What the Beans Knew
Thistlewick had a way of knowing things before it officially knew them. By the time Wren walked to the fairgrounds the next morning, half the village had already decided, without a single confirmed fact, that something had happened at the Ashvale cottage. She could feel it in the way conversations paused a half-beat too long when she passed, in the way Old Marta at the bread stall suddenly needed both hands for a transaction that usually took one.
Only Tomas had the decency to simply say it to her face.
"You could have told me," he said, falling into step beside her with the particular hurt of a man who has just realized he has spent two years quietly courting a stranger. "I wouldn't have — Wren, I wouldn't have said anything."
"There was nothing to tell. Not until yesterday."
"That's not what the Warden's asking around about." He kept his voice low, though there was no one close enough to hear. "She's been at the Millers' and the smithy since dawn. Asking how long you've lived alone. Whether anyone's ever seen you do anything odd. Whether your grandmother ever did."
Wren's stomach dropped somewhere around her boots. "She's building a file."
"She's being thorough. I don't think she's trying to hurt you." Tomas hesitated, and when he spoke again it was quieter, almost apologetic, as though the question itself was a kind of betrayal. "Is it true, though? What she's asking about?"
There was, Wren thought, no answer to that question that would leave things between them the way they'd been the day before. She could lie, and lose whatever trust remained once the truth came out anyway — because it would, now, there was no version of this where it didn't. Or she could tell the truth, and lose him a different way, faster, cleaner, with his face doing the thing every face in Thistlewick did when they said the missing word in their heads.
"Yes," she said. "It's true."
Tomas didn't flinch, which surprised her enough that she actually looked at him properly for the first time since he'd fallen into step beside her. He looked, if anything, tired — the particular tiredness of someone recalculating two years of memory in real time.
"How long?"
"Always. Since before I can remember."
"And you never—" He stopped, started over. "I used to bring you firewood in summer. Did you know that was ridiculous? I knew it was ridiculous. I did it anyway because I liked watching you pretend not to notice." A short, humorless laugh. "I suppose I should ask if any of that was — I don't know. Charmed. Worked on somehow."
"Tomas." She stopped walking. "I would never do that. Whatever else I am, I'm not that."
He studied her for a long moment, and something in his shoulders eased, just slightly. "No," he said. "No, I don't think you would." He looked away, toward the fairground stalls, the bunting still strung from the day before, ordinary and bright and entirely indifferent to the fact that Wren's whole life had come apart at the seams. "What are you going to do? About the Warden."
"I don't know yet."
"There's a third choice, you know. Besides her two." He said it carefully, watching her face. "You could run. Tonight, before she files whatever report she's writing. I've got a cousin two provinces south, past the mountains, in a fishing town where nobody's ever seen a ley-glass, let alone a Warden post."
It was, Wren thought, the single kindest and most dangerous thing anyone had ever offered her.
"They'd hunt me as an unregistered flight risk instead of an unregistered Kindling," she said. "That's worse, not better. Calder said as much — the network's tighter now than it was even a few years back. I wouldn't get past the first ley-post."
"So you're going to register."
"I don't know." The admission cost her something to say out loud. "I've spent my whole life making sure no one ever had this conversation with me. I don't — I don't know how to have it now that it's happening."
Tomas reached out, then seemed to think better of it, his hand dropping before it reached her arm. "For what it's worth," he said, "whatever you decide — you're still just Wren. Beans and turnips and a kettle that whistles flat. That doesn't stop being true just because one more thing is also true."
It was, she thought, the kind of thing people said to be kind rather than because it was accurate, but she found she wanted to believe it anyway.