Lady of Weeds, page 13
part #2 of Lady Series
“Mind your stitches,” she said briefly in passing. “I’ll take the ones in your forehead out soon, but try not to burst the ones in your shoulder.”
Eurion rolled over onto his back, beaming at her. “Didn’t I say you’re an angel, Lady?”
“If Miss Allen comes again today, you can give her a cup of tea even if I’m not there.”
“Why would she come again today?” protested Eurion, sitting up. “She came yesterday.”
“Give her something to eat, as well,” Carys said, and closed the door behind her.
She would be very surprised if Miss Allen didn’t show up again today. Miss Allen was a determined young thing; and if she wasn’t kind, at least she had the sense to know when she hadn’t been kind.
Carys would have said that she also seemed more concerned about how her lack of kindness affected her standing in Eurion’s eyes than the fact she had been unkind, but she didn’t like to be so ill-natured. She let the thought flutter away in the briny breeze that swept through her hair, and set herself to the day’s work. It was a pleasant morning, and she felt that she walked with more lightness than usual—with more lightness than she would have expected after yesterday. Somehow she still felt warm this morning.
Carys smiled faintly. Perhaps Eurion really was a sun, after all.
* * *
Toward noon, another stranger came to the rocky shore. Carys didn’t see him until he was well out on the rocks, standing too close to one of the rocky pools and gazing out on the ocean. Then she caught a glimpse of him as she came back to cast her eye over the black shoreline once more, the tails of his suitcoat fluttering in the breeze that teased his hair.
He was facing away from her, toward the water, but from the set of his shoulders and the cut of his hair, it wasn’t Steele.
Carys let out a breath of relief, but her brow furrowed. Two visitors to the seashore wasn’t unprecedented, but two visitors to the seashore in the same week certainly was.
“You shouldn’t stand there,” she called. It was far too close to the time when the selkies would start leaping from the water, and the man was right by one of the pools that had no rocky bottom to it.
He turned sharply at the sound of her voice, and it wasn’t Steele, just as she’d thought. An Eppan man, his face composed and watchful, he was very beautiful. Diamond earrings glittered in each of his ears, and the grey of his well-cut suit seemed to blend with the early grey of the sea itself.
He asked a question in Eppan, his eyes sharpening.
“I don’t speak Eppan,” Carys said. If need be, she would have to lead him off by the hand. She disliked trying to watch over people who couldn’t speak either Sunderman or the almost identical Scandian; they invariably misunderstood when she tried to tell them of their danger, and she had often had to save them from the consequences of their own folly.
“Really?” he asked, his voice rounded with the Eppan accent. There was a slight, considering frown between his brows. “Ah—It is dangerous to stay here?”
“Very,” Carys said, without mincing matters.
The gentleman in grey spoke to himself in Eppan briefly, as if to consider how to speak the words in Sunderman, then said, “You walk often on this shore, I think.”
“Yes,” said Carys.
“Perhaps something has landed here recently?”
Carys regarded him wordlessly, scooping up a scrap of seaweed that remained, while those brown eyes gazed on her thoughtfully—and, she thought, a little ruefully.
“What are you looking for?” she asked at last. “I take up anything lost that washes ashore, but I will give some things back. Are you with the other man?”
“No,” he said, very decidedly. “Never. I am Ma Yong Hwa.”
“My name is Carys,” she said. “Are you looking for items from the Eppan shipwreck?”
“Perhaps,” he said, and there was a slight edge of frustration to his voice.
Carys wasn’t sure if the frustration was because his Sunderman was insufficient to the purpose of conveying what he wished to convey, or if it was his own lack of surety in what he was looking for that bothered Ma Yong Hwa.
“If you’re not certain what you’re looking for, the rocky shore isn’t the best place to walk,” she told him.
Even as she spoke, she heard a splash and the slap of wet selkies as they leapt from the waves, and the first lilting sound of their voices as they saw the two figures on the rocky shore.
