It needed it after a night's work, the way it always did — the underarms, the hem, the ordinary wear of a full set under hot lamps — and she took it out to the washbin in the back with a cake of the hard soap and set to it properly, the way she'd learned to tend the one fine thing she had. Cool water. Gentle hands. She worked the soap into the cloth and coaxed the grime up out of it rather than scrubbing, patient, unhurried, and there was the old steadiness in it, the small, mundane task filling her hands and quieting her head. Maren was somewhere up front with the day's work. The morning came grey and ordinary through the open back door. For a little while, it was only her, the water, and the dress, and she let it be enough.
She wrung it gently, carried it out to the line in the yard, and hung it in what thin sun there was, smoothing it straight with her palms. Then she tipped the grey water out, and rinsed the bin, and dried her hands down her skirt, and went back inside to get on with the rest of the day —
— and stopped, three steps into the back hall, because she could feel him.
There was no mistaking it. She had learned the particular weight of him now, that vast banked stillness that no one else in the world carried, and it was here, ahead of her, out in the front room where the light came in. The tables were wiped, and nothing ever happened but bread and mopping and the ordinary business of the day. He was here. In the daylight. At the bar, from the feel of it, easy and settled as anything.
She stood in the dim hallway with her damp hands, her bound-back hair, and her plain, worn day clothes, and felt the whole shape of the afternoon tilt.
He had never come in the day. He was a thing of the evening, of the lamplit corner and the after-dark hours, of the charged in-between times when the tavern was full, and she was someone — the voice of the house, the woman in the good dress. He did not belong to the daylight. He did not belong to this: the bread-smell, the wet floor, and her with soap still drying on her wrists. And he was here anyway, and she had not had one moment's warning to make herself ready for him.
She could have stayed in the back. The thought crossed her, quick and cowardly and appealing — busy herself with something out of sight until he gave up and went. But even as she thought it, she could hear Maren's voice lift and roll from the front room, warm and bright and unmistakably pleased with herself. Lyrwen understood with a sinking certainty that it was already too late, that the two of them were already in it, and that hiding would only mean leaving Maren to run the whole conversation unsupervised.
That, more than courage, was what moved her feet. She smoothed her skirt with both damp hands, uselessly, and went in.
He was at the bar.
Of course he was — she'd felt exactly that — but seeing it was its own small shock, because in the flat grey daylight, he was somehow just a man. A cup of ale in front of him, half-drunk. His coat open, his posture easy against the bar, one arm resting on the wood. No lamplit portent to him, no corner shadows; only a tall brown-haired man having a drink in a tavern in the morning, which had never once been true of him before. And Maren was planted across the bar from him, with her elbows on the wood, her chin in her hands, and the whole of her tipped toward him like a flower to the sun, mid-sentence, glowing.
"— and she never mentioned a word of it, of course, not one; I had to drag the whole thing out of —" Maren caught sight of her and lit up further, which Lyrwen would not have thought possible. "There she is. Lyr. Look who's come to see you."
The words landed on her like a hand between the shoulder blades. Come to see you. Lyrwen stood at the mouth of the room, soap drying on her wrists, with no idea what to do with her face.
Rhevan turned on the stool, deliberately, and looked at her — the plain, worn day-clothes, the bound hair, the damp hands, all of it — and something in his expression eased, warmed, settled, as though the sight of her exactly like this were the thing he'd come for and found.
"Lyrwen," he said. "I hope I'm not intruding on your morning."
"You're not," she said, which was a lie, because he was intruding on the whole shape of her day, but there was nothing else to say to it with Maren watching.
"He's been no trouble at all," Maren put in. "A model patron. Orders, pays, tips well, doesn't put his hands anywhere they oughtn't be — you'd hardly know he was a man at all, present company the exception." She said it to Rhevan, brightly, with a wickedness Lyrwen knew far too well. "You'd be amazed the standard round here. He's set the bar somewhere the rest of them will never reach it again. I'll have to thank you and curse you both."
"I'll take the thanks," Rhevan said. "You can keep the curse."
Maren laughed, delighted — he'd played it back to her at exactly the right weight, easy and dry, and Lyrwen watched her friend decide on the spot that she liked him, watched it happen, and could do nothing to stop it. That was the trouble with Maren. She made her mind up fast, and she made it up out loud.
"See, now, this is what I've been saying." Maren rounded on Lyrwen, abandoning even the pretense of the dough going grey on the table. "A man comes in, in the daylight, sober, asks after you by name, sits and waits like a gentleman — and you stand there looking like someone's handed you a live eel. Lyr. If you're not going to do something about this, I want it on the record that I tried, and that I would have, in a heartbeat, if he'd looked at me even once the way he keeps looking at —"
"Maren."
"— the way he keeps looking at you," Maren finished, entirely unbothered, and turned back to Rhevan with her chin in her hand. "She's shy. She's not, actually; you should hear her tell a drunk to sit down, but she goes shy about exactly one thing, and I think we've found it. Isn't she lovely when she's flustered? She's gone the color of her hair again."
