The morning of the market tarts began the way most of Linn's mornings began, with a list.

She kept it in her head. She had never needed to write it down. It ran from the moment she opened her eyes to the moment she closed them, a long bright ribbon of small necessary things, each of which had to be done by somebody, and each of which, by some process she had never quite examined, had ended up being done by her. Bread. Hens. Linen. Oda's liniment. Fenn's lessons. The garden. The accounts. The three hundred and one small mercies that held a house together.

The market tarts were at the top of it. Larkspur was two days off, and the Wandering Table always arrived with a basket of them for the stalls. They were Linn's own pastries, glazed apricot tarts with a lattice of burnt sugar, famous in three valleys, and she began them before dawn with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and flour already in her hair.

By the time the sun cleared the eastern hills, she had made forty. They stood in rows along the long kitchen table, golden and glistening, perfectly even, as bright as a row of little suns. She stood back and looked at them with a critical eye, and found nothing to change.

"They look wonderful," said Brammer, at her shoulder.

"Do they?"

"They look like a painting."

"Thank you," said Linn, and smiled.

It was, she supposed, a very good smile. She had been told so. It was warm and quick and reached her eyes, and it did what she needed it to. It sent Brammer off to the garden with a lighter step.

The day went on, as such days do, in a long chain of small collisions.

At eight, Fenn upset an entire pot of ink across his lesson-book and the corner of the table, and stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen with his hands held out like a surgeon's, black to the wrists. "I'm so sorry," he said, in a stricken whisper. "I didn't see the pot, I was reading, I'm so sorry, Linn."

"It's fine," said Linn, already reaching for a cloth. "Truly. Don't give it a thought."

At nine, Brammer burned the first tray of morning rolls, because he had been watching the hens instead of the oven, and came in carrying the blackened tray in front of him like a coffin. "It's fine," said Linn. "We'll make more. No trouble at all."

At half past nine, Oda called from the common room that her liniment had run out, and could someone possibly climb to the high shelf for the blue jar, because her knees were being very difficult. "It's no trouble," said Linn, who had already climbed the stool and come down again with the jar and a warm shawl for good measure.

At ten, Mister Pettibone observed from his shelf that his tea had gone lukewarm, and that he was, regrettably, unable to carry on a conversation under such conditions. "I'll fix it," said Linn. "It's not a bother."

At a quarter past, one of Tolliver's hens got into the flour. "It's fine," said Linn, with a sort of cheerful desperation, and went after it with the broom.

She did not notice she was doing it. That was the thing. It was like breathing. Each little phrase came out of her smooth and warm and well oiled, fitted to the moment, a polished coin she had handed over ten thousand times, and she never once stopped to think of what it cost.

She did, however, notice the man at the end of the bench.

He had been there all morning. He sat in his usual place by the wall, with the brown mug in both hands and the satchel against his knee, and he did not seem to be doing anything at all. He was not reading. He was not mending. He did not offer to lift a pot or carry a basket, which was a small and welcome mercy, since the last time he had done so she had very nearly thrown a spoon at him. He only watched. His eyes followed her, from stove to table to window to door, with a quiet, steady, unfashionable attention, and every time she looked up, he looked away.

It made the back of her neck prickle. She told herself it was the heat of the oven.

At eleven, the sun had climbed high enough to warm the long porch, and Linn, with her hands full of dough and her head full of lists, decided that the pastries would be better rolled outside. The kitchen was too crowded. The light was better. She would set up the big board on the trestle by the porch rail, where there was air, and room to turn, and no one underfoot. She had only to bring out the flour.

There were six sacks in the pantry. They were each the weight of a small child. She had hauled them herself for years, one at a time, on the flat of her back, with a quiet and furious competence that no one had ever commented on.

She was reaching for the first of them when a hand got there ahead of her.

"I'll take it," said Corvin.

