Sarita was sitting on the paddock fence. Cassie paused, taken aback. She had never seen the musician on this side of town. There was something in the way she sat, the preternatural stillness, that made Cassie think there was either too much going on in the other woman's head, or too little.
She had been spotted. One of the horses, used to receiving treats every time Cassie came out here, trotted for the fence to meet her.
She couldn't let the poor beast's hopes down. Trying to keep her footsteps as quiet as possible so as not to startle Sarita, she approached the roan mare who was impatiently waiting for her.
After some attention and carrots, the horse returned to her own business, leaving Cassie leaning against the fence while Sarita continued to stare at the trees beyond the paddock.
"They sing to each other, you know," Sarita said without preamble.
Cassie followed her gaze to two of the horses, who had passed each other with some unceremonious whickering. She had never heard a horse make any sound resembling song, but she hardly had the ear for it.
"Does it give you ideas for your music?" she asked, not wanting to pry—but then, Sarita was the one who had spoken first. "Or do you come here to clear your head?"
Sarita answered neither question. "Did you have a clear head before you came here?" she asked Cassie without looking at her. "Or has it only gotten more muddled?"
"Do you mean here as in the paddock, or here as in Telyre?"
"I thought it would be quieter," she said, as though tasting the gentle breeze.
It sounded as though she had been disappointed. Cassie could empathize. She had thought life would be so much simpler, so much easier, once she ran away from home. Instead, it had only gotten more dangerous, and more complicated, with time. If she returned home, would it be just as difficult?
"I never thanked you for helping sing the farewell for that soldier," Cassie said instead. She braced her arms and stared at the treetops. "Your voice is...a great blessing." She tried, so hard she tried, to muzzle the envy. "I am glad he had that to give him peace." Everyone, even an enemy soldier, deserved a piece of that beauty on their passing from this life.
"I keep hearing whispers about you," Sarita said, not acknowledging Cassie's clumsy gratitude. "They say you're cursed."
Cassie stared straight ahead without flinching, although her jaw clenched. "They're right." She was cursed. Everyone who knew her came to ruin. She had brought darkness to Telyre, sure as she had brought it to the Gemmaros.
"Your name does not sound cursed," Sarita said, at last drawing Cassie's gaze as she sounded it out. "Ca-ssie. It sounds...green."
"Green," Cassie repeated. "Like the color?" How could a name sound like anything other than a name?
"Green. The color of new beginnings. Vitality." Sarita gazed at the small leaves spring had brought to the tree branches as she spoke without inflection. "Envy."
Envy—it was not the association Cassie would have chosen. Never mind that she at times felt consumed by it.
"The farewell is blue." Perhaps Sarita spent so much time lost in her head that she had forgotten the way back out of it. "Like the last shade of dusk."
"You hear...colors?"
"Sometimes I can combine them. And then it's..." Sarita inhaled deeply, as though tasting something secret, something revered. "My father thought I was cursed," she said, not completing her last thought before jumping to the next. "But it does not feel a curse, to see and hear the world different from others. It feels like..." She blinked slowly, pulling her thoughts together. "Like bread dough."
Cassie tilted her head curiously, not following.
"It rests, but it rises, it...changes. It can be something else, hidden away but...but forming."
Bread became itself, but it did not always do it in the way the baker might have expected. It could get too many air holes, or too few, and you could end up pulling out a loaf that looked very different from what you had baked last time. "Like possibility."
Sarita nodded. "Precisely."
What a challenge, to move through this world and experience it separately. It perhaps accounted for some of Sarita's oddness.
A villager rounded the stable and raised a hand in greeting. Cassie waved back. As he got closer she recognized Victor, whom she had met through one of Aldine's useless errands but had little reason to speak to since that first meeting.
"James not out here, then?" Victor asked when he was within earshot. Cassie shook her head. She had not seen him that day. "Shame," Victor said with a disappointed frown. "He's got another letter, and these days he's in such a rush to read them." He ran a hand through his thinning hair, the grey nearly indistinguishable from the pale yellow strands.
"I could help you look?" Cassie offered. Sarita had made no signal one way or the other if she would rather have her company or rather be alone. But as Cassie was the one who had trespassed on her contemplation, Cassie would restore it.
"I'd appreciate it," Victor said with obvious relief.
