Nobody's Lady Read Online Free PDF Page A

for the days when I had been so revolted by the way they kissed and kissed and could only pull their arms from each other’s backs with a great and wretched show of sadness.
    Now that I was finally on my own, I preferred to work more delicately with a chisel, a gouge, and a small block of wood to felling a tree with my ax. Children especially seemed to enjoy the little animals I crafted, so I called them toys and said they were meant to be played with. I sold them around town a few days a week. The first day I’d asked Master Tailor if I could sell some outside of the Tailor Shop.
    Helping me gave Nissa some distraction. I think what she really wanted was an excuse to see Luuk, who always seemed to want to spend the night with whichever parent she wasn’t currently staying with. It wasn’t that Luuk didn’t like Nissa, but he was no longer sure he was ready for romance. Nissa decided to break it off between them, although I was sure her heart wasn’t in it. Theirs was just one of many messy partings, and theirs wasn’t even that messy, considering how young they were.
    So I avoided the messiness of the village whenever possible. I felt more comfortable staying at my lone cottage outside the quarry.
    I was fully used to rejection, so there was no need for screaming and crying out with me. The few villagers who bothered to pass by were quarry workers, mostly men, the rest women who had rejected love before the curse had broken. There were few men in the village who would shed a tear over the lord’s edict.
    “Morning!” called one such tearless man. I looked up from the stool I’d set on my porch. One of the quarry workers, a pickax slung casually over his shoulder, waved as he walked by. His face had a familiar pattern to it. I’d probably met him when he came to chastise Ingrith, the woman who’d once lived in my cottage. Since I knew his face, that meant he had once been Returned. Not that that mattered any more. I nodded my greeting before turning back to work.
    This morning, I was halfway through making a cat’s rotund hindquarters out of a scrap block of oak left over from the new table Alvilda and I had finished crafting for Vena and Elweard at the tavern.
    Alvilda had been on her way home from the market to work on that table when a specter appeared out of nowhere and—much to Alvilda’s consternation—followed her home. The next time I saw her, she stood cross-armed and smirking in her shop’s doorway with a piece of parchment stating that his lordship recognized Alvilda and Siofra as each other’s wives. She said the confounded white creature had pulled it out of his inner jacket pocket as soon as Alvilda had explained the situation in the market and Siofra had expressed her desire to wed Alvilda as well. All it took was their signatures and they were united, on paper as they were at heart.
    I wished I had been there to see it.
    “It’s a beautiful day, lady carver!”
    My hand slipped. Now my wooden cat had a chunk missing out of its tail.
    I looked up. Another of the quarry workers. I couldn’t place his face. But he might not have had it out in the open until recently.
    He took my curt nod as an invitation. His trousers brushed against the bushes separating my new home from the dirt road. I remembered those bushes as a safe place from which to get a good look at the old, husbandless crone who once lived in my shack. She had killed the one man who would ever love her. All it took was a look at his unmasked face. And no one else remembered he ever existed. I figured this out only after I had done the same.
    The worker brushed the bush’s fine needles off the front of his trousers with one hand and swung the pickax he had been carrying over his shoulder with the other. He put his free hand on his hip and spread his lips wide to reveal a set of perfectly white teeth. The effect it had on his richly dark face stirred something unexpected in my belly. I quickly looked back down at the damage his