Chapter Text
Dana - Sister Darercra, Nárbflaith, whatever one might want to call her - chased him to an inn, and there they sat, on opposite sides of a long table, each breaking their fast. He couldn’t help summoning up a line of poetry: No weary mind may stand against wyrd. Fate or God’s providence, whatever it might be (and given the choice, he’d prefer the former), Dana’s presence had moved from a surprise to an inevitability. She was there this morning because she must be there, because the force causing the world to turn from night to day demanded it.
How long her company would last, he couldn’t say. Not long, was his guess. If Dana was no one’s image of a maiden, she was still reasonably young and not at all ugly - and her cleverness made her an entertaining companion. All those days at the abbey, she’d been pleasant to talk with, with a keen eye for observation. Marriage would surely be in her future, in his (matrimonially inexperienced, in all fairness) opinion.
And after her help with Sister Modwenna’s fits, he thought, he owed her the duty of his protection on the road. Traveling alone would be dangerous for her; a week or two spent taking her to her next life would be a worthwhile act.
“Dana,” he began, after swallowing a mouthful of pottage, but she interrupted. Gone from her convent only a day, and one would think she’d never set foot inside.
“Are you going to keep calling me that?” In English, at the moment, with an even cadence that suggested she hadn’t yet decided whether to be annoyed.
“Do you prefer Nárbflaith?” Two syllables, so easy and soft-sounding when they came from her mouth. His attempt to mimic her pronunciation lacked something - the shape of the R, he thought. He couldn’t get that sound quite right.
A smile crossed her face, bringing a new lightness to her features. Dana was pretty when she allowed herself to be unburdened of solemnity. Her pale, freckled face was fine enough when it wore a serious look, but this was better. “Not when it’s said that way.”
“In that case, Dana, ” with just a little emphasis, the sound of it the answer to her question, “I have business south of here - and eventually, across the sea. But I’d like to take you home before I go.”
The smile disappeared entirely, replaced with the face she wore when she was playing the part of the silent bride of Christ. This was the face of a woman who distrusted the idea of someone else knowing her thoughts. “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You don’t want to return to your family?” As though he could cast aspersions. The last time he’d visited the de Burghs was two years past. Two more years could go by before he saw his family’s lands again, and he wouldn’t feel much sorrow about it.
But for a woman set loose from the Church’s bounds, the rules were different. If not to her family, where could Dana go? Simply by traveling alone, she’d be endangered. He could leave her at a crossroads and spend the rest of his life wondering if he’d damned her to the road to perdition.
“I do,” she answered, after a pause that suggested to him that she was choosing each word with care. “But I’m not sure they’ll be happy to see me return.”
“Why not?” At worst, she’d be an extra set of hands around the house, a hard enough worker to offset whatever she might cost in food. And she might easily move on again, to whatever husband might have her.
Dana picked at her food, apparently unwilling to commit to an answer. Finally, sighing, she answered in Latin. (Did she worry about the possibility of eavesdroppers? Or was God’s language somehow more comfortable for such a discussion?) “I have never been the daughter - or sister - that my family wanted. The abbey was the only place I could be a credit to my family while doing things that mattered to me.”
He thought of the rumors circling her person, of her interests in anatomy and the healing arts. Dana had the analytical eye of Hippocrates and a head ready for new thoughts to fill it; he’d met his share of true physicians who lacked the judgment that seemed to come naturally to her. It still seemed to him that a man would be fortunate to wed her; she’d raise her children to live in good health and teach them all she knew. By the time her sons were old enough to be sent off to the nearest cathedral school, they’d have twice the wit of any of their peers.
But she had been driven to study the body, so determined that she had done so under the cover of secrecy. So desperate to know the truths of man’s corpse that she had been forced to leave her home. The life he’d imagine for her would leave few such opportunities to learn.
“Let me take you to them.” He didn’t know what else to say. If his own family were whole, he might never leave; his sister would no doubt be married by now, if she still lived, and if only he knew where she was, he would be a nuisance to her day and night. He’d give anything to see her grown and know her. Dana’s family might feel the same. “If you choose not to say, I’ll take you wherever you’d like to go.”
She studied him with pale, serious eyes - and suddenly, he saw the nun again in her, the contemplative creature who first greeted him at the abbey. Somewhere he couldn’t reach, she weighed his promise against the likelihood of his keeping it. There was nothing to do but hope he’d meet her measure.
