Victor Grimholt's Arc

Chapter 6 of 9

Morning came with the leather hare still clutched in Lunella's fist and a stranger loitering at the edge of Victor's yard. He saw the figure through the shutter slat as he warmed her bottle. A hood. A shawl. Eyes fixed on his door. The same shape had passed twice the day before, asking neighbors whether the butcher had truly been given a child, and by whom. Victor set the bottle down. He looked at Lunella asleep in her basket, small fist around a lumpy ear. Something in his chest went cold and even, the way it did before work. He sent for Rhys before the second bell. Rhys came in his hood and iron mask, quiet as smoke, and listened without moving while Victor spoke in short lines. Watcher at the fence. Questions in the market. Names being tested. "Find who it is," Victor rasped. "Do not touch them. Bring the name." Rhys nodded once. "I'll walk soft," he said. "Give me the day." He slipped out the back and was gone before Victor could thank him. Livia arrived at midday for the feeding and Victor said nothing of it. He kept his hands busy on a hide he did not need to scrape. He watched the door. Rhys returned at dusk and asked Victor to walk. They stopped under a wide tree at the water's edge, its pink leaves hanging low over a stone-ringed pool, petals drifting on the surface. Rhys pulled back his hood halfway. "She's been sleeping in the reeds two nights," he said. "Thin. Sick, I think. She asked the baker if the child had a name yet. She asked the herbalist if the child was well." He paused, choosing the next words like timber. "It's the mother, Victor. Lunella's mother. She left the baby on your step and she came back to see if she'd done right." Victor stared at the water a long time. A petal turned once and sank. He had come expecting a rival, a claimant, someone he could frighten off a porch. Not this. Not a woman half-starved in the reeds, watching from a distance to see if her daughter had lived. His plan broke apart quietly in his hands. He could not threaten her. He could not send Rhys to move her along. He could not, he found, even be angry. "Say nothing," he told Rhys at last. "Not to Livia. Not to Amara. Not yet." Rhys pulled his hood back up and nodded. Victor walked home through the dark with the certificate in his coat feeling suddenly like a thinner shield than it had that morning, and a harder question waiting on his doorstep than the one he had solved.