She straightened. He was standing in the pantry door, looking down at her with an expression of studied neutrality, and without waiting for an answer he had hefted the sack onto his good shoulder. He went out through the kitchen. She stood where she was, with her mouth slightly open, as he came back for the second sack, and the third.

"You don't have to," she said. "It's no trouble. I can manage."

"I know you can," said Corvin.

He went on carrying.

She followed him out onto the porch because there was nothing else to do. He stacked the sacks along the wall in a neat, square pile, and brushed off his hands, and stood for a moment with his back to her, looking out over the long green fall of the hill. The wind had come up. It was lifting the loose hair at the back of his neck. She thought, for no reason, that he looked tired. It was an odd thing to think. He had done nothing all morning.

She set out the board. She floured it. She picked up the rolling pin, and the dough, and began to work.

He did not go away. She felt him there, at her elbow, a quiet, uncomfortable presence, like a clock in an empty room. She rolled. She turned the dough. She cut it into neat rounds with the edge of a cup, and laid each one in its tin, and did not look at him.

"Fourteen," said Corvin.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Fourteen times."

"Fourteen what?"

"Since breakfast." He was still looking at the hill. His voice was very even. "You've said 'it's fine,' or 'it's no trouble,' or 'don't give it a thought,' fourteen times. I counted. The boy and the ink. Brammer and the rolls. Your grandmother's jar. The tea. The hen. The man with the fish who came to the back door and wanted three pounds of bread, though I think that one doesn't count, since you charged him."

Linn put down the cup.

"You counted," she said.

"I had time."

"That's an unpleasant thing to do."

"It's a habit. I counted other things, on the road." He shrugged. "Mile posts. Fence rails. The number of times a man says he's fine before he falls over."

"I am not going to fall over."

"I didn't say you would."

"Then what are you saying?"

He turned his head, and looked at her, and she saw that he had made a decision. It was in his face, a faint settling around the mouth, the look of a man who has been carrying a weight for a long distance and has finally decided to set it down.

"Your smile," said Corvin, quietly, "is like those."

He nodded at the tarts. They stood on the board between them, forty small golden suns, glistening in the light.

"Like pastry. Bright, and neat, and very good. You'd serve it to a king." He paused. "And nobody who eats it has any idea what's inside."

The sentence fell between them like a stone into a well.

Linn stood absolutely still. She could not have said how long. The wind moved the loose strands of her hair against her cheek. Somewhere below the rail a bee was working the thyme, with a small dry whirr. Her face, she realized, was perfectly calm. It was perfectly warm. It was doing exactly what it always did, and what it always did was smile.

She saw it happen. That was the dreadful thing. She felt the muscles of her face move, and she could not stop them. She felt her lips curve, and her eyes crinkle, and the whole bright mechanism of her expression slide smoothly into place, in the instant before she had even decided to answer.

"That's an interesting thing to say," said Linn, pleasantly.

He did not answer. He only looked at her mouth.

And she understood, with a sudden, cold, horrified clarity, that she had just proved his point. She had been told that her smile was a pastry, and she had responded by baking another.

The warmth went out of her face. It went all at once, like a lamp snuffed, and what was left felt naked and rigid and very young. She put her hands flat on the board. They were not quite steady. She looked at the tarts, at the glaze that caught the sun and gave back none of what lay beneath, and for one wild instant she wanted to sweep the whole tray off the rail and into the grass.

"You don't know me," she said.

"No."

"You've been here three weeks."

"Nearly."

"You've no idea what I..." She stopped. She breathed. When she spoke again, her voice was low and level and shaking very slightly with something that was not quite anger. "You sit at the end of that table every night with your back against the wall, and you watch us all as if we were a play. You say thank you like a man paying a fine. You've been in this house for nearly three weeks, and you have not unpacked your bag."

He went rigid.

"Your boots are by the door," said Linn. "Every night. Laced. Your coat's on the hook, not in the wardrobe. You keep the satchel on your shoulder as if someone's about to take it. You hold your cup as though you'll be asked to give it back. You're so careful, Corvin. You are so very careful. You never take one step into this house that you couldn't take back out again." Her voice broke, and she hated it. "You live with one foot out the door. And you have the nerve to stand on my porch and tell me about my smile?"

