in the cupboard. It’ll have to do for supper.”

Jurij patted Bow’s head and climbed over her to reach the table. He pulled the chair out and sat down beside me. “No, it’s fine. It’s just … why?”

“Why what?”

“Why the sudden invitation to the tavern? The tavern you’ve yet to set foot in since you went through all of that with your father.” He took a deep breath, and the skin between his eyebrows furrowed. “Is
she
going to be there?”

“What?” My thoughts were so far from Elfriede, it actually took me a moment to figure out who he was talking about. But there could be no other. Jurij might not have known the pain of the commune, but his watered-down version of those men’s torture centered pretty clearly on my sister, the woman who supposedly
used to
have a hold over him. I tapped the coin on the table. “I doubt it.”

“But you don’t
know
.”

“Do you want me to ask
her?”

“No!” He eyed me suspiciously. “But you didn’t tell her
we’d be there at the livestock fields that day, did you? You didn’t tell her we’d be at the tavern tonight?”

“Of course not!” The accusations stung, but I knew he was thinking about how I tried to convince him to go home when I found him in the cavern. “Jurij, are you going to live your whole life in hiding? Or are you going to learn to put this awkwardness behind you?” The coin slipped between my index and middle fingers, and the last of the day’s sunlight streaming through the window caused the coin to sparkle. “You’re not the only one who feels awkward, you know.”

Jurij snorted and slapped a palm on the table. “I don’t think Sindri or Darwyn or Tayton seem to run into their former wives as much as I run into mine.”

“You’ve seen her
one time
since you left.”

“And that was more than enough. She teased me about Arrow and then stole him back right after.”

I leaned back in my chair, tapping the coin on the table. “You act like your feelings are her fault.”

“Of course they’re not. But they’re not exactly my fault, either.” His gaze wandered across the table, catching sight of the coin I rolled beneath my fingers. “What’s that?”

My hand froze, my mind racing over the possibilities. A part of me wanted to keep it secret, as well as what it might mean. But the other part of me was rolling it on the table in plain sight, and I could hardly pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about. I slid the coin across the table to him. “I got this as payment today for one of my carvings.”

Jurij took the coin between his fingers and held it up to the last rays of sunlight. “It’s not copper.”

I leaned over and snatched it back from him. “I know
that.”

“But what is it? It’s hard like copper.”

I examined the coin again. Whenever I moved it, the fiery glint of the sun sparkled. “Golden copper.”

Jurij looked as skeptical as he did when I first invited him to the tavern. “Who gave that to you?”

“A little girl. I don’t know whose daughter.”

“And you didn’t think to ask where she’d gotten it?” Jurij dragged the coin across the table for a closer look.

“I
did
ask,” I corrected him. “She said she found it in the village, on the ground. But I might know where it really came from.”

“There’s a golden copper source, and you’re keeping it a secret.”

“Not a
source
exactly.”

“The cavern?” Jurij picked up the coin, examining its smooth, unadorned surface.

“No.”

Jurij froze, and the coin slipped from his fingers and bounced onto the floor, rolling away.

“
Jurij
!” I jumped to my feet, stepping over Bow to stop it just before it disappeared beneath the cupboard.

“You mean it’s from
him
, don’t you?”

I held up the coin to get a look in the dying light for dents or scratches. But the coin was flawless, except for a speck of dust. “How would a random village girl find a coin from the lord?”

Jurij scoffed. “Why don’t you ask him?”

I rubbed the coin against my sleeve, buffing away the dirt and restoring the impeccable surface. “Maybe I don’t really want to know,” I mumbled quietly.

“You don’t want to know anything.”

I gripped the coin in my fist. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”