Roslyn tied her green braids back at the window and watched Silas cross the village square for the fourth morning that week. He did not look up. He never looked up. She had spoken to him once, when he asked if she had dropped something and she said no, and she had been replaying his laugh from a different day ever since. It was Tuesday. The corset had already rubbed her ribs raw under the laces. She meant to be the woman he chose in front of everyone, and so far she had managed to be the woman he passed. Her mother watched her from the table. "You look like trouble," she said again, the way she said it every morning. Roslyn pulled a shawl over the corset and went out before the sentence could grow a second half. The other girls would be at the well by now. Roslyn knew the red-haired one paid the baker's boy to tell her which path Silas walked. Roslyn did not consider any of them a real problem. None of them had been asked if they had dropped something. None of them knew his laugh from up close. What she lacked was a reason to be in his way without looking like she wanted to be in his way. She found her reason behind the tavern, in the kitchen yard where the cook let her wash mugs three afternoons a week for coin. A short sword sat propped against the woodpile, its tip wedged into a split stone the cook used as a doorstop. The blade was old and chipped. The cook said a traveler had left it as payment and nobody in the village could pry it loose. "Take it off my step if you can lift the stone," the cook said. "I'm tired of looking at it." Roslyn lifted the stone. She carried it on her hip past the well, where the red-haired woman stood in a white skirt and a tube top, drawing water she did not need. Scarlett's grey eyes tracked the stone, then Roslyn's face, then the path ahead. "Heavy errand," Scarlett said. Roslyn kept walking. The cabin at the pine edge was Silas's. Everyone knew it. A chipped blade in a stone was the kind of thing a man who patrolled at night might want to look at, and a woman carrying it would have a question to ask, and a question was a door. She knocked. Silas opened it with a nunchuck in one hand and tired eyes. She held up the stone. "The tavern wants this gone," she said. "I thought you might know what to do with it." He looked at the blade. He looked at her. "Come in," he said. "Set it down." Roslyn stepped across his threshold and the door closed behind her.

Silas worked the blade against a wheel in the corner of the cabin while Roslyn stood by the door and tried not to stare. The cabin was one room. A cot, a table, a log open to a blank page, a row of pegs hung with rope and tools. He did not speak while he worked. She watched the chips lift off the edge and the steel come back clean. When he held the sword up to the lamp, she saw a rose now cut along the blade, fine lines wrapped around the old notch where the tip had struck the stone. He had not added the rose for her. The rose had been under the rust the whole time. "Done," Silas said. He set the sword on the table between them. "Tell the cook it cuts now. Mind the notch. That came from frozen rock. It will not sharpen out." Roslyn picked up the blade. It was lighter than when she carried it in. She had counted on the walk back being long. She had counted on a second errand, a borrowed cloth, a question about the notch. He had answered the question before she asked it. She stepped to the door and made her hand open it. "Thank you," she said. He nodded once and turned back to the wheel. Outside, the cold hit her bare arms. She had two steps before the path. She took one and stopped. A wooden bird feeder stood on a post beside the door, its roof dusted with snow, seed scattered on the ground beneath it. The seed was untouched. No tracks. No birds in the pines. She had passed the feeder coming in and not noticed. She noticed now because the yard was quiet in a way a yard with seed should not be. She turned back and knocked. Silas opened the door with the nunchuck in his hand again. She held the sword flat across both palms so he would see she was not using it as her excuse. "Your feeder is full," she said. "Nothing has touched it. I walked from the well and did not hear a bird the whole way." His face changed. It was the first time she had made his face change. He looked past her at the pines, then at the seed, then at her. "Come back inside," Silas said. "Sit down. Tell me what else you heard and did not hear. Start at the tavern yard." He stepped aside. Roslyn carried the sword in with her and set it on the table a second time. He shut the door, took down the log from the peg, and opened it to the blank page. He uncapped his ink. He was not looking at her like a girl on his step. He was looking at her like a witness.