The village of Breck sat at the bottom of a shallow valley like something that had rolled downhill and simply stopped. Three streets. A well. A market square that on Tuesdays became, by general agreement, a market square, and on every other day remained a patch of mud with ambitions.
Caelan had traded here twice before and remembered it chiefly for two things: a cooper who undercut everyone in the region on barrel staves, and an innkeeper who watered his ale with such consistency that you could set your expectations by it.
"Small," said Ysolde.
"It has a church," Caelan said. "And a mill. For a village this size, that is practically a city."
She made the sound he was beginning to recognize as her version of charitable skepticism. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a dismissal. Something in between, worn smooth by long use.
The cart rolled through the gap in the low stone wall that served as Breck's gate. Two children looked up from where they were doing something industrious with mud. A dog assessed Bram with professional interest and then thought better of it.
Ysolde's ears — which she had, by now, more or less stopped bothering to hide from him, though she kept them pressed flat when strangers were near — tracked toward the sound of the mill. Then toward the church. Then toward the market square, where three women were arguing about something with the focused energy of people who had been arguing about it for some time and intended to continue.
"That one on the left will win," she said.
"The one in the brown shawl?"
"Mm. She has already decided the argument is over. The other two have not noticed yet."
Caelan considered this. "You can tell that from here?"
"I can tell that from the set of her shoulders." Ysolde glanced at him sideways. "You could too, if you looked at people rather than calculating what they might purchase."
"I look at people."
"You look at people's purses."
He did not have an immediate answer for this, which she seemed to find satisfying.
They found the market square after the women had dispersed, which meant Caelan had no opportunity to verify the prediction. He suspected this was deliberate timing. He pulled Bram to a stop near the well and set the brake, dropping down to begin the familiar ritual of unloading what needed displaying and assessing who was around to see it.
The morning trade was thin. A cloth merchant with a cart twice the size of Caelan's had taken the prime position and was doing steady business in a way that suggested he had been here since dawn. A woman with dried herbs hung from a frame moved through the square slowly, calling out in a voice that had the practiced patience of someone who expected to wait.
Ysolde descended from the cart in the way she did most things — with an unhurried precision that suggested the world would simply have to arrange itself around her schedule.
"The cloth merchant," she said quietly, falling into step beside Caelan as he moved to the cart's side. "He has more of the blue wool than he wants to. He has discounted it once already. He will do so again before noon."
"How do you know he has discounted it?"
"The price is still marked with chalk. When a merchant is confident, he uses paint. Or he remembers the number. Chalk means he expects to change it."
Caelan looked. The price board was, indeed, chalk.
He said nothing. But she caught the slight shift of his expression and made that almost-laugh sound again.
"I will leave you to your work," she said, with the magnanimity of someone who has already won. "I intend to look at the square."
"Don't—" He stopped. He was not entirely sure what he intended to say. *Don't cause trouble* seemed both presumptuous and insufficient. *Don't reveal what you are* was more to the point, but she had demonstrated, over three days of travel, a perfectly competent ability to keep her ears flat and her tail still when it suited her. It simply, he was learning, did not always suit her.
"Merchant," she said, with exaggerated patience.
"Nothing. Go."
She went. He watched her move through the square — that same quality of occupying space, the same way the eye found her and held — and then he made himself look at his goods and begin the day's business.
---
The first sale was a disappointment. A farmer's wife who wanted pepper paid him in kind with a wheel of hard cheese he had not asked for and could not easily refuse, and left before he had entirely followed the logic of how it had happened. He stood holding the cheese and replaying the conversation and could not identify the precise moment he had agreed.
He was still holding it when Ysolde returned.
She looked at the cheese. She looked at him. She said nothing.
Her tail moved. It was a very small movement. A slight increase in the arc of its lazy sway, almost too small to notice.
Almost.
"The cheese is good quality," Caelan said.
"I'm sure it is."
"I can trade it in Marren. There is a factor there who takes—"
"Caelan."
"Yes."
"The cheese is fine." Her amber eyes were entirely without expression. "Everything is fine."
"Your tail," he said, "disagrees."
She looked down at it with the air of someone discovering an uninvited guest. The tail stilled, with visible effort.
"I said nothing," she said.
"You didn't have to."
She turned away to look at the cloth merchant's stall with sudden intense interest. Caelan resettled the cheese under the cart bench and went back to work.
---
By midmorning he had sold a good portion of his dried goods, a length of rope, and a small jar of oil for a price he was satisfied with. The blue wool, as Ysolde had predicted, was discounted again by the cloth merchant around the eleventh hour, and Caelan bought two lengths of it at the new price, which gave him a reasonable margin in Marren if the factor there was in a buying mood.
He found her near the well.
She was talking to an old man who was sitting on the well's stone edge with the authority of someone who had been there long enough to become a feature of it. The old man was laughing. Ysolde was leaning slightly forward in the posture she sometimes adopted when she was genuinely interested in something — less composed than her usual bearing, more present.
Caelan slowed his approach.
He did not know what they were talking about. Whatever it was, it had the old man's complete attention and something in her face that he had not often seen there: an unguarded quality, a straightforward pleasure. None of the irony she kept aimed at him.
He felt, briefly and irrationally, that he was watching something through a window.
She noticed him when he was still a few paces away. The expression did not disappear exactly. It shifted. Became the more familiar architecture of her face when he was present: alert, amused, slightly prepared.
"Merchant," she said. "This is Aldric. He remembers when the mill was built."
"Forty-two years ago," the old man said, with satisfaction. "Third month. My father drove the first ox."
"I did not know that," Caelan said, because it seemed expected.
"Most don't." Aldric squinted at him. "You're the one with the cart. She says you're heading east."