🙧
A week later, he came to learn that Dana inherited her small frame and searching eyes from her mother; he felt like a giant, being introduced to her. Mór was her name, and she looked a little like her daughter - who her daughter might have been, at least, if she had never been consecrated to the Church. Where Dana’s face was clear and white, with only pale freckles like stars dusting her cheeks, her mother’s skin had the rougher look of a woman who worked hard for her living. Other people would call it ruddy, though he saw it as a slight darkening of the skin rather than a particular change in color. Her hands had a hardness to them, something beyond Dana’s garden-made calluses. But the shape of her face was familiar, and the way she swept her daughter into an embrace made them feel - to him, at least - like family. He watched them, an intruder on the threshold, and wondered if his mother would weep to see him return.
“Wilhelm Mulder,” he said, when eventually, Mór’s attention turned from her daughter to her daughter’s traveling companion. Suspicion marked her teary gaze - and Dana’s as well, for that matter. No time to consider it now, in her mother’s presence; he’d have to find out why later. “I had the honor of escorting your daughter from the abbey.”
“You’d better come in.” Mór’s English was heavily accented but understandable, and certainly better than anything he’d manage in Irish. “There will be time to talk this evening.”
She said something else then, but it was to Dana, and it was Irish. All he managed to catch was her name, Nárbflaith. With a nod, Dana hurried along inside, and just for a moment, he and Mór stood alone at the entrance to her home. She looked up at him, raising her brows in a way that clearly meant <i>go on, follow</i>. And so he did.
Inside, the kitchen was dark and warm; he knew as he entered that he’d be sweating and stinking of peat by the time the day ended. He came toward Dana’s side, hoping to ask her what her mother said - but another woman beat him to the punch. This one was taller than either Dana or her mother, thin-cheeked but cheerful. A sister, he thought, or a cousin, but certainly someone close to her. “Nárbflaith!”
And then there were more hugs, both from the woman and the handful of children who were drawn to the room by the commotion. He kept himself back from the excitement, aware that his presence in this reunion was happenstance, a chance to observe without participating. His observations remained limited to names, however: Dana’s, her mother’s, and each of the children when pointed at. Sadb. Aífe. Fiachra. Áed. Two girls and two boys, all with the same light-but-not-too-light hair and eyes. He listened and committed the names to memory, murmuring their syllables under his breath and hearing his tongue’s failure to master them.
At some point, everyone remembered the stranger in their midst, despite his best attempts to become a part of the scenery. Dana took pity on him and switched to English. “This is -” and she paused, her gaze momentarily sharper - “Wilhelm Mulder.”
Introductions began again, and he learned that the slender woman was Dana’s older sister, also named Mór but apparently called Milbéla, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear. (Later, Dana told him it meant “honey-mouthed,” as though that was explanation enough. Two of the children belonged to her, and two to a brother, Tuathal, who was at sea with their father, also Tuathal. Red Tuathal, they explained, and White Tuathal, to distinguish them - but he could already feel that the distinction would never matter for him.
After all, Dana would stay here, in this warm house that brimmed with casual affection, and he’d leave. Having met all these people, and been told of yet more - Cáirthenn, a brother who lived far from Dublin, and Tuathal’s wife, who lived down the lane and would join them soon - he couldn’t imagine her going away. That she did once was already a marvel to him.
The chatter turned back to Irish, and Dana took the opportunity to gesture to him. “Come,” she said in English, her skirts rustling as she walked over to a cupboard and pulled a length of cloth from a shelf. Nothing, evidently, had changed in the home since she went to the abbey. “Help me string this up.”
🙧
They went outside, leaving the smoky heat of the kitchen for a gray morning. As the tallest person present, he was uniquely capable when it came to hanging up banners; this one, a wind-worn piece of brown cloth, would tell the neighborhood that beer was available for purchase. Dana’s nieces and nephews crowded into the doorway to watch, apparently delighted to see a well-dressed stranger doing the household chores. No doubt they were unused to tall men coming around with hitherto unseen aunts.
“Why did you lie to my mother?” Dana asked, watching him stretch up on his toes. She’s moved back to Latin, and this time, he knew it was an attempt to keep from being overheard; he doubted anyone in the neighborhood knew more of the language than an Ave Maria and some Pater-Nostering.
“I didn’t.”
