Page 4 of Bound to the Fae Assassin

He gave her a pointed look and she laughed.

“I’ll think on it,” she promised him.

The bell over the door rang and her father came in with Old Ben Carpenter right behind him.

The two men could not have been more different. Albert Barton was tall and stout with a flaming red beard just started to show the first flecks of steel gray. He had bright green eyes like Farrow’s, and a booming laugh that filled the bakery often, and made anyone who heard it feel like joining in.

Old Ben Carpenter was almost ghostlike in comparison. His wife, Delilah, had passed over the winter. Farrow had watched the old man stoop and grow thin before her eyes without the love of his life, practically wilting, like a plant kept from the sun.

“Can’t rightly sleep,” he had admitted to her one quiet day when she asked him how he was holding up. “Used to take a late morning nap. But the house is too quiet for it now, without Delilah fussing about.”

The next morning, she had come in early to whisper to the poppyseeds, asking them for a bit of restful tranquility to help the old man. She tried her best to weave in some good memories she had of Delilah, and even some bits from the stories he’d told about her, hoping that it would bring him some small comfort to think of his dear wife. And since then, he had been able to return to his habit of a late morning rest.

Now, Ben came by every day as soon as they opened.

She was glad if the treat could give him a little peace, even if he wasn’t sure why.

“Morning, kids,” her father called out.

“Good morning, Mr. Barton,” Jericho yelled back.

“Morning, Dad,” she said with a smile. “Morning, Mr. Carpenter. The usual today?”

“Yes, please, young lady,” Old Ben told her. “Always reminds me of Delilah. She made lemon ginger tea in the winters. Can’t get it right m’self.”

“That sounds delicious,” Farrow told him, carefully wrapping his muffin in paper.

He took it from her eagerly, his long, knobby fingers closing around the bundle like she might change her mind and take it back.

She accepted his coin and would have spoken with him about the weather had the door not swung open again with more customers.

“Enjoy it,” she murmured to him.

He smiled at her. For an instant the wrinkles disappeared, and she could see the Ben Carpenter she remembered, singing Hearthtide carols in his deep bass voice, back before he was Old Ben, when she was a little girl and they still held caroling in the town square.

A gaggle of townsfolk clambered in, and Ben headed out slowly as she took orders and slid loaves of brown bread and rows of buns into paper sacks.

It was going to be a busy day. And that was good.

Chapter 3

Farrow

By the time Farrow was able to duck out of the shop, the sun was already beginning its descent over the western woods. For a change, the sky was a cloudless, brilliant blue that almost hurt to look at after so long in the dim bakery.

She stepped into the golden light of the late afternoon, happy to stretch her legs after a day of standing behind the counter.

She was tired, and hadn’t even had time to stop and eat a proper lunch, but she had a bit of bread tucked into her basket to snack on while she hunted herbs. And her mother had decided to come early to the shop instead of waiting for Farrow at home.

Which meant that until darkness fell, her time was her own.

She set off through the town square at a good clip, so as to avoid being pulled into a nice chat with any of the elderly ladies who liked to sit on the wooden benches and sun themselves when the weather allowed.

She had the excuse of her herb basket and the sinking sun, if need be. The King had set a curfew at sundown for all of Fairweather, so any work left undone at darkness would have to keep until morning.

The street vendors called out, offering meat pies, sturdy work breeches, and even cheap costume jewelry, but she bypassed them all, eventually making her way to the dirt road that led out of the town proper.

When she reached the fields, she let out a sigh of relief and released her hair from its messy bun so the breeze could play in it. With her hair down and the flour off her hands, Farrow could be anyone, not just the baker’s daughter.

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