hunger, that such country wisdom did not tap the greater part of his experience.
Whenever he listened too closely, his refined senses unfurled and extended. Too far and too fast, he dropped into perceptions that frayed his awareness of self altogether. Or else he lost his inner balance and tumbled into deepened Sight that tracked mental engagement as colour and light, and grasped the drift of emotional currents distinctly as an unreeled melody.
Shaking, afraid, all but unmanned – he did not know why! – he became overwhelmed by the force of sheer gratitude. The mere touch of warm sunlight fallen through the window-pane shocked his skin with ecstatic intensity. Upended again, almost hurled to delirium, he shut his eyes, hard. Frightened, he grounded himself back into the texture of solid surroundings: the coarse weave of the linen sheets and wool-blankets that covered his maddening nakedness.
Unmoored and desperate, he affirmed what he knew as a recited litany to impose calm: he was in Tarens’s bed. Clad in a shirt too large for his frame, cut from cloth that smelled faintly of lye soap. Unsure of his voice, he silently mouthed the name of his benefactor. ‘Tarens.’ The unspoken syllables let him savour the thrill: that he might have a friend although his tongue felt too clumsy to dare attempt speech, even in solitude.
Once, he had loved music. The vague recall tugged, as estranged as a language elusively veiled beyond meaning. Perhaps even, he had been a singer. The idea terrified him to goose bumps, and contrarily, eased his sped heart. The galvanic dread gripped him, that if he found the nerve to try sound, he would utter no better than a rusty croak.
The grotesque possibility of such a failure slammed him back into paralysis. To shake crushing anxiety, he reopened his eyes. This time, his survey encountered the breeches. Facetious female generosity had left them for him, folded on a nearby chair. The loss of his own garments stung him again. What other clue did he have to reveal the person he had been?
Too late for regret, that weakness and sleep had relaxed his wary defenses. He could sulk and stay naked, or else bow to the straits that forced Kerelie’s high-handed charity.
If he must arise vulnerable under her roof, he intended to stay unobserved. In adamant privacy, he tested his untrustworthy senses one cautious layer at a time. Gently, he reined in the torrent that rushed to burst through his restraint and strand him in dizzy bewilderment. Control did not come easily. Somewhere before, he had faced dangers that demanded an exacting degree of tuned reflex and receptivity.
But whatever shadowy perils once stalked him, in whatever forgotten strange space, their spectre stayed hidden. Nothing untoward lurked here in this cottage. Only quiet lapped against his awareness inside these homely white-washed walls. Around him, the empty room was unthreatening, the air still in the silk fall of sunlight.
Tarens’s preference enjoyed rough-hewn pine furnishings, either whittled with whimsical animals, or else adorned with jaunty charm in painted patterns of vine-leaves. The floor-boards were gouged where he scuffed his boots. His sturdy clothes-chest displayed spirited dents inflicted by his quick temper. But the fierce, loyal eddy of Tarens’s bright presence was not here to safeguard a stripped stranger’s dignity.
The purposeful clatter from the kitchen downstairs bespoke the defensive sister. Immersed in her habitual prickly noise, she ransacked a cupboard like a butcher who had misplaced a favourite knife. Her bustle sang of annoyance and worry, but no longer streamed the rank copper taint of fear from the evening before. Therefore, the bout of illness that threatened her older brother would have improved. Tacit listening confirmed this. Efflin’s hacked cough emerged muffled, removed from the kitchen fireside to the downstairs bedroom. Though the sick man’s being rang yet with the fraught overtones of high fever, he no longer gasped for every clogged breath. Yet the dark vortex he carried still weighted his heart: the core flame of his vitality stayed wrapped at low ebb, sapped by a secretive bundle of pain.
