“Has anyone seen him?” Aurie half turned from the large kettle, the long-handled ladle in one hand and the first of her shallow bowls in the other. She filled the shallow bowl with a tip of the ladle and held it out for Maud with a slight nod. Her daughter’s hands were always shaking and she did her best not to make herself conscious of it, but was hard pressed not to eye how much she would spill in the few steps to the table.

  “I hope he’s no ugly,” Maud set the bowl in front of her father. “Or married.”

  Aurie shook her head and frowned at Maud, who only shrugged. She held out the bowl for her son, Alden, who sat across the table from Balor. The light of the hearth was enough for her to see Balor’s glare at their daughter. He still scoffed at the idea of his darling girl being swept off by a husband. No man was good enough for her. Not even one of the gods themselves. And she was pretty enough to catch their eyes, let alone the village boys, who have vied for her affections long before she had grown hips or her swindling smile.

  They weren’t a wealthy family, by any means, but they had an acre of wheat fields that had been worked by her husband’s family for eight generations. Their home was not a wattle and daub hut, but stone walled and wood roofed. Not to mention how their portions of the fields’ profits had built quite the dowry for their daughter. It was sometimes difficult to get around their supper table in front of the hearth because of how it filled between the walls of the kitchen. Alden had his own bed on the far end of the open area adjacent to the kitchen. Maud’s was on the loft above Alden’s with her own window.

  Aurie and her husband had their own room, albeit only large enough for their straw bed and a small table Balor made while Aurie was pregnant with Maud. Aurie had to stop herself for a moment at that. Twenty years now. Her daughter was twenty years old, making her…no, Aurie wasn’t going to think about that. She finished filling her own bowl, letting that thought float away.

  They had more than most in the village. Only the Greshons and Vorners had similar homes. They were the envy of all with how well she tended her own small garden. The wildflowers she cultivated in it would bloom bright with color every spring. Her only regret was how particular Maud had become in who she was willing to marry. She was one of six eligible girls to the five boys and seemed intent on marrying none of them. With Alden’s growing appetite, she knew it wouldn’t be long before Balor would be forced to arrange a marriage. And only the widowers and Men at Arms were eager for that.

  “No, none yet,” Balor leaned his head over the bowl to scoop the stew. His beard grew dark around his neck and over his smooth chin, but had grayed as it neared his eyes and ears. His thick red hair was knotted over the bald spot on the back of his head and he had brows like bushy red caterpillars, which she enjoyed tracing with her fingers in their most intimate of moments. And those laugh lines made her swoon when they showed the few times he would smile. His fingers still black from the dirt of hard labor in the fields did make her want to thwack him, but it was only another thing about him she cherished.

  It was planting season and Aurie knew how taxing that was on a man’s body. Tilling was hard work. She never begrudged the extra needs her husband had this time of year. She placed a pot of water on a hook over the hearth for after supper to sooth his feet and hands. Not only his hands, but her own, for when she finished massaging his shoulders before bed. And her knees. There was more to caring for her husband than merely his aches.

  “Samma said he is an old and ugly Techlar merchant. Smelled of piss and elderberries,” Alden giggled. Aurie was quick to whack his head with the ladle before setting her own bowl at her seat beside Balor. Alden rubbed his head through the matte of hair he refused to cut. It made him look like a scarecrow in her opinion. Tangles of strawberry red versions of her blonde locks over bushy red brows like Balor’s—unlike her dark-haired and pale skinned Maud, who looked like neither of them but for her father’s heart shaped face and Aurie’s figure—the boy was a perfect combination of both parents.

  “Samma’s a damn fool and you needn’t bother listening to a thing he says. None know because none have seen a torch lit at Kelger’s Farm since winter,” Balor said between slurps of broth from his wooden spoon. To Aurie, he smiled like a boy tasting berries for the first time, “This is quite good. Is it the rabbit or do I taste parsley, love?”

  “Pear chunks, parsley, and a dash of basil. Coralin gave me some pears for helping her with the mending of Balian’s trousers. How she lives all these years without knowing how to stitch still confuses me,” Aurie took her seat with an eye at Maud to finish filling their cups with ale and join them.

  “Balian’s a damn fool, too. Marrying that harlot,” Balor sipped even louder this time, followed by Alden, who seemed intent on outdoing him.

  “Balor!” Aurie scoffed. “Not at the table. True or no, we do not speak ill of family.”

  “You treat her as such, I will not. Their girl is as dark of hair as a bear and nearly as long nosed,” Balor shot her a defiant eye. Alden had to duck his head to not spit his stew over the table from his muffled laughter.

  “Either way, if one bit of my fields is trampled, I’ll have his…” Balor swallowed the rest when Aurie narrowed her eyes at him. “He better be as good a neighbor as Kelgar was, all I say.”

  “If not, I’m sure Lord Taggerty’s Steward will learn him without me having to wrap knuckles,” Aurie straightened proudly for fulfilling yet another wife’s duty of dampening her husband’s temper. ‘Keep your man in line,’ her mother would say, ‘Else they get ideas of worth they no be high enough for.’

  Once everyone had finished their supper, Aurie directed Maud on wiping the bowls and spoons while she filled the wide bucket with warm water to soak Balor’s feet in. Maud struggled to brace the bowls against the wall to scrub them with a hand that wiggled like a leaf in the wind.

  She rubbed Maud’s back with her spare hand, “I liked the ale you brought from Freider’s tonight. Did you see Dalfur while you were there?” Perhaps let him pique your interest a bit, poor boy. Everyone knew he would kill for her trembly hand if it would work. Poor soul, that one.