“You told her your name was Wilhelm Mulder.”
“I did.”
“Then you either lied to her, or you lied to the abbess.” Dana crossed her arms. “You told her your name was William de Burgh.”
“I have a few names,” he answered, pulling a knot tight. “So do you, Sister Darecra.”
“I’m not using that one anymore."
He paused, the flag half-tied and flapping idly in the breeze, to study her. Her displeasure was obvious, but its source was more obscure; was she disappointed in the lie or the surprise of hearing it?
“Ask me again tonight,” he said, aware that it could be a difficult request for her to accept. “I’ll find an inn to sleep in. If you sup with me, I’ll answer every question you have.”
“No.” Her voice dropped, eyes moving toward an approaching neighbor, who apparently saw their flag. He looked nothing like a Latin scholar - a sign on the building he came from was painted with a picture of a shoe and hammer - but she whispered all the same. “I will be with my family. You plan to leave me with them; you can at least accept my mother’s hospitality for the night. She’d take anything else as an insult.”
🙧
As he’d expected, his tunic ended up drenched in sweat. The day passed quickly, at least, as he carried heavy barrels wherever he was bid and learned to measure out the beer to the elder Mór’s specifications. He was kept far from the actual payments, an understandable, if nettling, instinct. Even with Dana there to vouch for his good character, he was an unknown, perhaps untrustworthy, quantity - and judging from the amount of beer that changed hands over the course of the day, he suspected it was the source of most of the family’s income. Tuathals Red and White might return from the cold sea, or their ships might be dashed to splinters. The rest of the family still needed to eat.
And eat they did, crowded around a table where Fiachra’s bony little elbow landed accidental jabs into his ribs. Directions came in English, <i>sit here, try this</i>, but the conversation slid back to impenetrable Irish once he’d been served. He didn’t mind, particularly not with roasted turnip and an oatcake slathered with butter before him. They’d even given him a little bacon, just a bite’s worth, and he wondered - with a little guilt - if it was brought out of the larder on his account. If the children’s excitement could be trusted, the meat’s presence was a surprising treat.
He sat quickly and ate slowly, and across the table, Dana did the same; she was a placid, smiling rock with conversation flowing all around her, once more silent Sister Darecra. Whatever she observed remained locked in her head, while Milbéla told a story and Aífe - or was that Sadb? - asked question after question.
At one point, when they’d all tucked away most of their food, the conversation shifted back to English, Milbéla’s question rising above the general sounds of supper. “Sadb would like to know who you are, Mulder.”
So Sadb was the little inquisitor. The girl, who could be six or seven by the look of her, was satisfied at hearing her question asked; he suspected she understood more English than she spoke.
Unfortunately, her chosen inquiry wasn’t an easy one to answer. Mulder licked a stray bit of turnip off one finger. “When something strange happens, I find out why. Something strange happened at…”
“Nárbflaith,” cued Dana, and at the sound of his attempt, the children burst into laughter.
“I know, I know. You should hear me ask for directions.” When he caught Sadb’s eye, giving her an easy smile, she giggled and burrowed her chin down against her chest. “Something strange happened at your aunt’s abbey, and she helped me understand what was happening.”
“And then you brought her back to us.” Mór’s hand landed on Dana’s shoulder. Somehow, it gave her smile a pained edge - or it seemed to, at least, in the firelight. “We’ll keep her this time - and for that, we are in your debt, sir.”
🙧
At nightfall, only Dana and Mór were left in the house, and he made the offer of going as well - but as Dana predicted, Mór heard the request as a dismissal of her hospitality. He smoothed things over as best he could, skipping his suggestion of sleeping outside in favor of suggesting a bed by the hearth. Mór didn’t seem to like the idea, but the alternative was taking the second bed, and he’d rather Dana had it. After that strange, tense smile she wore at dinner, she could stand to have some space to herself; he couldn’t make her curl up beside her mother just to give him a mattress to himself.
His generosity did nothing to spare Dana a tense evening, however. Lying there in the kitchen, beside the banked fire, he could hear a conversation happening in Irish in the house’s other room. Whatever they spoke of, it was quiet and featured enough overlapping discussion that he had to conclude it was an argument: interrupting each other, correcting and making new statements that required further disagreement.
