Page 19 of The Shape of Silence

Once again, Morggán couldn’t decipher her tone, whether she asked a question or made a comment.

She reached for a small pouch and unknotted it, spilling a measure of oats into a wooden bowl. Morggán’s eyes caught on the bag itself, recognizing his sister’s stitching, and the silk drawcord. Another boon provided by his fallen steed, he realized. This struck him as bold, her using his provisions right in front of him, and making no comment about it. He didn’t call her out, though, understanding as well as most that the act of survival had its own rules.

“Aye, and what will you do when it comes to your door?” He asked, watching as she added some broth from the stew into the bowl of oats, just enough to stir into a thick dough, which she took into her hands and shaped into several flat rounds.

“To the forest.”

His brows lowered. “That’s your plan?”

She turned her blue eyes onto him but said nothing, and then slid the first thin round of dough into the pan, which began to hiss at once.

“What if they come by night?” he persisted. “What if they creep and you don’t hear them in time to escape?”

“I heard you—or rather, Charlie did.”

A deep furrow creased his forehead. “Charlie?”

She pointed to the hound, who lay just beside her, his attention locked on her dough-covered hands.

“What of your man?” he gestured vaguely toward the pegs hammered into the wall, where hung those drab breeches and tunics. “Your husband?”

She shook her head.

“Your sire?”

Another shake of her head.

“A man lived here,” he deduced. “With you? Before you?”

“The man, yes.”

He waited. Nothing. Morggán sighed. In truth, conversation was a bit exasperating.

“What man?”

She shrugged, not with indifference or any wish to hide information, he surmised. It seemed she didn’t understand the answer herself. “The man.” She lifted her hand and pointed toward the hair falling over her shoulder. “With the gray hair. Gray eyes, too, but not... not like yours. He lived here.”

“With you?”

She nodded.

“Was he kin to you?”

Another slow, confused shrug. “I don’t think so—no, he wasn’t.”

“Ye prefer English to Scots,” he remarked, considering her switch.

She nodded.

She wasn’t simple, that much he knew. That might be all he knew, though; he didn’t know what to make of her.

“Your Scots is nae familiar to me,” he said, keeping to English now, “the cadence of it.”

“Okay.”

“Oh-kay,” he repeated, unfamiliar with the word.

She nodded.