  “Ugh,” Maud rolled her eyes as she wiped a bowl on her apron. “He follows me everywhere. If I have to hear another story of how some rodent was chased by his cat in the forge, I will throw myself into the river.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “He’s an odd one,” Aurie wished that wasn’t true. “But he’s kind. Gentle. That can be as valuable in a husband as being a hard worker. And, he is the strongest boy in the village. All good qualities.”

  “He’s like a lost puppy. I haven’t the room to breathe,” Maud huffed, fumbling to keep the bowl in her shaking and slippery fingers. “Can you imagine if I had to live with him?”

  “Yes,” she regretted how firm she said that. She softened, “You can’t turn all of them away forever. You should be with your own hearth and children by now. By the time I was your age, I had you in the garden and Alden on my hip.”

  “You had Pa,” Maud sulked. “I have a choice between pranksters, idiots, and…and…Dalfur!”

  “You act as if we were in love at first sight. I found your father to be as infuriating as you find Dalfur when we first met. You should have seen him. All snickers and red hair, like a fox playing in a chicken coup. And don’t get me started on what he offered to me, day after day.”

  “I know, I know.” Maud huffed as she finished wiping the last bowl and set it on the table. “Pebbles he thought were colorful because he couldn’t tell the difference between gray and purple if you hit him in the head with an eggplant. You’ve told me. But what about the Ribbon Dance? One look into his eyes after I kissed him and all I could see were my future daughter and son. Blah blah blah. Really, mother, I would only see me strangling Dalfur in the night if I danced for him.”

  “Pick one. Soon,” Aurie warned with a breathy heft of the water bucket. “Or your father will. And he’ll look less at what you want and more of what you need later.”

  “What if this offlander is unmarried, hm? Perhaps he’ll be different, being foreign and all.”

  “Or perhaps he’ll be like any other newcomer and driven off before he can trench his first planting. Keep your head out of the clouds of what may and start looking at what is. I beg you.”

  The look that Balor gave her as he sat on their bed spoke volumes. Expectant. Not for the hot water to soak his aching feet, which a less mature and younger Aurie might have assumed, but for the coming talk about their daughter’s future. Aurie shifted the bucket to balance on her hip like an infant and ran a comforting hand across Maud’s back as she went to him. She pulled their room door closed and set the bucket in front of him.

  “That Dalfur boy is dumber and more useless than Samma. She’d be better off with one of the Greshon boys,” Balor said as he dipped his feet in the bucket.

  Aurie sat next to him on their straw bed and laid her head on his shoulder. The house was quiet, now that Maud and Alden were in their own beds. Shadows shifted on the back of the room door from a candle on the little bedside table. His lips softly touched her forehead and she grinned with a deep sigh.

  “No one would be better off with those little shits, lands or no.” She lifted her head and kissed him. Best to butter him up before defending his little flower against him. “Dalfur is an ass. The whole village is full of them. It isn’t like when we were young. She’s right to want for more than these fools.”

  “Though, now that I think about it, Dalfur is a blacksmith’s son. A guild apprentice. Good choice in me mind.”

  “I could’ve been his mother if I looked at it that way. Have you forgotten that?”

  “If you were an ass, I s’pose you would’ve.”

  Aurie shook her head with a smile. “You’re an ass.”

  “But I am your ass, deep as can be,” he moved her mouth to his with a rough hand over her cheek. His whiskers tickled her lips and nose. She tasted his tongue and wrapped her arms around him.

  Catching her breath, she said at nearly a whisper, “I ought to thump you for that.” His green eyes beamed into hers as they did when he purposefully goaded her. “I don’t know what to do. I want her to be happy and provided for. I fear we may have to venture to Alcer or Berone this season to introduce her to other boys she hasn’t seen piss themselves and fart into bonfires.”

  He leaned back from her, “And see her once a summer? Or worse, if she goes to Berone. No, no, no, I cannot. She’ll come around. Dalfur’s a good choice. She likes him, she just needs to see it. I’ll speak with the boy and teach him a thing or two on wooing a Clevlan woman.”

  “Not pebbles,” Aurie slid to behind him and wrapped her legs around him. Her chin on his shoulder again, his beard tickling her ear and sticking to her hair, she said, “Promise me you won’t tell him to give her pebbles.”

  “They were pretty pebbles. Don’t care what you say.”

  “Honestly, I think we may have to consider watching to see if this offlander is eligible when he finally gets here. If not, then we must consider the other villages. It won’t be long before none will choose her even if she chooses them.”

  “The purple ones were your favorite, I recall,” he shook his head in disbelief. “You wouldn’t have danced when I was on that pole if not for those.”

  She slapped his back before beginning to massage his shoulders. “Don’t josh, I’m serious. We must consider broadening her choices.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll be sure to introduce myself to the man when he comes. But he won’t last. No newcomer ever does here. They’ll drive him off before planting.”

  “Not if he is married to our daughter before then because you’ll stop them.”

  He looked at her over his shoulder, “And not make a copper a bushel? We’ll starve!”

  “Then sell it in Alcer. They’re closer to Parisia and will pay more anyway. Two days’ travel or no. Just, consider it, please?”

  “Fine. I’ll consider it. As soon as you admit that pebble on the hearth rack is purple.”

  “If it will make you do it, then, yes, it is purple.”

  It was actually the color of the rocks the house was built of. Possibly just a piece smoothed by wind of the same boulders. But if there was a possibility that they could find a match for their daughter, then she could lie a little. He’d never know anyway. He was blind as a bat when it came to colors.