The peddler's boots were the first thing I noticed, and the last thing I told anyone.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
On Friday morning, Toby wore the green ribbon to breakfast.
He had tied it around his wrist himself, badly, and he held it out over the porridge so everyone could admire it. Elise said it was the finest ribbon in the kingdom. Noctavia said it was "adequately green." Toby told her that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about it.
I ate my porridge and said nothing, because every time I looked at the ribbon, I saw the man who had sold it.
He was friendly. That's the thing. Friendly the way a fisherman is friendly to a fish. I've met that kind before, in doorways and on roads, and they always have a pack too big for one person and a smile that arrives a moment too early. The peddler said lovely house and looked at the windows, not the walls. He said four, would you say? Five? in the tone you use when you already know the number and are checking whether someone will lie.
Elise lied. She did it so well that I almost admired her.
"We've got a lot of chickens."
I would have said the same thing. I've said worse. But Elise isn't a liar by nature, and I watched her do it for us, with a smile that cost her something, and I wanted to put my head down on the table.
"Clara," said Noctavia, from the stove. "You've stopped eating."
"I'm full."
"You've had four spoonfuls."
"I count my spoonfuls differently."
"Mm." She turned around, wiping her hands, and looked at me with that sideways look that I'm starting to recognize: the one she gives the tomato when it is doing something she doesn't understand. "Eat the rest. It's on the schedule."
"It's not on the schedule."
"It's an amendment."
I ate the rest.
Rest hour came, and I didn't rest.
I lay on my bed with my boots off, which is still strange, and listened to the house. Toby was downstairs teaching a hen the word ribbon. Elise was chopping something. Noctavia was in the garden, with the tomato, and the quiet murmur of her voice came up through the floorboards like a kettle just before it boils.
I thought about the left heel.
It was on the peddler's boot, the one on his left foot, worn down at the outside edge in a slow slant, the way a heel wears when a man favors one hip. I saw it when he swung his pack down at the gate. I saw it, and the world went quiet for about a second.
I'd seen that heel before.
Not on his boot. In the mud, on the morning of the footprints. Four sets pressed into the garden, one with the left heel worn flat. Noctavia crouched over them and said careful of everything, and I stood there in the doorway and didn't say anything, because I already knew they had been looking for us and not for her.
It could have been a coincidence. Heels wear down. Half the men in the kingdom walk crooked.
That's what I told myself, on the stairs, in the dark, listening to Noctavia read the list of names to a plant.
Pointing isn't the same as knowing, she'd said.
She was right. She was always right about the things that mattered, and that was the worst part. She'd built a guard that only knew who was new. It couldn't tell her what they wanted. It couldn't tell her how many. It couldn't tell her who was kind and who had walked a slow circle around her garden, counting.
But I could.
I looked at the ceiling for a long time.
Elise found me on the back step in the afternoon.
I didn't hear her come. That's another new thing: I used to hear everyone. She walked out of the kitchen with two cups and sat down beside me without a word, close enough that our shoulders almost touched, and held one cup out.
"It's not tea," she said. "It's warm milk with honey. Noctavia says it's for growing children. I told her you were fifteen. She said that's exactly when you need it most."
"I'm not a child."
"I know."
"I'm almost sixteen."
"I know." She smiled at her cup. "I'm twenty-three. She's three hundred. Nobody here is a real adult. We're all just pretending very hard."
I laughed, once, before I could stop it. It came out like a hiccup.
We drank for a while. The garden was quiet. In the middle of the vegetable patch, the little tomato leaned against its stake, bigger than last week, with a second flower on it. Dumpling's pot sat by the porch door, facing the road. The wind moved the grass. Somewhere down the lane, a cart rattled by and didn't stop.
"You don't have to tell me," said Elise.
I went rigid.
"Whatever it is." She didn't look at me. She looked at the garden. "I'm not asking. I just wanted you to know that I noticed the way you looked at the peddler, and that I'm not going to make you explain it. I think it's your story. I think you'll tell it when you want to."
"What if I never want to?"
"Then you don't."
"What if it's bad?"
"Then it's bad," she said, very gently, "and we'll be bad together."
My throat hurt. I held my cup very hard.
"That's a stupid thing to say."
"It's a pretty stupid kind of house," said Elise.