His back was beginning to stoop, which left his height nearly even with Cassie's. It also made it easier for him to fill her ear with a continuous stream of information about his latest struggles with his bad back. At first she tried to commiserate, making sympathetic noises, but as he talked over even that, Cassie fell silent and tuned him out. It made it easier for her to focus on looking for James.
If he wasn't at home, the next place to look would be the town center.
"By the second day I couldn't even lift my legs..."
"Seen James anywhere?" she asked the cheesemaker.
He pointed in the direction of the nut groves. "I think he and a few others went that way."
"Eleanor is always using me for these little experiments; if we had enough to pay a healer out here it would be different, but..."
"Thanks!" Cassie lifted a hand in farewell to the cheesemaker and headed for the nut groves, Victor trailing behind, words still pouring out.
"You ever been so bored you're stuck watching flowers wilt? I thought there was nothing..."
Slowly, a faintly raucous noise began to interrupt Victor's riveting explanation of what he did while he waited for his back to recover. It was not unusual to hear singing in Telyre, but it was not often followed by cheers.
Cassie veered off course to investigate. It was just a few streets off from the groves; Victor wouldn't mind if they took a detour.
It sounded like a group of men singing, and every time a verse ended there went up a cheer. But the tune...it was a song of welcome, Cassie had heard it a few times. She had never heard it in quite that tempo, like an energetic, whirling dance.
She was not surprised to find James present in the group, along with several of his friends. Cassie and Victor found them as they finished another verse.
"Another! Another!" George was already shouting, as they clapped loudly for themselves. "I'm leading, and Robert, you take it another octave higher!"
Robert bent over, his loud groan belying the grin that stretched from ear to ear.
Another one of the men booed the suggestion. "He's already cracking like a boy getting his first hairs!"
"Ah, he can do it!" George was undeterred. "Ready!"
Without waiting for the rest to draw breath, George launched into the next verse, stomping a foot to keep time. The rest followed after, a few vocal missteps getting the perpetrators good-naturedly jostled. Cassie had never heard this song, normally sung by one or two family members, with so many different harmonies. James, one foot propped against the outside of the carpenter's house, seemed to be leading the baritone section, with Robert giving his all to a hair-raising falsetto.
George drew the last note out, then dropped it with a curse, laughing. "You sods can't get it together on that intro!"
Several of the men were cheering for the harmonizing they had achieved, while others were already calling for what was next. She could not hear James with so many other loud voices in the way, but he appeared to be alternatively congratulating and razzing the ones who had been singing with him.
"Cassie!" George called, spotting her. "What should we sing next?"
Cassie froze. She had intended to slide around the edge of the group until she reached James, but this many eyes on her...she was unprepared to handle it. How was she supposed to answer that kind of question? She was terrible with song suggestions on the best day, and with this much rambunctious energy focused on her...her mind wiped blank. Had she ever heard a song before? She could not name a single one.
As she foundered helplessly, James pushed away from his wall and came for her. "You could try a serenade, but you lot are more likely to chase a woman away like that!"
A few of the men jeered back, and one of them began singing a new song. This time it was a normally rousing drinking song, but as more and more voices joined in somberly, it most closely resembled a dirge.
"How did this start?" Cassie asked James as he reached her.
He grinned, a touch of ruefulness in the smile. "A few of us were talking, then Robert and Don started trading tunes, and..." His shrug said it had gotten away from them, but that he was enjoying himself immensely. "Grew from there."
"It's impressive." There had been few bad notes in the entire group, large as it was.
"We're enjoying ourselves," James said. "All well?"
With a start, Cassie remembered Victor. "Yes, there's another letter for you."
"You should make all the deliveries," James told her with a smile as he took a creased, sealed paper from Victor. "In case you're interested in a new job—"
He let off teasing her to break the letter open and read it, Victor slouching off in search of a new audience for his litany of woes as James' eyes flicked back and forth rapidly.
Should she leave him to read in private? Or to get back to singing? She felt she was trespassing, regardless of which activity he wanted to focus on.
He finished before she could decide. "I should answer this," he said, folding it back up. "Walk with me?"
Cassie, who had been expecting to make some excuse so he did not have to ask her to leave him alone, blinked. "Oh...all right."