The silence that followed was terrible.

His face had gone white around the mouth. He had not moved. His hand, the one nearest her, had closed slowly into a fist at his side, and the knuckles stood out like cords. She had hit something. She could see it, in the sudden dark stillness of his eyes, a bruise she had pressed with all her weight. She felt a bright sick spurt of triumph, and then, close behind it, a rush of shame.

"I'm not staying," he said. His voice was barely a thread. "You know that."

"You're not leaving either."

"That isn't my choice."

"No," said Linn. "It isn't. But you could at least unpack."

They stood on either side of the trestle, with the flour sacks stacked against the wall and the tarts shining on the board between them. Neither of them looked away. She was shaking. He was shaking too, she realized, very slightly, along the line of the jaw. They were two people who had said true things to each other for the first time, and were furious about it, and neither knew how to stop.

She did not know what she would have said next. She would never know. Because at that exact moment the door behind them banged open, and Fenn burst out onto the porch, red-faced and out of breath, with a large brown hen clasped to his chest and an expression of apocalyptic urgency.

"Linn," said Fenn. "Linn, I'm sorry, I know you're busy, but I think she's laid an egg in Mister Pettibone's hat."

There was a pause.

"Is it," said Linn, in a strange, flat, careful voice, "a good egg?"

"It's very warm," said Fenn. "And Mister Pettibone is wearing the hat."

Another pause.

Something in her chest gave way. It was not a laugh. She was nowhere near laughing. But it was the same muscle, the same loosening, and when she looked across the board at Corvin she saw the same thing in his face, a slight, involuntary twitch at the corner of the mouth that he suppressed instantly, with the grim determination of a man defusing a mine.

She did not smile. Neither did he.

"I'll see to it," said Linn.

"Yes," said Corvin, hoarsely. "I should go and wash."

He went. She stood where she was, with her hands still on the board and the sun beating down on the back of her neck, and listened to his steps go down the porch and around the side of the house, to where the old iron pump stood by the water butt. She heard the first creak of the handle. She heard the splash.

"Linn?" said Fenn, uncertainly. "Are you angry?"

"No." She pressed the back of her wrist to her eyes. "No, love. I'm only busy."

"You said that fourteen times."

She turned and looked at him.

"It's all right," said Fenn, who was fourteen and had never been wrong in his own opinion. "I counted too. After he did. It's a very interesting number."

The tarts sold, in the end, for twice what she asked.

That was the following day, at the edge of the Larkspur road, where a small knot of travelers had gathered at dusk to buy from the inn, and where the pastries went in the space of a quarter hour, praised, pressed on children, and carried away in napkins. But that night, the night of the quarrel, she did not know it yet. She knew only that the day had been very long, and that she was moving through it with the odd, brittle care of someone carrying a full cup across a crowded room.

She did not eat supper. She said she had eaten in the kitchen, and nobody argued.

He did not eat much either. He sat at his place with his eyes on his plate, and when she set the pie in front of him, he said, "Thank you," in the old flat voice, and she said, "You're welcome," in hers, and neither of them said anything more. Pettibone, who disliked silence in the same way that he disliked draughts, tried three times to start a conversation about the proper temperature of tea, and each time it died of exposure.

After supper, he went out. She heard the door close. She heard his boots on the porch, and then, after a while, nothing.

She washed the dishes slowly. She dried them slowly. She put each one away in its place, and then took it out again, and set it down a little to the left. At some point Oda said, from the common room, in a voice of great mildness, "You'll wear a hole in that plate, dear," and Linn said, "Yes, Gran," and put the plate down.

It was nearly dark when she went to light the lantern.

The porch was empty. She had half expected to find him on the bench, as before, wrapped in the old gray blanket with the night coming down around him. But there was no one. The long boards lay pale and bare in the last of the light. The sky above the northern hills had gone the color of a bruise, and the first stars were out, small and white and very far away.