Ma Yong Hwa said something under his breath, his eyes glowing in fascination, and turned toward the selkies, but Carys seized his wrist and drew him away without compunction, dragging at him when he would have tried to resist.
“Stay with us, sister,” called a voice from her left, soft and crooning. “Play with us!”
She only had one hand free, and not enough seaweed to block her ears even if she could have done it. Carys gripped Yong Hwa’s wrist and broke into a run, focusing her mind on the sound of surf and wind; and, keeping pace by her side, he began to sing.
As they ran, his voice lifted the sparkling sand from the dark crags of the rocks in a golden cloud and silenced the selkies into rapt enchantment. Perhaps it even shortened the distance to the safety of the sand and grass. At any rate, they tumbled into soft grass so suddenly that Carys nearly lost her footing, and only Yong Hwa’s quick half-turn to catch her shoulder with his free hand saved her from going head over heels in a scurry of sand and grass blades.
He held her for a brief moment longer to make sure that she was steady again, then stepped back and bowed. “Thank you.”
“I’ve the feeling I should be the one thanking you,” Carys said dryly. She would not have still been on the seashore if it wasn’t for him, nor would she have been running with only one hand free; but he had done something she had never seen done before, and it had cut through the selkies’ wiles like a hot knife through butter. “What is it that you did?”
Ma Yong Hwa hesitated. “I think my words are not…sufficient,” he said. “For magic, there is great love on this shore.”
“I see,” said Carys. She wasn’t quite sure she did see, but she had seen the gold of the sand as it rose in the air, and she was certain Ma Yong Hwa was an even stronger magic user than Eurion. “If you come to have words to express it, come and see me again. I may be able to help you find what you’re looking for.”
He bowed to her again, and it struck Carys that if she was cautious of him, he had no such reservations with her. He was neither afraid of her nor distrustful of her. He simply didn’t have all the words he needed to express what he wanted of her. It made her feel that he had a knowledge of her that she wasn’t aware of, an uncomfortable thought.
Carys parted from Yong Hwa at the fork that split ways between her road to the cottage and the road to the village. He gave her a short but solemn bow and began his way up the bluffs without any of the difficulty Carys would have expected from someone wearing such expensive clothing.
He was an odd man, she thought and she turned her own way homeward. He seemed to be a gentleman, but he hadn’t pestered her to draw her cart when she stepped decidedly between the shafts—a kindness Carys was grateful for, refreshingly new as it was—nor had he tried to discover what she herself was doing by the seashore.
He was another one, perhaps, who already knew how the seashore worked—though, if so, why would he stand so close to the pools, where the danger wasn’t only from the selkies? It made her consider again, uneasily, the possibility that he knew something more of her than most people.
Carys, still wondering, drew her cart swiftly homeward. She heard the sound of voices above the sandy tumble of the handcart wheels before she quite reached the cottage, so she wasn’t surprised to see Miss Allen’s hat hanging by the door, ribbons fluttering prettily in the breeze.
She was surprised, however, to see a familiar felt hat next to it: the peaked hat that Aled wore whenever he travelled out of the village.
Carys breathed a sigh toward the sandy ground and settled her cart lightly on its supports. Aled usually visited the cottage once a month, but she had been so busy with Eurion that she had forgotten to expect his visit. He was a little early, by her reckoning, but that wasn’t surprising given his concern about Eurion.
She left the seaweed in the cart with the almost unconscious desire to get the tiresome part of the day done with, and entered the cottage to find Eurion edged in the warm corner of the kitchen while Miss Allen reached around him for the tea canister, invitingly close.
At the sight of Carys, Miss Allen went from pink and beguiling to pink and annoyed.
“Lady!” said Eurion. He darted hastily from the corner, unsettling Miss Allen’s precarious balance and causing her to grab frantically for the benchtop. “You’re home!”
Carys threw a look around the cottage. “Where’s Aled?”
“He went out,” Eurion said, crossing the kitchen. “Lady, we were just—”
“I’ll collect more firewood,” Carys told him, thankful for an excuse to get away from the cottage. Miss Allen and Eurion could do with more time together. “Look after Miss Allen while I’m gone.”