I wanted to tell her. I really did. I wanted to put it all out on the step between us: the road, the four of them, the ribbon man with his careful smile, and the thing I'd done, years ago, that made it all my fault. I opened my mouth.
And I thought of Noctavia reading names to a plant in the dark, one by one, so that nobody she loved would ever get bitten. I thought of the gold thread on my collar. I thought: if I say it, they'll have to choose.
They'd choose us. That was the terrible part. They'd choose us, and it would cost them everything, and they'd do it without being asked.
"Not yet," I said.
Elise nodded. She didn't look disappointed. She put her arm around my shoulders, quick and light, as if she wasn't sure I'd allow it, and left it there.
I allowed it.
Dinner was loud. It always is now.
Toby told the story of the dragon in the barrel again, with a new ending where the dragon got a ribbon. Elise burned the bread. Noctavia said she hadn't seen it burn, that it was a trick of the light, and when I took a bite and said it was fine, she looked at me with such naked, wary hope that I took a second bite just to see her ears turn pink.
After dinner, Toby fell asleep face-down on the table. I carried him upstairs. Elise and Noctavia stayed in the kitchen, and I stopped at the top of the stairs with Toby's sleepy weight on my shoulder, because I could hear them talking.
"He's a stranger," said Noctavia. "He stays a stranger."
"Yes."
"It's not the same as an enemy."
"No."
"But I'm not taking chances with you."
She said it so quietly that I almost didn't hear. There was a soft rustle, the sound of someone leaning against someone else's arm.
I put Toby in bed. I stood at the window.
I thought about telling Noctavia about the heel. I thought about it for a long time.
I thought: she'd go after him tonight. She wouldn't even stop for her coat. She'd go out in the dark with her tail puffed and her eyes gold, and she'd find him, and then there would be a war in a ditch, and every plan I'd ever made to keep her safe from this would be useless.
Or I thought: she wouldn't. She'd stand at the window, and she'd look at me with those wary old-coin eyes, and she'd say, I'll keep watch until you're ready, and I'd have to live with the fact that she meant it.
I don't know which is worse.
I went down to the porch at midnight.
I didn't plan to. My feet decided. I put on the gray coat and my boots (loosely, with the laces undone) and came down the stairs in the dark, through the sleeping kitchen, and out the front door as quietly as I could.
Dumpling was awake.
It didn't click. It turned its round green head toward me, slowly, with its jaws just slightly parted, and the violet light inside flickered like a candle. It was still facing the road. It had been facing the road all day.
"I know," I whispered.
It leaned its smooth top toward my hand.
I touched it. It was warm. It made the small, settled sound, click, the one it makes for people it knows, and something in my chest gave way.
"I know what he is," I told it, very low. "I don't know if he's alone. I don't know if they're coming tonight, or next week, or after the first snow. I don't know what to do." I swallowed. "I can't tell her. Not yet. I'm scared that if I say it, she'll look at me differently."
Dumpling said nothing. It's a plant. But it didn't pull away.
Behind me, the door creaked.
I didn't turn around. I knew the footsteps by now, the careful ones, the ones that sound like a person trying to be quiet and failing slightly.
Noctavia sat down on the step beside me, in her nightdress and her bare feet, with a blanket around her shoulders. She didn't say what are you doing. She didn't say go to bed. She only looked at the road, and at the plant, and then at me.
"It's cold," she said, and held out half the blanket.
I took it.
We sat there. The stars were out. The grass moved. After a very long time, she said, quietly:
"You don't have to tell me tonight."
"I know."
"You don't have to tell me this week."
"I know."
"I'm only going to ask one thing, and you may answer however you like." Her voice was steady, but her tail was curled so tightly around her own ankle that it trembled. "Is it still not yet?"
I looked at the dark road, and at the plant, and at the small, stubborn woman who had never once asked me for anything in return.
"It's... soon," I said.
I felt her go very still.
"Soon," she repeated.
"Soon. Not tonight. But soon."
She let out a long breath. She didn't smile, exactly. She just pulled the blanket a little higher over my shoulders, and her ears went the color of cherries in the starlight.
"...Good," said Noctavia.
I leaned against her shoulder, and she didn't move away, and we watched the road until my eyes closed.
In the morning, I woke up in my own bed with my boots at the foot of it, laces loose. I don't remember climbing the stairs.
There was a second blanket folded outside my door, next to the first one.
I picked them both up and carried them inside. I didn't say anything about it, and neither did she.