"She has," Rhevan agreed.
And there it was — she felt it land, the warmth of it, low and unwelcome, because he hadn't said it the way Maren had, tossed out for the play of it. He'd said it looking at her, quiet and plain and meaning it, and it went straight through the guard she'd been trying to hold.
She reached for the mop she'd come in to use in the first place, because her hands wanted something to do that wasn't standing there being looked at, and mopping was a thing they knew how to do without her. She set to the floor. And slowly, pass by pass across the boards, the steadiness of it did what it always did, and the worst of the fluster drained off and left her something closer to herself.
"I'm not shy," she said to Rhevan, not looking up from the floor. "Maren only says it because it's the one thing she can't get me to do her way."
"Ha." Maren pointed at her, triumphant. "There she is."
"You've been trying to marry me off since the day I walked in."
"Because you'd be happier, you contrary thing, and someone has to think of it, you certainly won't —"
"I'm happy mopping your floor."
"That is the saddest sentence I have ever heard a woman say, and I've worked a tavern eleven years." Maren appealed to Rhevan with both hands, as to a reasonable party. "You see what I contend with. She'd live and die in that one dress and call it a life well spent."
"It's a good dress," said Rhevan.
"It's her only dress —"
"Maren." But it came out with a laugh caught in it this time, and Maren heard it and her whole face went bright with the triumph of having got a laugh out of her at last, and even Rhevan's mouth had gone up at one corner. For a moment, the three of them were only that — three people in a warm room in the morning, laughing at nothing, the way people did. Lyrwen felt the ease of it settle over her before she thought to guard against it. How ordinary it was. How ordinary it wasn't, that she should be standing here trading barbs in front of a man and not minding, not bracing, not counting the exits. She had not felt anything like it in longer than she could name.
She did not let herself look too hard at how much she liked it.
Maren turned back to him. “What district you from? You don’t look the sort we see come out of the Sink.”
Rhevan’s lips twitched, betraying the slightest hint of amusement. “Trying to learn where I sleep?” He quirked an eyebrow and then gestured his head behind her. “You have company.”
She turned to find the carter had come in for an early ale, and went to draw it; two of the regulars drifted in after and wanted feeding, and Maren swept off to see to them with a backward look at Lyrwen that said, plainly, don't you dare waste this while I'm gone. And then, without any particular moment marking it, the buffer of her was gone, and it was Lyrwen and Rhevan and the length of the bar between them and the ordinary noise of the room at a little distance.
She kept mopping. It seemed the safest thing.
"She's good to you," Rhevan said. Not a question. He watched Maren from across the room, where she laughed with the regulars and balanced plates. "The two of them. Her and the keeper."
"They are." She said it carefully, the way she said anything true that mattered. "They didn't have to be. I came in half-starved with a voice and nothing else, and they could have used me for the voice and let the rest of me fend. They didn't." She stopped, surprised at herself — she didn't say things like that, not to anyone, and certainly not to a man she'd known a handful of nights. But he had a way of being quiet that made the quiet want filling, and she'd filled it before she'd decided to.
"No," he agreed. "They didn't." He turned the cup slowly on the wood, not drinking. "It's rarer than it should be. Being taken in for the whole of yourself, and not the useful part."
Something in the way he said it made her look up. There had been a weight under it — not a heavy one, just a thing briefly true and briefly shown, the way he'd shown her almost nothing of himself across three nights and now had let her see a corner of this, whatever it was. She had the sudden sense that he knew exactly what it was to be valued for the useful part and nothing else, and that he had not, unlike her, been lucky enough to find his own Maren and keeper.
And there it was — the thing she'd been holding off since she walked in. Because this was the trouble with him, the whole of it: she had spent her life being wanted cheaply, by men who wanted a song for free or a look or whatever they thought a tavern singer owed them, and she'd built a great many walls against exactly that, and not one of them was the right shape for a man who looked at her like she was the only fixed point in a moving room and didn't seem to want anything from her at all. She didn't know what to do with it. She hated that it worked on her. She did not hate the thing itself at all, and that was worse.
She didn't ask him what he'd meant. She wanted to, and she didn't, because asking felt like stepping through the very door she'd told herself she'd keep shut. But she looked at him a moment longer than she meant to, there in the flat ordinary daylight, and something in her chest shifted a quiet degree toward him, and she felt it go, and could not call it back.
"You still haven't said why you came," she said, because it was safer than any of the things she was actually thinking.
He considered the cup a moment, turning it, as though the question deserved more care than a quick answer would give it.
"Do I need one?" he said. "A reason?"
"People usually have them."
