“I know, and I’m sorry. Please understand that’s not my way. I just wanted to let you know that. And these are for you.”
He stopped and thrust the flowers in her face.
She remembered that they looked much fuller and fresher when she first saw him. Their collision and his jog after her had decimated their blooms.
He blinked at them, perplexed.
“Presenting flowers to a woman when you meet her—that is a very proper thing to do.” She smiled at the haggard stems. “You’re learning. Next time you’ll remember to keep the flowers wrapped in the scrap paper the sellers put them in, so that they don’t lose their petals as you go.”
“But the flowers were wrapped in an old Administrative notice,” he said, his voice curiously hardening.
“Yes,” Mahrree acknowledged, wondering if he was offended by the notice’s second life. “We use them for flowers, for kindling, and even for emergencies in washing rooms when the wiping cloth hasn’t been cleaned.” Even as she said the words, she wondered why she bothered to add that last unpleasant detail.
But the captain wasn’t offended. His face relaxed to a smile.
“This village just becomes more interesting every day. Everything here astonishes me. No wonder I can’t get anything right.”
Mahrree laughed, surprising herself. “You like flat bread, Captain Shin. That must mean something!”
Politeness. She should always be polite. That’s what her mother drilled into her head when Mahrree was younger and said all kinds of things Hycymum didn’t approve of to scare off young men. The young men that stopped trying to present her flowers many years ago.
Then she thought of what her father would do at a moment like this.
Before she knew it she heard herself saying, “Would you like to join me in eating my flattened bread? My home isn’t too far from here. And I won’t be serving blob. I had to bury it this morning in the back garden. It was becoming . . . a little more than I could handle.”
It was the only way she could think of describing the stench and the fact that it was beginning to eat away the kiln-fired platter at an alarming rate.
“Didn’t look like your brother,” she added impulsively. “Wasn’t attractive at all.” She was wincing before she even finished the sentence, realizing she should have stopped talking half a minute ago.
“Really?” He smiled. “I’m sorry. About the blob, that is, and . . . I’m afraid I already have an appointment elsewhere tonight.” He held up the jug as an explanation.
Relief and disappointment simultaneously surged through Mahrree.
“Besides,” he continued, “Edge would have a great deal to talk about if I was seen going to your home, wouldn’t they?”
“Oh, oh, of course, Captain!” Mahrree blustered in embarrassment. “Until tomorrow, then. And I thank you for the flowers.”
“I am sorry,” he repeated. He gripped her shoulder clumsily and stared deep into her eyes. “But can I make it up to you some time?”
Mahrree waxed eloquent again in his dark brown gaze. “Uhhh, sometime I am available should be fine, when we, uh you, can make it.”
He squinted as he deciphered what she tried to say. “Then ‘sometime’ it is. And please, call me Perrin.” Then he was gone back down the road.
Father would like him, but Mahrree didn’t know why.
She turned back around and tried to diagram her last sentence all the way home. Once she got there, she put the haggard stems in a tall mug and tenderly watered them, smiling at the handful of wilting petals.
Her first flowers, ever.
---
At the fort that evening, the new spyglass that arrived was being tested. It wasn’t sighted on the forest where the Guarders may be hiding and planning their attacks, but on a small house on the northern side of Edge.
---
It was going to be easy—the return of the Guarders—if this young woman was any indication. The man in black had been watching her ever since the first debate, and she didn’t notice anything beyond her books. Except for maybe the captain.
He’d already searched her house—no one in Edge seemed to know how to work their locks—and found she wasn’t hiding anything interesting. Oh sure, she had slips of gold and silver in her cellar, predictably stored under a bag of flour and a crock of oats. Everyone in the world thought their savings were secure in their cellars. They’d be shoving the hammered metals under their straw mattresses next. Every Guarder knew where to find the goods.
But thieving wasn’t the point. If it were, they could leave every village destitute within a couple of quiet evenings.