Little Moon

Chapter Four: Sundown

My room looked smaller when I had to leave it.

I had a second dress. I had a comb with two teeth missing. I had a pair of shoes that had already done too many stairs. I put them in a cloth and tied the corners. That was my life. A bed. A peg. A bowl. A king’s smell I could not pack.

The second bell had gone. Sundown was not a story. It was a time.

I did not go through the main yard. I went to the postern, where the stones sweated and the air smelled like onions from the kitchen.

Dorcas was there.

She looked like she had run. Her bun was worse than usual. She shoved a bundle into my arms. Bread. A hard bit of cheese. A spare pair of stockings that were not mine.

“Do not cry on it,” she said. “I stole that cheese.”

“I am not crying.”

“You will. Do it on the road, not on my door.” She pushed a scrap of paper into the loaf. “Reed. Low village past the first pines. Ask for Wystan Reed. He has a spare room and a bad habit of helping before he thinks.”

“Why would he help me?”

“Because I once pulled a thorn out of his dog and he still thinks he owes me.” Her mouth shook. She bit it still. “Do not tell him the King’s name unless you want two graves.”

“The Seal did not burn me.”

“I saw.” Her eyes were wet and angry. “That is why they cannot let you stay. Go, before Idony remembers you still have a tongue.”

I wanted to hold her. There was no time for it, and she would have hated it in the open.

“Dorcas.”

“Walk, Linnet.”

I walked.

The road out of Harrow was just a road. Ruts. Dust. Pines waiting like a dark fence. Behind me the palace sat on its ridge and looked like it had always been there. It did not look like a place that had kissed me and then opened a gate.

My bundle bumped my hip. The bread smelled like Dorcas. The paper scratched inside the loaf.

I did not read it yet. I was afraid it would say stay. I was afraid it would not.

The first stand of pines came sooner than I wanted. My stomach folded. I made it off the track and lost the edge of the bread in the needles. I sat in the dirt with my palm on my belly. I did not have the right word. My wolf had gone strange and quiet, turned inward, as if she was listening to a second small drum.

“Fear,” I told her.

She did not answer like fear.

A cart clocked toward me. The mule had one ear back. The man on the board had brown hair faded at the ends and sleeves that had been mended more than once. He looked down. He looked away. He looked down again.

He drew the mule up.

“You heading somewhere,” he said, “or only away?”

His voice was low and plain. No gold in it. No court in it.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Reed.”

He studied my palace smock. He studied the bundle. He studied my face like a man checking a fence for gaps.

“That’s me,” he said. “Wystan. If you get in, you work. If you are running from a name, keep it off my table until you can say it without shaking.”

“I can work.”

“I can see that. Your hands are not court hands.” He tipped his chin at the cart bed. “There is a sack of turnips. They do not bite. You can sit on them.”

It was a small joke. It still helped.

I climbed up. The cart smelled like earth and mule and old wood. When I sat, my body reminded me of the table in the dark room. I set that thought down. I could not carry it and the bundle both.

Wystan clicked his tongue. The mule moved.

“You from the stone house,” he said, after a bit.

“Yes.”

“They open the gate for maids at sundown now?”

“Today they did.”

He nodded once, as if that was a kind of weather. “I do not need the speech. Not on this road. You eat when we get there. You sleep. Tomorrow you split wood or you mend or you cook. We will find out which.”

“I can wash.”

“Of course you can wash. Everyone from that hill can wash.” He glanced at me. “Can you keep a pot from burning?”

“Yes.”

“Good. My last pot did not make it.”

I almost smiled. It felt wrong on my face. I let it happen anyway.

The pines closed behind us. I looked back once. Harrow was still there. Banners. Pale stone. A yard I could not see and could still feel.

Kenelm would be on those steps by now, or in that room with no window, or in front of men who wanted a throat and had been given a road instead. I wondered if the pin was still in his fist. I wondered if he had already told himself I was a mess he had cleaned.

“Do not look back so hard,” Wystan said. “The track is in front.”

“I know.”

“You keep saying that. It does not make the looking lighter.”

I faced forward.

The low village was not much. A few houses. Smoke. A well. A dog that barked once and then decided I was not worth it. Wystan stopped at a house with a mended fence and a door that sat a little crooked.

“This is it,” he said. “It is not a palace.”

“I am done with palaces.”

He gave me a look that said he did not believe big sentences on the first hour. He was right.

Inside was one main room, a hearth, a table, a door to a small second space. The spare room was a cot, a peg, a blanket that smelled like sun. It was so much like what I had left that my throat closed.

“Water is in the jug,” he said. “I will cut bread. You sit before you fall down.”

I sat.

He set food in front of me and then went to the hearth like a man who did not want to watch a stranger cry. I did not cry. I ate a little. My stomach argued. I won by a small amount.

When he came back, I had taken the paper from the loaf.

It was Dorcas’s hand, hard and quick.

*He is decent. He is not court. If the child is real, do not tell the hill. Tell him only when you must.*

I folded it before Wystan could see the words. My palm went to my belly again, without leave.

Wystan noticed. He was that kind of man. He did not ask.

“There is a bolt on the inner door,” he said. “Use it. Not because I am a beast. Because you have had a day, and a bolt is a simple thing.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank me when the pot lives through supper.”

He went out to see to the mule. I sat on the cot with the paper in my fist and sundown coming through the small window.

I was off Harrow land.

I was not safe.

My wolf listened inward again, to that small drum I did not want to name.

From the yard of my new life I heard Wystan talking to the dog like it was a person. Normal. Quiet. Real.

I lay down on top of the blanket with my shoes still on.

Sleep came close.

Then it stopped.

Because outside, far up the ridge, a palace bell rang a clea

n hour, as if the yard had only been weather.

And under my dress, under the fear, something in me answered with a life that did not care about gates.