hovered over his shoulder, though Tarens chastised her rudeness.
‘Let him be, Kerie! He isn’t a thief.’
‘What’s he doing, then?’ Trailed after the man’s furtive step up the stair, she bridled as his brazen exploration turned down the second-floor hallway. Before he presumed the unthinkable and breached the shut door to the boys’ empty bedroom, she called downstairs, benighted, ‘Shouldn’t somebody check to be sure he’s not up to mischief?’
Which comment froze the snooping stranger at the forbidden threshold. His head turned. Kerelie caught the brunt of his razor-keen stare, charged by a contempt that prickled her hackles. Then, undeterred, he spun on his heel and invaded the family’s most sacrosanct shrine. The room was pitch-dark. He carried no light. Since Kerelie could not bear the desecration, she refused the loan of a candle. Instead, she fled headlong downstairs and collided with Tarens, who captured her into his steadfast embrace.
‘You know where he’s poking his inquisitive nose,’ she objected, muffled by her brother’s warm shirt.
‘Let him do as he must,’ Tarens urged, also shaken, but unready to surrender his last glimmer of hope to the stifling shadow of grief. ‘Everything that man’s done has held purpose! I’d place my trust in the same goodwill that spared you from Grismard’s clutches.’
Kerelie sniffed. She conceded the point, enough to suppress her outraged nerves until the intrusive, quick footstep re-emerged and descended the stair. Her stare still shot daggers for flagrant presumption. Worse yet, the glow from the kitchen fire brushed the tell-tale gleam of polished wood in the pilferer’s hand.
Rankled, Kerelie shouted, ‘He’s got Paolin’s flute! Efflin’s going to be furious!’
Tarens clamped her arm, curbed his own blast of temper, and whispered a plea for restraint. ‘Efflin’s riled nerves might be for the best. Force him to take a stand and maybe he’ll rejoin the living.’
If the vagabond noticed their umbrage, nothing deflected his course as he poked through the cottage kitchen. No pot and no spoon on the rack went unfingered. He laid his ear to the trestle, eyes shut, as if the scarred planks spoke like a book’s riffled pages, scribed with the past layers of ingrained conversations.
While Kerelie glowered with prim disapproval, he moved on and ran a near-reverent hand over the contents of Aunt Saffie’s dish cupboard. As if the tactile slide of bare fingers garnered the nuance of buried impressions, he lingered, drew in a satisfied breath, and savoured a pause before he pressed onwards. Glimpsed by the frangible gleam of the fire, his eyes appeared softened from focus. Bemused as a dreamer’s, the slight tilt of his head suggested he listened to strains far beyond natural hearing.
Kerelie’s impetuous tongue blurted outright what Tarens was thinking: ‘Either your creature’s as daft as the moon, or we’re watching a sorcerer work.’
‘I fear the temple’s meddling examiners far more,’ Tarens snapped. ‘If harm comes to us by this man’s hand, I’ll shoulder the blame. But without a shred of contrary evidence, my mind is going to stay open.’ Deaf to debate, he positioned himself to shield against his sister’s untoward interference. When at last the vagabond made his way back into Efflin’s chamber, the shortened candles cast fluttering haloes over coverlet and furnishings, and pooled yellow light on the braided-rag carpet. Kerelie beat a nettled retreat to her chair and retrieved her dropped mending like armour. Tarens stationed himself by the door, despite his stout claim of unshaken faith, poised to move fast if need warranted.
The vagabond drifted onwards to the bed and extended the hand-made flute, balanced across his open palms. There, he waited until his planted stance forced Efflin’s blank stare to a flicker of confrontation. The moment faded. Indifference resurged, then subsided to flat rejection. The inflamed rims of the sunken lids lowered, sight shuttered behind adamant, closed eyes.
The vagabond bowed his head, not resigned. He laid the flute across Efflin’s stilled knees. Left it there, gleaming atop the plain coverlet as he leaned forward and ran his expressive fingers over the bedstead: the same that Aunt Saffie and Uncle Fiath had shared through their eighteen years joined in marriage. He stroked the carved wood, engrossed: as if his engaged survey of another’s belongings scrutinized intimacies that even kinsfolk had no right to rifle.
‘Feels like an invasion of somebody’s privacy,’ Kerelie grumbled with self-righteous heat.
Her intrusive comment offended at last. The vagabond’s chin snapped up from absorbed contemplation. His disturbed regard raked her soul-deep with reproach. The effect all but flayed skin, as he left Efflin’s bedside and advanced on her chair, his stalker’s step primed for a challenge.
Her fierce courage met him straight on. The fears that edged Kerelie’s outbursts never had stemmed from concern for herself. Aware she would stand her adamant ground, Tarens looked on with choked breath as the vagabond squared off against a loyal sister’s disapproval. The hands he raised could have belonged to an artist, but for his broken nails and chapped knuckles. Firmly, he tugged the bastion of fine needlework out of her defensive fingers. Then he gathered up her emptied palm, and cupped her own flesh against the old scar that disfigured her cheek.
His clasp guided, only. She easily could have yanked free. Yet as though anaesthetized, she did not jerk away, but looked upwards into his angular features. His green eyes captured hers, deep beyond measure, impenetrably calm and unthreatening.
And something inside of her burst the rigid dam that constrained a violent torrent of feeling…
She was three on the day the neighbour’s cranky mule lunged with flattened ears and nipped at her arm. Open-hearted and innocent, she had leaned over the fence-rail to plant a kiss on its whiskered muzzle, eager to grant any creature who wronged her that earnest gesture of forgiveness.
Such a simple mistake to have scarred her for life. The pain as the mule’s blunt teeth crushed her cheek had been brief, and the pinprick trauma of stitches, a pittance. The damage that crippled struck later, inflicted by endless humiliation.
Hurtful memories rushed through in a cruel cascade: of her mother’s exasperated anger and resigned pity; then the remorseless jeers of the other children who poked fun at her welted face. She shrank into self-consciousness, then scourging embarrassment, as puberty delivered the blow that her blemish made her undesired by the young men. She endured the torment of her uncle’s strained silences, then the helpless resignation that drove him from the room each time her aunt broached her dim prospects for a good marriage. The westlands tradition of chaperoned courtship made her teen years a punishment as she sat through the dances, or waited forlorn at an empty table. Shunned, she had watched the lit candles burn above the baked sweets that hopeful youth had laid out for young suitors who failed to appear. Or worse, she had struggled to make conversation, when callers were sent by their insistent mothers as a hollow gesture of conciliation.
Seared to her core, Kerelie ached for the flaw that could not, in this life, ever leave her. Her spoiled features could not be restored. She lived, day on day, as separate as though sealed behind a pane of marred glass. Except for her brothers, no one she met ever saw her: until a wild vagabond, chance-met on the road, had bridged the gap of her isolation. No person, ever, had soothed her raw nerves with the tonic of clear understanding.
The first sob tore from Kerelie’s chest with a sound like rent cloth, coarse and alarmingly primal. Tears followed, a wracking catharsis of shame that alarmed Tarens to witness. The spate passed without incident. Limp, drained to emptiness in release, Kerelie made no effort to disentangle herself. Bent forward, leaned into the vagabond’s support, she allowed him, that gently, to ease her soaked fingers back into her lap.
Now, his weathered touch cradled her scarred cheek directly. The drawn flesh with its whitened, hard knot of tissue did not repulse him. His contact stayed steady, an unpretentious acceptance beyond any banal word of comfort.
Unthreatening, tender, he lifted her chin. He brushed the brine from her lashes, and gazed into her eyes until the flood brimmed again, spilled, and emptied. Something uncanny quickened the connection: a bloom