Eurion’s fingers closed around her wrist with surprising strength. “You can’t, Lady!” he said.
“Can I not?”
“I mean, you don’t need to. The old—that is, Aled is collecting firewood.”
“Why is he doing that?” asked Carys, in some exasperation.
“I don’t know.” Eurion’s voice grew vexed. “I told him I’d already fetched enough firewood, but he didn’t listen to me.”
And Aled wouldn’t have listened, Carys knew. Not to Eurion, at any rate.
“Your hands aren’t cold today, Lady,” Eurion said, tilting his head at her.
So that’s why her hand suddenly felt so warm; Eurion’s fingers had slid down around it instead of her wrist. Carys disentangled her fingers from his and said, “I’ve to empty the handcart. Make Miss Allen some tea.”
“I’ll empty the handcart,” Eurion said, and darted out the door before she could protest.
Carys left it to him and instead nodded to Miss Allen, who curtseyed rather sullenly back. Carys didn’t blame her; she had arrived at a very unfortunate time for Miss Allen and Eurion, and while it was no part of hers to ruin any budding romance of theirs, she felt the brief, upward turn of an amused smile as she spooned tea into the pot.
Outside, she could hear the regular, heavy thump of seaweed bundles jolting against the side of the cottage as Eurion hefted them into place, and came to the conclusion that he was more than usually disturbed. Either that, or he was in more of a hurry than last time he had unloaded the cart.
“There’s some speckled bread from your baking yesterday,” she said to Miss Allen, checking the kettle that still hung over the fire. Eurion must have filled it recently; it was high to the top and on the point of boiling. “Would you care for some?”
Miss Allen shrugged in an elegant sort of way and said, “Thank you, I’m sure.”
Carys smiled again, this time humourlessly, and set out cups enough for all four of them. Aled would know it wouldn’t be long before she returned from the seashore, and she would like to have a cup of tea waiting for him when he got back. A creature of habit, Aled always went home after his tea was gone; the sooner she gave it to him, the sooner he would be gone.
It wouldn’t be as easy to be rid of Miss Allen, but since Carys was putting up with her in a good cause, she tried not to feel too rueful about that. It would have been easier to put up with Miss Allen at the market where Carys herself didn’t have to interact with her—and there, realised Carys, as she worked around the seated Miss Allen, was another problem.
She didn’t know about the mysterious Steele, but Ma Yong Hwa had certainly been climbing in the direction of the village; it wasn’t a far stretch to think that he would be staying there.
“Shall I help you with something?” asked Miss Allen, without moving from her seat.
What a determined little thing she was.
“There’s no need,” Carys said. Eurion, she decided, would have to stay away from the market coming. If she wasn’t sure about Yong Hwa, she was definitely suspicious of Steele. Eurion’s arrival had been as dramatic as it was suspicious, and she would prefer that neither of them see him just yet. As little as she liked her life being invaded by such a ruthless sunshine, she couldn’t bring herself to put him in the kind of danger he’d so recently escaped, by exposing him to the attention of two persons unknown who were both wandering where they’d no business to be wandering. Miss Allen and Eurion would have to wait until Miss Allen’s next visit to resume their closer friendship.
Carys meted out a teaspoon of sugar into Aled’s cup, three into Miss Allen’s at her request, and half a teaspoon into Eurion’s. She had begun by making Eurion’s as black as her own, but he seemed to like the smallest bit of sweetness and now she had made it a habit to put a little sugar in his, even if he didn’t ask for it.
Miss Allen watched her intently—remembering Eurion’s preferences, no doubt—and bestirred herself to pour the milk just as the door opened to admit Aled.
Carys replaced the kettle on the swinging arm and moved the whole toward the front where it would get less heat. From the fireplace, she could already see the faint line between Aled’s brows that meant he had seen Eurion unloading the cart. Behind him, Eurion slipped through the door and helped himself to bread and tea, then sat down by the fire in his usual spot instead of at the kitchen table with Miss Allen.