When he thought he heard Mulder come through, he got up, pulled his borrowed blanket around his shoulders, and went outside. They didn’t want him to understand their discussion, and he didn’t want to hear it at all. Away from the still-warm coals, the night was refreshingly cool, even if the breeze carried the riper odors of city life. Inevitable, he thought, with so many people living near each other, and nowhere near as bad as London, where two or three times as many people produced two or three times as much waste.
He’d rather be out here, he told himself, since sleep was - as always - elusive. Better to break off a twig from one of the trees and sit down on an empty beer barrel, pick his teeth and be alone with the sleeping chickens.
His thoughts turned idle as he counted stars above him: the usual wondering of who else in the world might be looking up at that moment, whether the sky cast starlight down on Sibilla, too. He found himself trying to imagine the woman based on the girl he’d known, so lost in the image that he didn’t notice Dana until she sat down beside him. On another empty barrel, she was near enough to touch, but he didn’t try.
Her silence left him to start their conversation - in Latin, in deference to her. “The moon is full tonight.”
“I noticed.” If she’d looked at the sky since she came outside, though, he hadn’t seen it; just then, her eyes were on her hands. Not for the first time, he wondered what else she’d noticed that day, where attention was pulled. The secret workings of her mind were tantalizing to think about, more intriguing than those of any other woman he’d met.
“Have you decided,” he asked, since allowing her to guide the conversation led only to silence, “to stay with your family?”
Dana looked up at him then, and the full moon must have been ashamed to be seen in the same company as her face. Her skin took in the moonlight and gave it back in a form twice as beautiful. “I think you’d like me to say yes.”
“I’d like you to be safe.”
“I know you would. Mulder…de Burgh. Whatever it is you want to be called.” Quiet frustration seeped into her words; he wasn’t sure if his name was actually its target, or if she simply found everything frustrating at that moment. “If I stay here, every day will be exactly like this one.”
He frowned, thinking of the kitchen full of chattering women, of sisters within reach and children to dote upon. There was sweat and toil, of course, but there was love as well. The entire day had been novel to him, a world he’d never stepped into before. “Today was a good day.”
“If you want to spend your entire life making beer.” The steadiness of her eyes, made dark by the night, struck him then. “Would you? After everywhere you’ve traveled and all the miracles you say you’ve seen, would you stay in one place? Do you want to dedicate your life to barley and dredge?”
He knows the answer should be yes , a lie meant to comfort her and - perhaps more importantly - convince her to stay in her mother’s home and allow herself to be wooed by the nearest widower. He despised lying, though, and more than that, he knew she would hear it as a lie. If the pleasance of home and hearth were enough for him, he would never have left England, and she knew it. He couldn’t leave her here, thinking of him a liar. “No.”
“No,” she agrees. The moonlight shone wetly in her eyes as she opened her mouth again, then closed it. Something in her wavered, hesitant to share - but eventually, after rallying herself, determined to speak. “Before I took my vows, I tried to want this. I - I know I should -”
“But you don’t.”
“No.” Dana sniffled, turning her face up toward the sky - the better, he thought, to keep any wayward tears from spilling over her cheeks. “I don’t.”
“Midwifery,” he suggested after a moment’s thought. It was a wonder she didn’t come to the same conclusion years ago. “You already know the workings of the body.”
“I’d be a midwife before I was a beggar - but I want to do more than deliver babies and cure colds.” Her hands closed into fists, the fabric of her overskirt wrinkling where they clutched it. “It should be enough, I know it should. Milbéla’s oldest would have died, if not for her midwife. But the things I want to learn are…they’re larger than that. You were given all of Oxford to study; I doubt you’d trade it for one village priest’s teachings.”
She wasn’t wrong - but it was nearly beside the point, a woman at Oxford being an impossibility. He ran down every other solution he could think of instead of dwelling on what no one could make happen. Take her someplace else, where the depths of her curiosity were unknown, and bid her find a husband; his trade, whatever it might be, would become hers. She was too old to apprentice in skilled work, of course, but she could keep an inn or a bathhouse. She could be taken on by a baker, for she must have helped with breadmaking at the abbey - but that would still trap her in a hot kitchen for the rest of her life. She could take on washing, if she could stand the tedium and ruined hands.
Every single option would require her to stifle her true interests and accept a life of boring security. Besides establishing herself as a midwife, nothing she could do would take advantage of her shrewd intellect. Dana tended knowledge like a garden, growing ideas and ensuring established truths bore new fruit. How wasteful it would be to leave her cleverness a fallow field, never to be replanted.