Snagged in the midst of this tight-woven family, the upstairs visitor broke his tranced reverie. He tossed off the annoyance of the itchy blankets. Acutely ashamed of his burdensome presence, he placed slender feet on the floor-boards and rose. Soundless in movement, he fingered the pair of brown breeches given for his use. The homespun wool had been cuffed at the ankles to suit his shorter stature. Kerelie’s neat stitches hemmed the turned seams. Her delight for needle and thread touched his spirit, a dance of harmonics that soared far above the range of natural hearing. He stroked the cloth and also sensed the whispered urgency of her unease: that some later short-fall might wish back this old garment to mend a brother’s torn jacket or patch up a moth-eaten quilt.
Lip curled at the thought of wearing such chafing anxiety next to his skin, the destitute supplicant dressed himself. The breeches, made for a much broader build, threatened to slide off his hips. He would need a string to secure the loose waistband if the household insisted on decency. His beard stubble prickled; his jet hair hung tangled. Yet he had been offered no comb and no knife, far less soap and basin to shave. The napped hose provided at least had no holes. Since borrowed shoes appeared nowhere in evidence, he padded into the hallway on stockinged feet.
A narrow passage with creaky, pegged floor-boards led him to another bedchamber. Dust filmed the thresholds of two more rooms with shut doors, both shadowed and uninhabited. Too respectful to pry, he ventured the stair towards the kitchen, determined to right his disgruntled pride and amend his overlooked grooming.
He was halfway down and still masked in gloom when the sharpened ripple of an inbound disturbance flicked over his sensitized nerves. He froze, unsettled by split-second warning: another person strode towards the cottage, not expected by the known family inside. Survival reflex prompted him to expand that initial assessment. Still strange to himself, he quashed that fierce impulse: locked down the swift expansion of his perceptions hard and fast, before he lost his grip. Unadorned hearing already informed him that the caller was not a close neighbour. Through the hearth-fire’s crackle and the on-going rattle of Kerelie’s heedless industry, he picked up a stamped hoof and the restive jingle of harness bells from outside. A carriage and team handled by a groom was being tied to the pasture fence.
Nothing like Tarens’s straightforward tread, the passenger’s step minced along the mud path, then thumped up the porch stair from the garden. Then that someone, unknown, and bullishly male, knocked at the kitchen-door.
Kerelie’s skirt swished, a brusque rustle that bespoke surprise as she passed the pine trestle, crossed the braid rug, then scuffed over the slab at the entry and lifted the latch. The squeak of the door-panel’s crooked hinge was followed by speech, enlivened by recognition.
The listener’s ear ignored Kerelie’s greeting in favour of tracking her tone: she was annoyed, even felt imposed upon, which tagged the fellow as invader. But perfunctory courtesy obliged her to invite the unpleasant caller inside.
As her platitude brought his unctuous acceptance, frustration spiked the rampant dislike she smothered behind genteel manners.
Shameless, the eavesdropper poised in the stairwell chose not to retreat. Since the secretive vantage provided him with a covert view of the kitchen, he settled down in cat quiet as the pushy visitor shoved into the cottage. The man’s fruity voice and deliberate gait foretold the portly build that shortly emerged into view.
Pinkly shaved over his pouched chin, he claimed the only padded chair from the trestle, and buckled the rug in his grunted effort to haul the seat onto the slate apron before the hearth. There, he settled, oblivious, or else uncaring, that his planted bulk blocked the heat that kept the rest of the croft cottage cozy. His clothes and tweed jacket bespoke country origins, a surface impression spoiled by the gleam of a tailored silk collar and gold rims on his oyster-shell buttons. He provided a gift. His fussy, scrubbed hand bestowed the package on Kerelie as though grateful acceptance was his rightful due.
Which presumption made the unseen witness bristle. Restraint kept him still, while Kerelie took the man’s bundle of charity with clipped distaste. She unwrapped a glass phial of cough syrup, then a string-tied packet that faintly wafted the astringent fragrance of cailcallow.
The silent lurker understood herbals: somewhere, he had been well taught to know their virtues by their subtle essence. These dried, crumbled leaves had