"I suppose they do." He looked up at her then, and there was nothing sly in it, nothing withheld — for once he seemed to be telling her the plain truth and finding it faintly funny that the plain truth was all he had. "I found I wanted to see you somewhere that wasn't the tavern at night. You're different in the evening. Lit up, watched, giving the room what it came for. I've seen a great deal of that version of you." He set the cup down. "I wanted to see the other one. The one who washes her own dress, mops her own floor, and tells her friend to sit down. I like her better, I think, though I'll grant I've only just met her."
She had no answer to that. There wasn't one that was safe.
"That's a strange thing to want," she managed.
"Is it?" He didn't press it. He only let it sit, easy, the way he let everything sit, and after a moment he seemed to decide he'd taken enough of her morning. He rose from the stool, always unhurried, and drew a coin from his coat and set it on the bar beside the cup, more than the ale was worth, the way Maren had said.
"I've kept you from your work," he said. "And your friend will have the whole of it out of you the moment I'm gone, so I'll spare you having to invent anything." A glance toward Maren across the room, dry, almost conspiratorial. "Tell her I was a model patron. It'll please her."
"She'll be insufferable."
"She'll be insufferable regardless. At least this way she'll be right." He inclined his head, "Lyrwen."
And he went — out through the front, into the ordinary daylight, where she had never once watched him go before. She'd only ever seen him leave into the dark, folding into it, there and then not. In the day, he walked out the door like any man, and she could see him go, all the way, until the door swung to behind him — and somehow that was stranger than all the vanishing had ever been.
She stood there with the mop in her hands.
She could still feel him. That was the thing. Out the door and up the street and going, that vast quiet weight moving off through the ordinary morning, and she stood in the middle of the wet floor. She felt the distance of him stretch and thin, and did not look away from the door, and was still standing there when Maren came barreling back across the room with her eyes alight and her mouth already open.
"Well," said Maren, arriving at the bar with the empty plates still in her hands and no memory of them, by the look of her. "Well, well, well."
"Don't."
"I will absolutely not 'don't.' I have earned this. I have waited years for this." She set the plates down with a clatter and planted both hands on the bar and leaned in, radiant, merciless. "That man came in here in the broad light of morning, sober as a stone, and asked for you by name. By name, Lyr. Do you know how many men ask for you by name? They ask for 'the singer.' They ask for 'the redhead.' One memorable gentleman asked for 'the one with the voice like a warm bath,' which I've never let you forget and never will. That man asked for Lyrwen."
"He knows my name. We've spoken."
"You've spoken," Maren said it like it was the understatement of her life. "Three nights he's watched you sing and walked you home and turned up in the daylight to see you mop a floor, and you'll stand there and tell me you've spoken."
Lyrwen opened her mouth to correct the walked-you-home — Maren didn't know about that, couldn't know, she'd said nothing — and then realized she must have said something after all, in the muddle of yesterday morning, or Maren had assembled it out of the pieces the way she assembled everything. Either way, it was true, and there was no unsaying a true thing to Maren. She let it go.
"It isn't what you think it is," she said instead.
"It's exactly what I think it is. It's always exactly what I think it is. I have an unbroken record, and you know it." Maren's grin softened, though, some of the theatre going out of it, and what was under it was gentler and harder to stand in front of. "Lyr. He looked at you like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at—the whole time. I was doing my very best work over here — and I'm good, I'll have you know, I could've had him blushing if he'd had it in him — and he was polite, and he was funny, and he did not care one single whit, because you were in the room. I've never seen a man do that, not for me, not for anyone. They always look. He didn't look. He just… waited for you."
And there it was, said plain, the thing Lyrwen had felt and refused to name — handed back to her in Maren's voice, warm and certain and impossible to argue with. She felt it go through her a second time, worse for being witnessed, worse for being true.
"I don't know what to do with that," she said, and it came out smaller and more honest than she'd meant, the guard slipping for just a moment.
Maren's whole face changed. She reached across the bar and put a floury hand over Lyrwen's, and for once she didn't tease.
"You don't have to do anything with it today," she said. "That's the thing about a good one, Lyr. They don't need you to know what to do with it yet. They just keep turning up until you figure it out." She squeezed her hand once and let it go and picked her plates back up, the brightness coming back into her like a tide returning. "This one'll keep turning up. I'd put my wages on it. Now go finish your floor before the keeper docks us both, and — Lyr." She stopped, looked back, and grinned. "The color of your hair. Still. It's been ten minutes."
"Go away, Maren."
"Going. Insufferably." And she swept off, delighted with herself, delighted with the morning, delighted with the whole unfolding shape of a thing she was certain she'd called from the very start.
Lyrwen stood a moment longer in the middle of the wet floor. She could still feel him, faintly, far off now, a distant weight moving through the ordinary day. She made herself stop reaching for it. She made herself take up the mop. And if she finished the floor more slowly than she needed to, and if her mind kept sliding back to a man who had come in the daylight to see the version of her that no one ever came for — well. There was no one to see it but her, and she told no one, not even herself, not quite.