Turning back to the drinking dirge still going on, James bid farewell to George with a clasped hand and a clap on the back. George returned it without ever breaking tempo.
"You'll send Elliot over?"
George nodded in answer, and James left with a wave and a final round of applause for the entire group. As though in answer, their voices swelled as James and Cassie left, the tune following them around the corner and for farther than Cassie would have thought possible.
"They are very...dedicated," Cassie said, casting about for something to say.
James smiled. "We're having fun."
"You need Elliot for something?" George's teenage son had no set job yet, but frequently would pitch in if someone needed help.
James pocketed his letter. "I'm going to be training him to take over for me."
"What? Why?"
"I...I'll be leaving soon."
Again? The only times James ever left Telyre were mid-disaster. "Where are you going? Is something wrong?" Cassie tried to ignore the pang in her heart.
"Nothing like that," he assured her, nodding in greeting to people as they passed through the town center. "But...it's getting to be time I returned home. My family is—they need me."
From what James had told her, it would not be that simple, returning home. "Is that what all the letters back and forth have been about?"
"In a manner of speaking." James squinted against the sunlight. "You ever think about it? Going home?"
"Telyre is my home." There was nothing left for her in that cold stone prison she had come from.
"And it's been mine, too. A happy one." He shot her a smile as bright as the setting sun. "Still, there comes a time when we can't keep running."
"I'm not running." Cassie was done running, was done trying to escape her curse. It had done its worst. Leora was gone, her sister was gone, and what good would it do for her to go somewhere else, dragging that curse behind her as she went?
"I have been," he said bluntly. "For longer than I'd care to admit. And you ran...and we found each other here."
Found each other? They were skirting close to that line, the one they had not approached since the morning before Leora's death. The one that made Cassie's breath shorten and his eyes gleam.
"And now you're leaving." What good would it do for them to have that conversation, when he was going to leave her for good?
"I think we both should. There are responsibilities we've both been neglecting."
Cassie could not hold back her bitter chuckle. What responsibilities did she have? "I can assure you, they have no need or desire for me to return."
"Don't say that," James said, genuine concern in his eyes. "You still have your family, and your duty to—"
Bitterness rising in her in waves, Cassie whirled on him. "What family?" she demanded. "My mother gone, my father hates me—and after what happened to Elisabet, he should—"
"It wasn't your fault, Cassie."
"No, but it was." Why couldn't he see that? Cassie saw it all too clearly, every minute of every day. "She came looking for me. Just like Leora came looking for me, and just like Longheirce comes looking for me, and keeps coming for me—" Overwrought, tears threatening, Cassie broke off.
"All the more reason to get out of his reach," James said. He pulled her into a hug, offering her a comfort in the safety of his arms. "Even here, there are ways for him to get at you. But if you went home, got beyond his power..." He spoke into her hair as his scent, sunlight and the stables, soothed her. "You'd be safe, as would those around you."
"It wouldn't do any good," she said, her voice muffled by his shirt. "He won't ever give up, and he said he would find some way—" Longheirce had sounded like he was looking forward to the challenge of finding a new way to destroy her life, even if he owed her his own. The bandit had found her too many times; he would find a new way to strike, too.
"I'll keep you safe," James said, the words a vow as he pulled away just enough to look into her eyes. "Trust me in that?"
Cassie longed to ask how—if he was returning to his home, how did he plan on keeping her safe?—but there was no room for doubt. At long last, Cassie understood what Skylar had said about James, that he could convince a dragon to do his bidding. It was in the way he looked at her, as though he believed what he said, with his whole heart. It made her want to believe it, too. Believe in him.
"And who's going to keep you safe?" she asked instead. "From—?" She gestured at herself. When the curse came calling, who would save James?
He smiled briefly, a flash of light in the cooling day. "That's what I need you for. Who else is going to protect me from your curse?"
And she would, if it came down to it—stand between him and whatever darkness came next. Stand beside him, ready to face it together.
Or let him go, so the curse never came for him. It would be best, for them both.
And so Cassie made herself move back, out of his arms. Made herself let go of him.
"Don't leave Telyre without saying goodbye," she ordered him.
"Of course." He looked ready to reach for her again.
Cassie took another step back, then another. Until he nodded, seeming to understand, and went home.
It was for the best. He was unlikely to survive any closer association with her, and she could survive no more loss.