Still, our thighs pressed together. Her scent filled my nose-musky, rich, traces of salt and spice and that sweet-sharp honey of a woman with love on her mind. The evening air carried the cutting odor of windfall apples on the rot, overwhelming the host of small changes night brought to the forested hills. Ilona twined my fingers within her own, causing the silk to shiver and chime, but turned her eyes away from me.
“I shall not tell you to leave. But I am certain you will soon need to return to Copper Downs, regardless of either of our intentions.” She sighed. “You cannot bring them so close to the edge of their own disasters, then walk away.”
“Of course I can. That is not my city.” Even I did not believe that. Inasmuch as I had a city, Copper Downs was it. Or so I understood at the time. In my earliest youth, I had been stolen from a rural backwater, where a settlement of a hundred people would have been considered a vast, brooding metropolis teeming with sin and darkness. As to the only other candidate for my city, I’d been banished formally from Kalimpura, Selistan’s capital and home to the temple of the order that had trained and sheltered me. Otherwise, none of the wretched towns and villages I’d visited on either side of the Storm Sea had any claim on the loyalty of my heart.
“You slew their Duke. By some lights, that makes you responsible for them.”
There was nothing wrong with her command of history, but Ilona’s grasp of politics seemed to be lacking. “I was eleven years old. No one sane would have handed me the throne, then or now.”
“That is not my point, as you well know.” Her grip on my hand tightened. The baby stirred within my belly. She moved so much, for such a small thing. “This is not a matter of ruling, this is a matter of repairing what you have broken.”
I glanced downslope in the direction of the beechwood grove and the bandit graves. “ That repair is already beyond the work of a lifetime. And I did not inflict the break, only the final blow to what was already rotted. It took the people of Copper Downs four hundred years to dig the hole they find themselves in now.”
She followed the line of my gaze. “You are no bandit yourself, girl.”
Tugging at Ilona’s hand, which suddenly seemed heavy, I brushed the fingers to my lips. All I wanted was to stay here. To love and be loved. To put away my knives and open up my fists and simply cook and clean and live. Quietly.
“I will not go back,” I whispered, trying to swallow the quaver in my voice.
Ilona squeezed my hand once more. “As you will, Green. You are always welcome here.” She stood, the hem of her dress brushing my thigh. “Tomorrow, will you take some food up to Mistress Danae?”
“She will not be approached by me.”
“Perhaps. In any event, you can leave it at one of the sheltered graves up on Lady Ingard’s Hill.”
“You think it good for me to be among the dead,” I muttered. We had discussed this before.
Ilona smiled and swept into her house.
I sat in the wan moonlight awhile. It had paled Ilona’s skin, rendering her nearly into a ghost. My own fine dusky hue simply darkened until I was almost no one at all. Not Selistani, not of the Stone Coast, of neither divinity nor womankind.
Just a shadow girl hidden in a shadow world. As ever, for me, both then and now.
In time, I stretched upon the bench and took my rest. I couldn’t bring myself to displace Corinthia Anastasia. If Ilona had wanted me in her bed, she would have invited me. Still my hips twitched and rolled as I settled in toward sleep. The scent of rotting apples was my lullaby, the night mists my blanket.
Morning brought a pale sky almost brittle blue. The early sun lifted my fey mood of the previous evening into the autumn air. I shook off the veils of gloomy anticipation that had settled upon me, stretched my aching limbs, and ventured forth among the frosted golden grass to capture a hare for breakfast. They were numerous enough in the meadows above the neglected apple orchards, and slow with the summer fat they had not yet lost to winter’s coming.
Prowling slowly among the late wildflowers, I realized that Ilona had the right of it. Even if no one had come asking after me, I could not stay here in the High Hills. The declining weather would strike a wound in me as deep as any blade might hope to cut. Even the chill coastal fogs of Copper Downs froze and shrank my soul with little more than a graying damp that numbed the fingers. Snow up here would pile eaves-high on the north side of the cottage. The streams froze for months.
This was no place for a child of the sun.
I touched my belly again. Just a bump, not so much more than an overlarge meal might leave me with. Other women showed far greater than I, six months pregnant. Ilona had said I’d probably carry well nearly to the end. I am not a large woman, and was not even quite to my full height at that time, but she placed much faith in the strength of my frame and the fitness of my body.
“Will you grow here and be happy?” I asked my baby. I didn’t know if I meant the High Hills, Copper Downs, or the world at large. And with Septio dead well before her birth, what would my baby miss about her father? I had been raised by and among women, but Papa had been there first, along with my grandmother.
At that moment two hares emerged from a gorse bush. My chase was on. It is a simple enough affair. You close in sufficiently to overtake them; then, when you judge the moment correct, you break right. A hare will randomly break either right or left, but you cannot outthink an animal with little sense of its own. I always break right. Half the time I have my chance, and I never worry overmuch.
So I ran, scooping up a good-sized rock as I did, watching for the twitch of their stride that meant the escape attempt was coming. I broke right with one of my targets, while the other headed left. Short knife in my off hand, I went for him with a swift toss of the stone. I tripped on something in the grass. Still I caught him, but I lost the blade.
Stunned by my throw, my prey managed to kick, clawing my neck and arms, though I kept my face away until I could break his neck in return. I rose, found my weapon glistening in the damp grass, and paced back a few steps to see what had grasped at me from the earth.
Nothing, in truth. Nothing but my own clumsiness.
I patted my abdomen again. “You do me no favors, little girl,” I told the baby. “I cannot feed or protect either of us if you steal my balance away.”
Once I had returned to the cottage, I dressed the hare in the work area out back. The pelt I left for Corinthia Anastasia to prepare for tanning. The offal I dumped in the cracked clay pot we kept outside against such uses, for later disposal. The prepared carcass I carried inside to place in Ilona’s smaller iron pot with a goodly portion of well water, some of the previous night’s onions, a very generous pinch of salt, and a pair of gnarled carrots that I shredded. As Ilona still slept, or at least rested, I set about making the day’s bread. My earliest lessons with Mistress Tirelle back at the Pomegranate Court had included cookery, and those memories were among the few that I treasured from the years of my enslavement. Dried rosemary and fresh chopped garlic went into the dough along with the leavening, and I worked it just so. The loaf would not rise and bake in time for the breakfast stew, but we would eat well this afternoon, especially with butter or honey.
As I folded the dough back into the crockery bowl to rise, Ilona’s hands snaked around me. I stiffened and almost pushed her off out of sheer reflex before stopping myself. Fool! She hugged me tight, just below my breasts, before pressing her head against my shoulder.