The only idea he had left was that of a lunatic - but he’d been called worse in his travels. Before he could stop himself, he said, “Then come with me.”
Dana’s head turned toward him slowly, her gaze inscrutable. Say more , she seemed to demand, but she gave so little away that it was hard to say with certainty. Convince me.
“You’ve seen my work - you’ve helped me with it, with Sister Modwenna, and I think you could help me with others. You could travel with me as my assistant -” and the words came faster as he acclimated to the idea, imagining a future in which she figured prominently - “and I would consult with you on matters of body and spirit.”
It would still be a hard life, at least by his standards. It was a harder life than he would have had in his father’s home, or among the clergy he’d failed to join. But she would see the breadth of the world and all its people. After all, he slept at whatever inn or meadow pleased him, took only the work that proved most fascinating, and recorded everything he learned. Rinsing his own clothes and finding his own food was a small price to pay for the freedom to live outside of anyone else’s standards. It was the life he’d chosen - and Dana could, too.
“Most women would fear to travel with strange men,” she answered, as though the matter were entirely theoretical, and not a test of his honor. She continued to watch him, and her face was still unknowable. “Traveling companions can take advantage of them.”
“Most women haven’t already spent weeks in my company.” Having thought of the idea, having put it forward into the world, he couldn’t imagine any other future. Leaving her behind, in her mother’s house or somewhere else, turned into an unacceptable solution as soon as he realized he didn’t have to. Selfish it might be, but her dilemma created a twin inside his mind: After having a partner in his work, after being able to to call on the expertise of someone who understood parts of the world he didn’t, how could he go on alone? He’d benefit from her presence, just as she’d benefit from his.
But that benefit would - perhaps inevitably - depend on Dana, and on her willingness to travel with him. The freedom of sleeping under trees and bathing in rivers would lose all its charm if she didn’t trust him. And so he fixed her with an inscrutable gaze of his own and asked, “Are you afraid of me?”
Hearing a yes might have killed him - but Dana shook her head, and her smile was moonlight captured and reflected. If she’d ever looked so amused, it wasn’t in his presence. “Of course not. I wouldn’t have let you anywhere near Sister Modwenna if I was.”
That was that, he thought, smiling back. No matter what happened next, their fates were now entwined.
🙧
Fate, it turned out, still required a reckoning with Mór - and if he’d thought the last night’s argument unpleasant, the one that woke him in the morning was worse. Louder, equally incomprehensible, and featuring the name Mulder often enough to be unquestionably about their plans. He rose from the hearth as quietly as he could, slipping outside before he ended up in the middle of the furor.
The morning was cool and dewy, the chickens awake and pecking at the dirt in search of breakfast. He watched their bobbling steps in the dust and wondered if they had any idea that they’d all end up in stewpots one day. He couldn’t imagine they knew there’d be a tomorrow at all, let alone a morning when they’d cease to lay.
As the sun rose, the sounds of a city waking up overtook the disagreement happening in the house behind him - or perhaps his newfound interest in hen mortality distracted him enough that he didn’t hear it anymore. Eventually, Dana stuck her head out the back door, asking, “Do you have your things?” “They’re inside.” He looked over at her, studying her face. The stiff expression she’d worn so often at the abbey had returned. There were no wet tear-tracks on her cheeks, but her eyelashes were damp, as though she had swiped her face with a sleeve before she came out to fetch him. “But everything’s still packed away. I can get them, if you’d like.”
I can leave sat on his tongue, but Dana beat him to the punch. “Then we can go.”
The pronouncement wasn’t especially surprising, but something pinched in his chest all the same. “Do you want to say goodbye to your family?”
“I’ve said my goodbyes to my mother.” Dana swallowed, her gaze somewhere above and away from his head. Watching her past fly away like a bird, he thought. “We’ll pass Milbéla’s house when we leave, and Red Tuathal’s. We’ll say goodbye to everyone else on the way.”
🙧
They didn’t escape Dublin before midday. There were too many goodbyes to say, tearful embraces and conversations held outside his understanding. Milbéla had given him a knowing look and asked Dana something in Irish. Her response came in English, and he’d wondered for the rest of the day if it was for his benefit, or to keep her answer from Sadb and Áed. “No, no, it isn’t like that. I’m going to study.”
