Vale bowed theatrically. “Roderick Vale, at your service.”
“No,” Maren said. “You are not.”
A hush fell.
Vale blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You are not at anyone’s service. You are at the center of this town’s rot, and rot rarely serves. It spreads.”
Someone gasped. Someone else muttered that she had a sharp tongue for a woman fresh off a coach.
Vale’s smile returned, colder now. “Careful, madam. You arrived here under uncertain circumstances. A woman alone should make friends quickly.”
Maren looked around at the wet faces watching her. “I see no friends to make.”
Elias made a sound that might have been a laugh, though it was too brief and rough to be certain.
Maren turned back to him. “Mr. Wren, may we speak somewhere dry?”
“You don’t have to stay.”
“I know.”
“I can pay for the coach to take you back east.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why ask?”
She touched the satchel. “Because your forged letter mentioned Thornback Ridge.”
Roderick’s face changed so slightly that only Elias and Maren noticed.
Elias saw it. Maren saw that he saw it.
“The ridge is mine,” Elias said.
“Yes,” she replied. “And I believe someone else has just made a very expensive mistake.”
He studied her through the rain. “Come with me.”
The crowd parted as Elias led Maren away from the stage stop. They expected her to slip, to struggle with her satchel, to ask for help and receive none. She did not. She walked through the mud as if she had crossed worse roads and found worse people waiting at the end of them.
Behind them, Roderick Vale watched in silence.
For the first time that day, he did not look entertained.
Elias’s house stood beyond the last crooked fence of Ashwick Hollow, half a mile uphill where the road became stone and the trees leaned close together. It was not much to look at from the outside: a narrow farmhouse with a slate roof, a patched chimney, a sagging porch, and windows that looked blindly toward the valley. Yet it was cleaner than Maren expected. Sparse, yes. Hard, yes. But not neglected.
A man who repaired broken things lived there.
He opened the door and stepped aside. “There is a stove. Dry yourself.”
Maren entered.
Inside, the room smelled of iron, pine smoke, and rain-damp wool. Tools hung on one wall in perfect order. A kettle sat on the stove. There was one bed behind a partition, one table, two chairs, a shelf of cracked books, and a locked chest beneath the window.
Elias remained near the door, dripping onto the floorboards. “I’ll sleep in the forge.”
“No,” Maren said, removing her gloves.
His brow tightened. “No?”
“You will sleep in your own house. I will use a blanket near the stove. We can arrange propriety without pretending either of us is made of porcelain.”
“I don’t care what the town says.”
“I gathered that.”
“I care what you fear.”
Maren paused.
That was the first gentle thing he had said. More importantly, it was the first gentle thing she believed.
“I do not fear you, Mr. Wren.”
“You should know better than to say that so quickly.”
“I am thirty-two years old. I have worked in counting houses, railway offices, land archives, and one shipping company that considered theft a personality. I do not decide a man is dangerous because fire changed his face.”
His mouth hardened, not in anger but in defense against something close to pain.
“People do,” he said.
“People are lazy.”
For a moment, only the rain spoke against the roof.
Then Elias removed his hat and set it on a peg. “Why did Thornback Ridge matter?”
Maren opened her satchel.
Inside were folded dresses, a small case of drafting instruments, three notebooks, a sealed tin of charcoal pencils, and a leather map tube tied with blue cord. She took out the tube and laid it on the table.
“My father was a civil engineer,” she said. “Before he died, he spent years studying old water routes, colonial property lines, and failed quarry claims across this county. He believed there was a buried channel running beneath Thornback Ridge.”
Elias did not move. “A channel?”
“An old riverbed sealed under stone. Not useful to farmers. Very useful to a man who owns mills, pumps, sluices, and freight.”
“Vale.”
“Yes.”
“He wants my spring.”
“He wants more than your spring.”
Maren untied the cord, unrolled the map, and weighed the corners with a mug, a knife, a horseshoe, and a jar of nails.
Elias stepped closer despite himself.
The map was old, but not fragile. It had been copied carefully, revised in different inks, and marked with measurements written in a precise hand. Thornback Ridge appeared as a black crescent above Ashwick Hollow. Beneath it, hidden lines curved toward the river valley.
Maren tapped one mark. “Here is your spring.”
Elias nodded.
“Here is the mill.”
He nodded again.
“Here is the old quarry.”
His jaw tightened.