Chapter 4 The Man Who Watched Too Carefully

The walk back to town was quiet in the way that two strangers who have already said something honest to each other tend to be quiet.

Vee led and Kael followed and neither of them spoke until the treeline broke and the back fence of the easternmost house came into view. She heard him slow slightly behind her as the town opened up, the main road visible beyond the row of houses, smoke rising from chimneys, the ordinary afternoon sounds of Ashveil going about its business.

She glanced back at him. He was looking at the town with an expression that was not quite wariness and not quite relief. Something between the two that she filed away without commenting on.

"This way," she said, turning along the fence line toward the side entrance of her shop.

She brought him in through the workroom rather than the front, partly because the front was still locked from her midday departure and partly because something told her he would be more comfortable entering without the main road watching. He stepped through the door and stopped just inside it, taking in the hanging herbs and the crowded shelving and the worktable at the center with the same careful attention he seemed to give everything.

"Sit there," Vee said, nodding toward the low stool beside the worktable. She was already moving to the supply shelf, pulling down clean linen, a jar of her best wound salve and a bottle of the pine resin tincture she used for deeper cuts.

Kael sat. He did it without argument, which she noted. In her experience, men with that particular quality of physical presence tended toward argument as a default setting.

She filled a bowl with clean water from the pitcher on the side table and carried everything to the worktable. He watched her prepare without speaking, his hands resting on his knees, his posture straight but not rigid. Watchful.

"The cut first," she said, pulling the stool close and sitting across from him. "Look up slightly."

He tilted his head back and she leaned in to examine the wound above his brow in the better light of the workroom lamp. It was deeper than it had looked in the forest. Clean edged, like something had struck him rather than scratched him, and the skin around it carried the faint yellow green of bruising that was already a day or two old.

"This happened before today," she said.

"Yes," Kael said.

"How many days ago?"

He considered this with more thought than the question seemed to require. "Three," he said.

Vee dipped the linen in the tincture and pressed it carefully to the wound. He did not flinch. She had treated enough patients to know the difference between someone bearing pain through effort and someone who simply did not register it the way most people did. Kael was the latter, which was its own kind of information.

"You heal quickly," she said, more to herself than to him. The edges of the cut had already begun pulling together in a way that would have taken most people a full week to achieve.

"I have always been that way," he said.

She cleaned the wound in silence, applied a thin layer of salve and covered it with a small linen square. Then she reached for his hands.

The knuckles on his right hand were split in two places, also several days old and also further along in healing than they had any right to be. She worked through them methodically, aware that he was watching her face while she worked rather than watching her hands.

"You are staring," she said without looking up.

"I am," he agreed, without any particular apology in it.

"It is considered poor manners in most places," Vee said.

"I know," Kael said. "I apologize."

He did not stop.

She finished with his hands and sat back, looking at him directly. The grey eyes met hers with that quality she had noticed in the clearing, steady and ancient and carrying something underneath that she could not get to the surface of no matter how carefully she looked.

"You are not from Ashveil," she said.

"No," he agreed.

"You are not passing through either," she said. "People passing through do not track a specific person to a specific clearing in a forest they have never walked before."

Something moved through his expression. Quickly contained, quickly gone.

"What makes you think I was tracking you?" he asked.

"The prints led to the clearing," Vee said. "I led myself to the clearing by following them. You were already there. Either you were tracking me or you were tracking something that followed me, and given that nothing in that forest posed me any threat before you arrived, I am inclined toward the first explanation."

Kael was quiet for a moment. He looked at her with an expression she was beginning to recognize as the one he wore when she had said something accurate and he was deciding how much to confirm.

"You are very calm about this," he said.

"I am calm about most things," Vee replied. "It is generally more useful than the alternative." She paused, folding the used linen neatly. "Who are you looking for?"

The question landed in the room and sat there. Kael looked at her steadily.

"Someone I lost," he said at last. "A long time ago."

Vee studied him. "And did you find them?"

He held her gaze for a moment that stretched longer than was strictly conversational. Something in it pressed against her chest in a way she did not have a clean explanation for, like a word she had forgotten and was trying to recover from somewhere deep and inaccessible.

"I am not sure yet," he said quietly.

Outside, the wind picked up and moved through the eaves of the shop in a low, resonant sound that was not quite a howl but was close enough to make Vee go still for just a moment, her hands resting on the worktable, her eyes staying on the man sitting across from her.

"You can sleep in the storeroom tonight," she said, after a moment. "There is a cot in there. It is not comfortable but it is better than the mountain."

Kael looked at her as though she had surprised him for the second time that afternoon. "You do not know me," he said.

"You said that already," Vee replied, standing and beginning to clear the supplies from the table. "I am aware. The offer stands."

She heard him exhale slowly behind her, something in it that sounded less like a man accepting a kindness and more like a man setting down something very heavy he had been carrying for a very long time.

"Thank you," Kael said.

Vee did not turn around. "There is soup on the stove upstairs," she said. "Wash your hands first."