Aled nodded gravely at Carys. “You’re home.”
“As you see,” she said.
“Putting the boy to work?”
“As you see.”
“You could allow me to help around the cottage if you’re feeling overcome, Carys.”
Eurion looked away from the fire, his brown eyes narrow, and said, “I already did it all. There’s no need for you to take the trouble.”
“If it comes to that, I see no reason for you to take the trouble,” Aled said bluntly.
“That’s because she’s my angel,” Eurion said, smiling dreamily at Carys. “Of course I should help her.”
“Is that my tea?” Aled asked Carys, ignoring him.
Carys reached across the table and took the furthest cup to give him. “This one. You’ll find the others not sweet enough.”
Miss Allen laughed, bright and sudden. “I wondered how you knew exactly how Aled likes it, but I suppose you’ve been making tea for him these past ten years.”
“Near enough,” said Aled, with a quiet smile in Carys’ direction. He accepted the speckled bread she wordlessly passed him and braced himself against the kitchen bench. He knew better than to sit in the seat across from Miss Allen, and Carys was grateful for it.
Eurion, his soft brown eyes watchful, went back to looking at the fire and seemed to relax. Carys wondered if he had expected Aled to sit at the table—and what he would have thought appropriate to do if so.
When the last of his tea was gone, Aled set down the cup deliberately and said, “You must be tired, Carys. I’ll take my leave now. Miss Allen, it will be growing dark shortly—shall we walk together before your brother becomes worried?”
“Oh! Well! It’s very kind of you,” Miss Allen said, too startled to do anything but begin gathering her things.
“I’ll show you where I stacked the firewood,” Aled said to Carys, scarcely less deliberately. “Will you come out?”
Eurion got up, too; Carys said to him, “Help Miss Allen with all her things,” and went outside with Aled. As much as she didn’t care to discuss things with Aled, he wouldn’t rest easy until she did, and she preferred to be honest with him.
Nor did Aled attempt to point out the very obvious abundance of firewood that he had gathered; he and Carys walked toward the sandy bluffs that led to the village without pausing, and only when they were some distance from the cottage did his pace slow, and then stop.
Even then, he gazed back at the cottage in perturbed silence for some time before he said, “That boy is stacking your seaweed and firewood now?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Carys, you don’t even let me bring firewood.”
“I’ve not noticed that it stops you,” Carys said, with something of a snap. “I’m quite capable of looking after myself, Aled.”
“If that’s the case, how can you let the boy do it for you?”
“He should do something. Now that he can stand up without falling over, he shouldn’t be sitting around the house all day. It’s not good for him at his age.”
“It’s not that he’s doing it,” Aled said, though Carys was aware that wasn’t quite true. “It’s the way he does it, Carys! He looks at you like—like—he worships you!”
“I saved his life,” Carys said; though it wasn’t so much that she’d saved Eurion’s life as it was that she hadn’t left him to die. She didn’t usually like to speak in such extremes, but perhaps it was the only way Aled would understand. “To his eyes, I’m the angel that saved him.”
“That’s exactly what I don’t like,” Aled told her, his voice low and his eyes on the light from the cottage. “That kind of worshipful—”
“That’s all it is,” Carys interrupted him. “I’m not a human to him, Aled; just an angel who can do no wrong. He’ll come to understand his mistake after he’s lived with me for very much longer, so leave the matter! You can be sure I’ll not be easy on him.”
“Is that why Miss Allen is here so often these days?”
“Exactly so,” agreed Carys. “They’re a well-matched pair.”
“Do you think so?” Aled’s eyes seemed to dwell on the cottage, from which Miss Allen was just emerging, and for the first time Carys found herself wondering what he was thinking.
“They seem promising,” she said.
“Go in, then,” Aled said. He wasn’t exactly satisfied, but he did seem to understand, and that would have to be enough. While Carys preferred not to leave any misunderstandings between them, she couldn’t save Aled from every figment that occurred to him. “It’s still cold of nights. They say it will snow tonight.”
