Forest Mage (The Soldier Son Trilogy #2)

Forest Mage (The Soldier Son Trilogy #2) Page 127

We ate in silence. I gave my complete attention to my meal, only pausing to add the coffee to the water when it boiled and then set the pot where it would stay hot while it steeped. The smell of the brewing coffee enhanced my appreciation for the meat.

She’d cooked the liver perfectly. It was moist and tender still; I could cut it with the side of my fork. She hadn’t used much onion, but what she’d used was evident in tender translucent pieces of the vegetable and its affable flavor throughout the goose grease. The meat was the most alive thing I’d eaten in a long time. I can think of no other way to express it. Liver is always rich and flavorful, but that evening I was suddenly aware that I had transferred life from the deer’s body to my own. There was something so essential in that meat; I had no name for it, and yet I felt it replenishing me as I chewed and swallowed. The taste was so thick and strong, the goose grease so satisfying that when I scraped the last sheen of it from my plate, I felt more satisfied than I had in days. I looked up to find Hitch staring at me.

As I returned his stare, he grinned honestly at me. “Can’t say that I’ve ever seen a man enjoy his meal as much as you do. That coffee done yet?”

He had wolfed down his portion of the meat. I doubt that he’d even tasted it, and somehow that seemed a shame, that he did not realize as I did that the life I’d taken from the deer had passed into us with this meal. It diminished what I’d done in taking the deer’s life. I felt oddly disgruntled, as if his gobbling of the meat were disrespectful of something. But I said nothing of that, only poured coffee for both of us. He gulped his down and had a second mug-full. I drank mine in long, lingering sips, and then put more water onto the grounds to try to get a second brew out of them. While it simmered, I took Amzil’s pan outside, cleaned it, and then returned it to her. When I tapped on her door, she opened it a crack. She took the pan from me with a quiet “thank you.” She didn’t invite me in and I didn’t try to intrude.

When I returned to Hitch, he was pouring some of the re-brewed coffee into his mug. He hunched near the fire on his blanket, looking miserable but alive. “Well, that was quick,” he said.

“I was just returning her pan.”

He smiled knowingly. “She’s a difficult one, isn’t she? Sometimes she will, sometimes she won’t.”

Dismay mingled with anger and churned in me. I tried to keep anything from showing on my face. “Meaning?” I asked him.

He shifted slightly, his brow furrowing deeper. Obviously the move hadn’t eased his pain. He rubbed at his face. “Meaning only that, for a whore, she’s an odd one. Sometimes a man can buy a night inside and a bit of comfort from her. Other times, she’s either boarded the door up tight or there’s no one there. She’s moody. But good when you can get her, is what I heard.”

“Then you’ve never had her?”

A small smile crooked his mouth. “Old son, I never pay for it. Not Buel. I don’t have to.” He drank the last of the coffee in his mug and tossed the dregs into the fire. He grinned. “Guess that means you ain’t had much luck with her.”

“I didn’t try,” I said. “Didn’t think she was that sort of a woman, with three children around her and all.”

He gave a choked laugh. “What? You think whores don’t have kids? Well, I suppose they don’t, if they can help it, but most can’t. That woman there, she’s been there, oh, a year I guess. Used to have a husband, but he’s gone now. Probably up and left. But it’s known a man can buy her. Not for coin; she’s got no use for that. No, she only barters it for food, and only when she’s in the mood for it.”

I could not begin to sort the emotions running through me. I felt stupid and used; Amzil was only a whore, and even though I’d paid her fee in food, day after day, she’d never allowed me to so much as touch her hand. That wasn’t a fair judgment and I knew it. She’d as much as told me that she’d sold herself for food when she’d had to. Doing what she must to feed her children; did that make her a whore? I didn’t know. I only knew that hearing another man talk of it so bluntly made me intensely unhappy. I’d known what she was, I admitted. But until Buel Hitch had come here, I hadn’t had to face that a lot of other men knew it, too, and far more intimately than I did. I had pretended she was something else, and pretended all sorts of other things about her as well. That she had a heart I could win. That she would be worth winning. That my protecting her and hunting food for her might make her something other than what she really was.