"Marren, eventually."
The old man made a sound that managed to convey several things simultaneously: acknowledgment, mild skepticism of Caelan's life choices, and the general philosophical position that east was fine if you liked that sort of thing. "Pass through the Ferren valley?"
"If the road holds. Last time I came through, there was a wash-out past the second crossing."
"Repaired. Church paid for it, or so they say." Aldric shrugged with one shoulder. "Church has been busy lately. More travelers through here than usual, all heading the same direction. Men in good cloaks."
Caelan kept his face neutral. "Surveyors, perhaps. Or factors."
"Perhaps." The old man seemed to lose interest in the question as quickly as he'd raised it. "She was telling me about the old roads," he said, nodding at Ysolde. "Remembers things that aren't written down anywhere."
"She has a good memory," Caelan said.
Ysolde looked at him with an expression that was precisely calibrated to convey that she found his understatement tiresome.
---
The sky turned grey around midday, and by the time Caelan had packed the remainder of his unsold goods and seen to Bram, it had made up its mind about the matter. The rain came in fast and sideways, the kind that does not bother with any preliminary courtesy and arrives already certain of its position.
The inn was across the square. He ran for it.
He had gotten perhaps eight steps before he realized Ysolde was not beside him. He turned. She was still standing by the cart, looking at the sky with an expression of moderate interest, rain plastering her hair flat and running in rivers down the collar of her borrowed cloak.
"Ysolde."
"Mm."
"Come inside."
"In a moment."
"The 'moment' is wet."
"So it is." She looked at him with perfect serenity. Water ran off the end of her nose. "Rain is interesting."
"Rain," he said, "is water falling from sky to ground. It has been doing so for some years. You have had opportunities to observe it." He walked back to her, pulled his cloak off his own shoulders, and held it over them both.
This required him to stand rather closer to her than he generally did.
She looked up at him — she had to tilt her head back to do it — and for a moment neither of them said anything. The rain drummed on the cloak above them, heavy and insistent, and the square was empty of everyone with better judgment.
"You will be cold," she said.
"I will be briefly cold and then I will be inside."
"And if I am not ready to go inside?"
"Then we will stand here until we both drown, and Bram will find a new owner, and the blue wool will mildew, and I will have lost money on today entirely."
"You bought the blue wool," she said. "At the discounted price. You have not lost money."
"The cheese."
Her lips curved. It was, he noticed, not her performance smile — not the one that kept people at arm's length. It was something smaller than that, and therefore more real.
"The cheese," she conceded.
The rain showed no signs of philosophy. He moved, and she moved with him, both of them under the single cloak, walking the eight steps across the square to the inn door with the slightly awkward coordination of people who have not yet established whose pace sets the tempo.
Her shoulder was against his arm. Her ears — pressed flat under the wet hair — were level with his collarbone.
He pulled the door open and they went in.
---
The inn was warm and smelled of old wood and something animal and soup. There were perhaps six people in the common room, all of whom looked at the door when it opened and then looked away with varying degrees of pointedness.
Ysolde shook herself like — he thought it, he could not help it — like an animal, and water scattered from her hair. She ran her fingers through it and her ears, freed from camouflage, rose slightly before she caught herself and pressed them down again.
"Your ears," he said, quietly, behind her.
"I know."
She kept them flat and he said nothing more about it.
They found a table near the fire. The innkeeper brought them something that was, as Caelan had been expecting, mostly hot water with ambitions of being broth, and bread that had reached the dignified end of its career.
Ysolde wrapped both hands around the bowl and looked into it with an expression of solemn evaluation.
"It is sincere soup," she said, at last.
"That is generous."
"The bread has character."
"The bread," he said, "has given up."
She broke a piece of it, ate it, and did not contradict him.
Caelan sat with the warmth at his back and looked at his hands around the bowl. The rain was loud against the shutters. Bram was under shelter. The goods were covered.
He thought about what Aldric had said. Men in good cloaks, heading the same direction. Church has been busy.
He thought about how the old priest at Ashfen had looked at Ysolde — not at the statue, but at her, already standing in the shrine doorway, in a way that had made the hairs at Caelan's neck stand up for reasons he had not fully examined.
He thought about the road to Marren.
"You're thinking," Ysolde said.
"I am sometimes given to it."
"You think with your jaw." She touched her own jaw briefly to indicate. "It tightens."
He relaxed his jaw. He had not noticed it was tight.
"The old man mentioned church travelers," he said.
"I heard." She was looking at the fire, not at him. Her voice was level. "You wonder if they are looking for something."
"I wonder if they know what was in that shrine."
A pause. The fire made its small comfortable sounds.
"Shrines do not typically empty themselves," she said.
"No."
"And the sort of men who track such things are not typically deterred by distance."
"Also no."
She turned to look at him then, and the firelight was amber in her eyes — not the same amber, precisely, but close enough that he noticed the resemblance and found it oddly appropriate.
"You could leave me in the next town," she said. It was not a plea. It was stated plainly, like a price quoted fairly. "It would be simpler."
"Simpler," he agreed.
"Less risky."
"Substantially less risky, yes."
"More profitable in the long run."
"Well," he said. He turned his bowl in his hands. "Probably not that. You noticed the chalk on the board this morning. I didn't."
She looked at him for a moment with something that was not quite the performance face and not quite the window face but something between them, something still being decided.
"The cheese," she said.
"Exactly."
She made the almost-laugh sound. Then she looked back at the fire, and one of her ears — the left one — tipped very slightly toward him, which he was fairly certain she did not intend him to notice.
He looked at his soup and said nothing about it.
Outside, the rain continued to make its point.