Rosemary Thorne's Arc

Chapter 13 of 24

Damien slept two hours that night, then sat up in the dark. Rosemary heard the chair scrape. She found him at the table with the half-pendant in his palm. The steward had ridden east, but a rider could turn back. A letter could follow. A second man could come with more coin and sharper questions. Damien would not rest, and neither would she, while anyone at the inn still whispered the name Ashford. "I need to go back," he said. "Once more. To hear what he's saying now that I'm not in front of him." They walked in at dawn. Rosemary carried her satchel and a basket of eggs, so anyone watching would see the girl who sold to the kitchen. Damien stayed at the tree line. The common room was near empty. The innkeeper's wife took the eggs and counted coins onto the boards. Rosemary asked, plain as weather, if the city man had left word. "He paid for two more nights," the woman said. "Left this morning to ride the east road and ask at the farms. Said he wasn't sure the man he met was the one he wanted. Said the face was close but the hands were wrong." Rosemary kept her own hands still on the counter. "The hands." "A scar he was told to look for. He didn't see it." Rosemary bought a loaf she didn't need and walked out slow. At the tree line she told Damien what the woman had said. He looked down at his palm where the scar had faded to nothing after the reversal. The thing that had marked him as his father's son was gone with the curse. "He'll come back," Damien said. "He'll want a second look." "Then give him one he can carry home." They went to the cottage. Rosemary took a knife from the drawer, wiped it with spirit, and set it on the table beside a clean cloth. Damien understood without asking. He laid his hand flat. "Where it was," he said. She cut along the old line. He did not flinch. She pressed the cloth until the bleeding slowed, then bound it with linen. The wound would heal ugly, exactly like the mark the steward had been told to find. At dusk Damien walked to the inn alone and sat in the common room where the innkeeper's wife could see him. He asked for bread and ate with his bandaged hand on the table. He waited an hour. Then he walked home. The purple alligator was in the garden, chewing a fallen apple, watching the path. The cats had come out to sit beside it. Damien latched the gate behind him and let Rosemary take his cut hand in both of hers. "He'll hear about the scar," he said. "He'll write it down. He'll leave." "And after?" "After, I'm only the man who lives here."