Rhys Downing's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The dinner was three days out. Rhys sat in his workshop at dawn, staring at the green shirt still folded on the chair. It looked wrong now. A cottage meal was not a walk by a pool. He needed help, and he only trusted one person to give it. He found Victor at his butcher block, wiping a cleaver on his apron. The bunny man's red eyes flicked up. Blood streaked one white ear. He did not stop working. "I need to buy clothes," Rhys said. "For a woman's table." Victor set the cleaver down. "A hide is a hide until you skin it clean. Then it's a coat." He untied his apron. "You want Silus." They walked to the fish merchant's pavilion together. Its roof curled like a great golden fish above the reeds, orange silks draping the doorway. Silus Wavecrest stood inside among bolts of cloth, a fat blue fishman in red and gold, rings on every finger. "Ah," Silus said, spreading his arms. "The hermit and the butcher. A rare tide indeed. What does the swamp bring me today?" "Something for supper at a woman's home," Victor said. "Not a funeral." Silus laughed and pulled Rhys under the light. He held bolts against Rhys's chest, muttering, discarding, muttering again. He settled on a deep charcoal shirt with a thin bone-white stitch at the collar, and dark trousers cut close. "Understated," Silus declared. "A man who does not shout. Yet the stitching says he was chosen with care." Rhys paid without arguing. Victor watched him fold the clothes into his pack. "The mask," Victor said, outside. "You bringing the work one?" Rhys stopped on the path. He had not let himself think about it. His work mask was leather and iron, scarred from nights he did not talk about. It was the face the village knew. "No," he said. "I have another. For weddings. My father's." Victor nodded once. "A clean blade for a clean cut." Rhys went home. He knelt by the chest at the foot of his bed and took out a mask of pale carved wood, smooth, unmarked, with narrow eyes and a soft jaw. He had not worn it in nine years. He tied it on. It sat lighter than the other. He walked to her cottage as the light turned amber. She opened the door before he knocked. Her blue cap glowed against the dark inside. Her eyes went to the new mask and stayed there. "You changed your face," she said, gentle. "Only the cover of it," Rhys said. "The one I wear at market is for the work I left. This one is for the table." She stepped aside. "Come in." He crossed her threshold for the first time. She did not ask him to take the mask off. He did not offer. But she had seen him choose it, and that was a door she had opened, and he had walked through.