Philomena

The daughter of Phil Nye and Phillipa, about sixteen at the time of the killing and much traveled for her age, which had not made her forward. Her parents were protective past what her years called for, and she was reserved with strangers because of it.

The exception was the blades. She had learned butchery as a child from a butcher’s apprentice and was good at it, and her father would not have it. When Koa dragged a whole hog back to the wagon and Phil went for his own finest knives, she said she had told him more times than she could count that she could do the work. He said it was not work she should be doing. She said he would not say that if they were Peren. He said they were not Peren, and they were not Dhel either, whatever they traded with them. She took the knife out of his hands, said she knew what she was doing, and turned her back on him to start.

She was walking beside Koa and talking to him when the arrow came out of the dark and killed her father. She screamed at the sight of it. The swordsman who came in behind the arrow took her by the back of the neck, saying she would fetch a pretty price, and Koa cut him down where he stood.

Two days later, in Loshev, she pulled out the chair at Koa’s table and tried to pay him again. She had tried before. He would not take it, holding that he had failed the charge he had accepted; she told him they owed him their lives, that the family were not without coin of their own, and that he could at least let them say thank you. All the while she was talking she kept reaching for the back of her own neck without knowing she was doing it.

She and her mother were gone from the town before the party came back off the bandit hunt, away for a birthday tradition of hers, and they left word behind them. The man holding it rubbed his fingers together and found he could not quite remember where he had put it; Koa leaned on him instead of paying. The note asked for more of his stories the next time the wagon rolled through. With it came the coin still owed on the hire, and a potion tagged to keep him safe.

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The wagon came back through Loshev with the two of them on it, and she was not subtle about it. She invited Koa on a walk and pointedly did not invite Mikhail or Aldo. Aldo had read what she wanted with a talent he has for reading it, and moved things along on her behalf without being asked to.

The walk went out to her father’s cairn. Koa told her there, gently, that he was engaged to Gwenivere. She said she was happy for him and meant it as far as it went. At the parting she held on to him a good deal longer than the news had left proper. She and her mother still run the roads with the wagon.