Elan M’Cory was sewing something stretched on a wooden hoop; her eyes did not lift even when he stopped and stood for long moments, waiting. At last, his courage dying quickly, he coughed a little. “Lady Elan,” he said. “I bid you good afternoon.”
She finally looked up, but with such an unseeing, uncaring gaze that he found himself wondering against all sense whether he had approached the wrong woman, whether Elan M’Cory might have a blind or idiot sister. Then something like ordinary humanity came into her eyes. An expression that was not quite a smile, but almost, tugged at her lips.
“Ah, the poet. Master...Tinwright, was it?”
She remembered him! He could almost hear trumpets, as if the royal heralds had been called out to celebrate his now unmistakable and confirmed existence. “That is right, lady. You honor me.”
Her gaze dropped to her sewing. “And are you enjoying the afternoon, Master Tinwright?”
“Much more for your presence, my lady.”
Now she looked at him again, amused but still distant. “Ah. Because I am a vision of loveliness in my spring finery? Or perhaps because of the cloud of good cheer that surrounds me like a Xandian perfume?”
He laughed, but not confidently. She had wit. He wasn’t certain how he felt about that. He didn’t generally get on very well with women of that sort. On those occasions when he received compliments he wanted to be sure he understood them and that they were sincere. Still, there was something about her that pulled at him, just like the flameloving moth he had so often cited in his poetry. So this was what it felt like! All poets should be forced to feel all the things they wrote about, Tinwright decided. It was a most novel way to understand the figures of poetry. It might change the craft entirely.
“Have I lost you, good sir? You were going to explain the subtle charm that draws you to me.”
He started, ashamed at his own foolishness, standing slack-jawed when he had been asked a question, however sardonic. “Because you are beautiful and sad, Lady Elan,” he said, uncertain whether he might not be overstepping the boundaries of propriety. He shrugged: too late—it had been said. “I wish there were something I could do to make you less so.”
“Less beautiful?” she said, lifting an eyebrow, but there was something underneath the gibing that hurt him to hear— something naked and miserable.
“My lady points out rightly that I have made a fool of myself with my clumsy talk.” He bowed. “I should go and leave you to your work.”
“I hate my work. I sew like a farm laborer. I am more of an executioner than a chirurgeon when it comes to handcraft.”
He didn’t know what that meant, but she hadn’t agreed he should go away. He felt a surge of joy but tried to hide it. “I am sure you underestimate yourself, lady.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “I only like you when you tell the truth, Tinwright. Can you do that? If not, you may continue on you way.”
What was she asking? He swallowed—discreetly, he hoped—and said, “Only the truth then, my lady.”
“Promise?”
“On Zosim, my patron.”
“Ah, the drunkard godling—and patron of criminals, too, I believe. A good enough choice, I suppose, and certainly appropriate for any conversation with me.” She turned to the young maid beside her, who had been listening to them and watching openmouthed. “Lida, you go,” she said. “Play with the other girls.”
“But, Mistress...!”
“I will be fine. I will sit right here. Master Tinwright will protect me from any danger. It is well known that poets fear nothing. Is that not right, Master Matthias?”
Tinwright smiled. “Known only to poets, perhaps, and not to this one. But I do not think your mistress will be in any danger, child.”
Lida, who was all of eight or nine years old, frowned at being called a child, but gathered her skirts and rose from the bench, a miniature of dignity. She spoiled the effect a little by sullenly scuffing her feet all the way down the path.
“She is a good girl,” Elan said. “She came with me from home.”
“Summerfield?”
“No. My own family lives miles from the city. Our estate is called Willowburn.”
“Ah. So you are a country girl?”
She looked at him, her expression suddenly flat once more. “Do not flirt with me, Master Tinwright. I was about to ask you to sit down. Am I to regret my decision?”
He hung his head. “I meant no offense, Lady Elan. I only wondered. I was raised in the city and I’ve often wondered what it would mean to smell country air every day.”
“Really? Well, sometimes it smells wonderful, and sometimes it is just as bad as anything to be found in the worst stews of a city. If you have not spent much time around pigs, Master Tinwright, you haven’t missed a great deal.”
He laughed. She might have more wit than was fitting in a woman, but she also spoke more engagingly than most of the women he knew—or the men either, for that matter. “Point taken, my lady. I will try not to over-burnish the joys of country living.”
“So you grew up in a city. Where?”
“Here. Well, across the bay, to be precise, in the outer city. A place called Wharfside. Not a very nice place.”
“Ah. So your family was poor, then?”
He hesitated. He wanted to agree, to make himself seem as admirable as possible. Since he couldn’t pass for nobility, he could at least be the opposite, someone who had lifted himself up from dire misery by bravery and brilliance.
“Truth,” she reminded, seeing him hesitate. “Most in Wharfside are poor, yes, but we were better off than the largest part of them. My father was a tutor to the children of some of the merchants. We could have lived better, but my father was...he wasn’t good with money.” But good with spending it on drink, and a little too forthcoming in his opinions as far as some of his employers thought, Tinwright recalled, not without some bitterness even with the old man now years dead. “But we always had food on the table. My father studied at EastmarchUniversity. He taught me to love words.”
Which was not exactly the strict truth, as promised—what Kearn Tinwright had actually taught him was to love words enough to be able to talk yourself out of bad situations and into good ones.
“Ah, yes, words,” said Elan M’Cory, musingly. “I used to believe in them. Now I do not.”
Tinwright wasn’t sure he’d understood her. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I mean nothing.” She shook her head; for a moment the brittle look of ordinary social cheerfulness crumbled. She looked down at her needlepoint work for the span of several breaths. “I have kept you too long,” she said at last. “You must get on with your day and I must get on with ruining my sewing.”
He recognized a dismissal, and for once was too gratified to try to tug loose a little more of something he coveted. “I enjoyed speaking with you, my lady,” he said, and meant it. “May I hope to have the pleasure of doing it again sometime?”
The shrieks of the girls playing ball rose up and filled the long silence. She looked at him carefully, and this time it was as though she had retreated behind a high wall and peered down at him from the battlements. “Perhaps,” she said at last. “If you do not hope too much. My company is nothing to hope for.”
“Now it is you who does not tell the truth, my lady.” She frowned, but thinking, not disagreeing. “It is possible that some afternoons, when it does not rain, you may find me here, in this garden, at about this time of the day.”
He stood, and bowed. “I will look forward to such days.” She smiled her sad smile. “Go on and join the living, Matt Tinwright. Perhaps we will meet, as you say. Perhaps we shall.”
He bowed again and walked away. It took all his strength not to look back, or at least not to do so immediately. When he did, the bench where she had sat was empty.
Duchess Merolanna hesitated at the bottom of the tower steps as the door creaked shut behind them. “Oh, I’m a fool.”
The creak ended in a low, shuddering thump as the door swung closed. The breeze set the torches fluttering