And on the bench, in the corner by the rail, lay the satchel.

She stopped.

It was an ordinary thing, an old, battered, brown leather bag, its strap curled loosely on the boards. She had seen it a hundred times. She had never seen it without him. It lay there alone in the gloom, with its flap hanging a little open and the faded star of the Post stitched on its side, and she stood and looked at it as though it were a body.

He had gone to wash, she thought, and had forgotten it.

He had never forgotten it. Not once. Not in three weeks, not at the table, not in the night, not in the long gray hour after the bell, when he had stood in the grass with his hand pressed to his chest. He had carried it through every hour of every day with the stubborn, silent, fierce devotion of a man guarding a sleeping child. And now he had walked off and left it lying on a bench in the dark.

He was angry, then. Angrier than she had thought. Angry enough to forget the one thing he never forgot.

She felt a strange small pang. It was not triumph. It was nearer to remorse.

She did not touch the bag at first. She lit the lantern. She trimmed the wick and struck the flint and cupped the flame against the wind, as she had done three thousand times, and held it up in the gathering dark, and its warm gold light fell over the boards and the rail and the leather on the bench. She stood for a moment with the lantern in her hand, looking at the bag, and the bag looked back.

It should not be left out, she thought. It might rain. Someone might step on it. She would only move it somewhere safe.

She turned toward the door, with the lantern in one hand, and the bag, quite without her noticing, in the other.

It was only afterward that she realized what she had done. She had meant to carry it inside. She had meant to set it on the hall table, and say nothing. Instead her hand, which knew this porch better than her mind did, had carried it the other way. It went out to the iron hook beneath the eave, the one beside the lantern's own, where the old Keepers had hung the things that travelers left behind, the lost gloves and forgotten shawls, so that anyone returning might see them in the light and know that they had been kept.

She hung the lantern on its hook. And then, with her own hand, steady and unhurried, she slipped the strap of the satchel over the second.

It swung, and settled. It hung there beside the flame, brown and humble and a little shabby, with the light running warm along its worn edge.

Linn stared at it.

She was not sure what she had done. She had a strong sense that she had said something aloud, in a language she did not quite speak. She put out one hand to take it down, and found that she could not.

Let it hang, said some small stubborn voice in the back of her head. Let it hang. It's only for tonight.

She went inside, and shut the door, and did not look back.

She was up before the light, as always.

She was down the stairs, and across the common room, and had her hand on the front door, before she remembered. She stopped. The house was still dark. The Hearth was low and red in its ring. Somewhere above her, a floorboard creaked.

She eased the door open, just a crack.

The porch was gray with early dawn. The lantern still burned, small and steady and gold. And beneath it, on the edge of the boards, stood a tall figure in shirtsleeves, with his back to her, and his face turned up to the second hook.

He was not moving. He had not touched the bag. He stood with his arms at his sides, looking at it, with the dim light on the planes of his face, and she saw that he had seen it, and understood, and had not yet decided what to do.

She held her breath.

Slowly, very slowly, he raised his hand. He did not take down the strap. He only laid his palm flat against the leather, over the place where the lining ran, and held it there, as though he were feeling for a heartbeat. His lips moved. She could not tell what he said, or whether he said anything.

He stood so for a long time.

Then his hand dropped. He turned, and picked up the old gray blanket from the bench, and went in by the side door without a sound. She heard his boots on the stair. The bag swung gently in the wind, beside the lantern, and no one came to take it down.

Linn let the door fall shut.

She stood in the dark of the common room with her back against the wood and her heart doing something very strange. She did not know what it meant. She did not know whether he was angry, or ashamed, or relieved, or all three. She knew only that he had seen the bag hanging in the light, where a thing was hung that was waiting to be claimed, and that he had not claimed it.

It was a very small thing.

She would think about it, for a long time, in the weeks that followed.