Before they’d left Milbéla’s home, her children waving to them and shouting farewell, Milbéla had hugged him tight. In his ear, quick and hushed, she’d whispered, “I kept Nárbflaith safe when she was a girl. Do the same, or you’ll regret it.”
He’d only had time to hiss back, “I will,” before she let him go. After that, a nearly identical scene had occurred at Red Tuathal’s house, though Dana’s sister-in-law had felt no need to hug him. They left the city traveling south, and he’d told her of his - or rather, their - next inquiry. A man alleged that he knew the true location of Tech Duinn, and local clergymen, wanting nothing so much as to deny such pagan fancies, needed someone to disprove it.
“You don’t care if it’s blasphemy, do you?” Dana asked, as they walked along the road. Her good humor returned sometime in the hour after Dublin’s noise had disappeared behind them. “You just want to know if it’s true.”
“Me, a blasphemer?” he asked, wide-eyed and trying not to smile. “I don’t know where you could have gotten that impression, Dana. I’m a pious layman of the Holy Roman Church.”
The conversation moved on, of course, as it always did, and he spoke more in that afternoon than he ever had on the road. Dana answered easily, asked questions without hesitation, and pushed back whenever she felt he was overly flippant. Her posture was still that of a well-trained nun, as was her careful Latin, but she didn’t hesitate to speak. As they approached an inn for the night, he told her about an incident he’d witnessed around a year ago, when a woman was driven mad and then brought back to sense by the presence of an alleged relic of the True Cross. And even the former Sister Darecra couldn’t help laughing when he admitted it was actually a splinter from a building he’d passed on the way to visit the woman.
Hunger eventually overtook their desire for conversation, and only when they’d tucked into their evening meal. The inn buzzed with activity, filled with travelers’ conversations, and no one appeared to be paying attention to their end of the long supper table. Swallowing a piece of cheese, he told her, “My father is called Mulder - my natural father. The man who raised me is named de Burgh.”
“You’re a bastard?” There was a certain delicacy to the way she asked, as if walking out onto untested ice.
“ And I’m illegitimate.” A joke was the right approach, if the way her shoulders relaxed was any indication; her hand moved to cover her mouth to hide a smile. “My father - de Burgh - he must know, but we’ve never talked about it. I don’t think we ever will. My mother was married to him at the time, and -” A shrug, as though to say these things happen . “There are places where a highborn name will get me the things I need, and there are places it won’t. Your mother seemed like someone who’d prefer Wilhelm Mulder to William de Burgh.”
By the time he’d finished explaining, that surprised, hidden smile had disappeared; Dana was studying him like she would a piece of torn flesh, looking for what needed mending and how. “What would you prefer I call you?”
“Whatever I’m using at the moment.” It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a fair request; the most consistent thing in his world was the inconsistency of his name. William or Wilhelm aloud, or even Guillaume among de Burgh’s more hidebound Norman compatriots. Willelmus de Burgo or Pistorius in writing. Once, just outside Norwich, he’d ended up Will Cockscomb because no one was willing to house him; he’d slept outside with the chickens. “But if you don’t want to guess, you can always call me Fox.”
“Fox.”
“Fox,” he agrees. Fox for slyness, Fox for guile. Occasionally Fox for sharp eyes and a handsome face, if the person saying it was interested in more than just the results of his investigations. He’d come to find it convenient, as sobriquets go - distinct to him and easily translated into Renard or Fuchs or Vos as needed. (Once, very far south on the continent, he’d been Zorro. The sound of it had been as impossible for him to replicate as Nárbflaith - again, a problem with the R sound - and his attempts were equally amusing to his hosts.)
Her gaze was level, and it was piercing, turned entirely on his person. Seeing her stare at him, weighing the merit of a silly nickname, he realized just what a different woman she’d pretended to be in Dublin. For her family, Dana was a demure maiden, a quiet woman of God who’d hardly looked up from her hands; she’d worked as hard as anyone, but she’d worked to keep her mother and sister from seeing that analytical eye of hers. The real Dana, he thought, might be this one, studying him fearlessly. He liked her much better than the one who kept her thoughts far from the open air.
If she was looking for something in him, she seemed to find it. With a nod, she picked a piece of cheese up from her trencher and broke off a little bite in her hands. “In that case, Fox, I want to know more about your blasphemer. Where are we going next?”
And since she’d settled the matter, he told her.