the pockets and let my fingers drift through dried leaves as I listened to him speak.
He was tall, thin, cloaked and hooded despite the warm weather, and he stooped as he spoke, his body curved towards me, making us a circle of two as he told me some tale, his hands moving gracefully through the air to illustrate his story. The words were lost immediately, in the way they often are in dreams, but the feelings they evoked remained, and I knew his words had been chosen to make me laugh – really laugh – deep, creasing belly laughs that had me clutching my stomach with the pain of so much joy. He smiled at my delight and it made it all the sweeter.
When I finally stopped laughing, I turned to him and watched as he rummaged inside his cloak. He pulled out a small doll and pushed it towards me, sliding it over the stone of the bridge. I reached out, taking it, my fingers brushing against his. I heard his breath catch and it made my stomach ache in a different sort of way.
“What is it?” I asked, looking at the tiny figure.
“It’s you,” he replied. “I like to carry you with me. I like to keep you close. To watch over you.”
Then he took the doll back, plucking it from where I’d held it cradled in my hand and replacing it carefully in the folds of his cloak, while I watched, my heart beating double time inside me. Though I couldn’t see his face, I could tell he was looking at me and I blushed, which prompted him to smile softly, his lips parting, his tongue moistening them.
The thumping of my heart grew louder as he moved closer, until suddenly it became the insistent banging of the front door, and I was yanked out of my summer dream to hear rain beating against the wooden shutters. The pain in my stomach wasn’t from laughing but from hunger, and the dream drifted away like a broken spiderweb. I was both heartbroken and relieved. It was bittersweet here in Almwyk, in winter, to think of Tremayne in the sun.
Stretching as best I could, I hauled myself up from the pallet on the floor, pulling one of the blankets around me as a makeshift cloak, and hit my knee against the table leg with a hollow crack that knocked me sick. I took advantage of the relative privacy to swear violently while the rapping on the front door continued, rhythmic as a pulse.
When I opened it, Chanse Unwin stood there, pale, fleshy lips split into a grin as he looked me up and down. My skin prickled as his eyes roamed over my blanket-draped body.
“Errin, good morning. Have I woken you?”
“Of course not, Mr Unwin.” My answering smile was all teeth.
His grin widened. “Good, good. I would hate to think I’d inconvenienced you. May I speak with your mother?”
“I’m afraid she’s not here.”
He peered behind me as if he expected to see her hiding there.
“Not here?” he said, nodding towards the sun peeping through the trees of the East Woods. “But the curfew is barely ended. Surely I would have seen her had she just left.”
“I can’t understand how you didn’t,” I said blandly. “She left a few moments before you knocked. In fact, I thought at first you were her returned, having forgotten something.”
“Hence answering in a state of undress.” He leered at me, taking the chance to drag his gaze up and down my form again.
I pulled my blanket cloak closer. I’d overheard enough gossip at the well to know Unwin has been in Almwyk a good twenty years. For all his veneer of respectability, the rumours say that he ended up here for the same reason we all did – he was out of options and unwelcome anywhere else. It’s said that he created Almwyk from the ruins of an old hunting village of the royals, and began to regulate it, first as a black-market hub, then as a village, to make it turn a profit for him. By the time officials came to investigate, he was doing his best impression of repentance and atonement, offering shelter to the needy for a pittance and keeping them in check. Justice of Almwyk.
“I’m surprised you opened the door; I could have been anyone. These are desperate times, people with nothing to lose … soldiers miles from their homes, their girls. Refugees out for what they can get.”