Page 35 of Tusk Love

Oskar stopped walking and absentmindedly patted Pudding’s nose while he scanned the mess of buildings for the inn’s signpost. It was a moment of stillness that allowed him to become aware of a weighty sensation on the back of his neck, which, the longer he assessed it, gained a prickly current.

He had the instincts of a lifelong hunter and tracker. In this case, the difference between a predator lurking in the undergrowth and a danger hidden in the crowds was minimal. He and Guinevere were being watched. And not only by the people gawking at her. This was a different kind of gaze—intent and calculating. He stopped looking for the inn and started looking for whoeveritwas, his eyes narrowing from one cluster of strangers to the next. There were some drunks slouched outside a tavern, a woman haggling with a fruit peddler while her children clutched at her skirts, a group of men loudly arguing over a broken cart…

“Guinevere?”

The cultured accent broke through the Sprawl’s hubbub. A carnation-skinned infernal was swanning over, for there was no other way to describe how she walked, all fluttering arms, piles of jewelry clanking together with each light, skipping step.

“Lila!” Guinevere cried, and the absolutely hilarious thing was that she began swanning, too, her arms fluttering even more vivaciously as she squirmed in the saddle. Oskar had to hurry to help her dismount before she fell off. Once she was on solid ground, she gripped her cloak tighter around herself—to cover, he realized with a peculiar twist to his insides, her humble dress. She beamed at Lila, and they exchanged airy cheek kisses and then held each other’s hands and emitted squeals of such high pitch that they surely should not have been audible to the humanoid ear.

“Fancy seeing you here!” Lila tossed back her horned head, acurtain of sapphire hair spilling down one silk-clad shoulder. “Foxhall is checking in on some investments and I thought I’d tag along—fascinating city, isn’t it! Do you remember Lunete telling us about the time she fell into the sewers?” She and Guinevere giggled, then the infernal looked around expectantly. “I suppose your parents aren’t too far off.”

“They are, rather,” said Guinevere. “I’m to meet them on the Menagerie Coast.”

“How perfectly titillating. Where on earth is your chaperone, then? I should like to greet—” Lila’s mouth snapped shut as it became clear that there was no mobcap-wearing spinster in the immediate vicinity. Her ruby eyes fell on Oskar, who had been standing there for the last few minutes with his presence going about as acknowledged as a potted plant.

Guinevere swallowed. “Oskar,” she said in a quiet, stricken voice that gnawed at him, “permit me to make known to you Lila, Lady Foxhall. A neighbor of my family’s, from Rexxentrum. Lila, this is Oskar, my…”

She trailed off, at a loss on how to describe him. Embarrassed to be seen with him, more like. Him and his threadbare clothes and his cheap boots.

“I’m the chaperone,” Oskar said curtly.

Lila’s features twitched. She sucked in a sudden breath, as though remembering something, and turned to Guinevere with none of the righteous condemnation that Oskar had expected. Instead, her expression was filled with pity.

“Chin up, my dear. Things will get better,” Lila told Guinevere. “It’s only a temporary slump, isn’t it? I’ll talk to my husband about opening some shares to your father on his next venture. Foxhall will give Master Illiard a friendly price, never fear. In the meantime, why don’t you stay with us while you’re in town? We have the most darling house in the Tri-Spire district, with a lovely view of the Constellation Bridge.”

“Thank you.” Guinevere’s small hands balled into fists. “But Oskarand I are in no need of charity just yet. It was nice to see you, Lila. Please give my best regards to Lord Foxhall.”

With that, she spun on her heel and walked away, leaving Oskar no choice but to follow with the horses while Lila blinked after them in confusion.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Oskar

“What was that about?” Oskar demanded once they were out of earshot. “What’s in a slump?”

Guinevere’s posture was ramrod straight, so incredibly tense. He’d seen more relaxed spears. She didn’t say anything until they found the Song and Supper farther down the block and stopped beneath its awning. People hurried past on their way to a hundred somewhere elses, but the two of them stood unmoving, adjacent islands in a wave-tossed ocean, never more distant from each other than they were now.

Although…it was technically notjustthe two of them. Pudding was looking from Oskar to Guinevere and back again, bewildered in her usual way. As for Vindicator, he swung his great neck in yet another attempt to bite Oskar’s face off, but Oskar impatiently shoved the stallion’s head away as he awaited Guinevere’s response.

“It started two years ago,” she mumbled, her eyes downcast. “My parents came home for the winter quite worried because they hadn’t made much during the caravan season. Nor were they able to recouptheir losses in the next. Father eventually grew desperate enough to invest the bulk of our remaining funds in the maiden fleet of a new shipping company headquartered in Nicodranas.” She gave a helpless shrug. “To be fair, it seemed a good idea at the time. The ships were to ply the route between Issylra and Wildemount, transporting high-quality products that neither continent would otherwise have much access to. Unfortunately, the entire fleet sank in a storm only four days after setting out from Issylra’s coast.”

Oskar didn’t have a very high opinion of Guinevere’s father, but the story still chilled him. To pin your last hopes on that one thing, only to have them dashed through no fault of your own…It was a familiar tale. So many of his neighbors in the Dustbellows had lived it.

“We sold off most of the furniture,” Guinevere continued dully. “It was…difficult, watching the house grow emptier each day. Then the majority of the servants had to be laid off. But still there was money for my education, my training—because it’s all up to me now, you see.” She finally looked up at Oskar, and her gaze begged him to understand. “I am their only child. I have to marry well, to save my family. My parents hurried to Nicodranas on the off chance that they could get back at least a portion of the investment, but they were also on the lookout for a match for me. So when they wrote that Lord Wensleydale was interested, and to bring the trunk and whatever remaining wares we had, of course I went at once. It’s the only way.”

Right from the start, there had been some things about Guinevere’s situation that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. But they had floated around in Oskar’s mind, random pieces that he didn’t realize belonged to the same puzzle until it was all laid out like this. This was an answer to questions he should have asked, if only he hadn’t been so distracted by her. By all the horrible, wonderful things that he felt for her.

For the daughter of a wealthy merchant, she had been traveling with no lady’s companion and precious few guards. If the contents of the trunk were as valuable as they were purported to be, the woefully inadequate security measures had been shortsighted to the point ofbeing idiotic. But now Oskar saw the choice for what it had been on her parents’ end: desperation.

He had greatly misjudged Guinevere even back then. Like him—like his mother, like everyone he knew in Druvenlode—she’d been trying to survive with what she’d been given. And hadn’t her will to survive surprised him every single day that they’d spent on the road?

The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. At himself, for how he’d treated her at the beginning of their acquaintance. At her parents, for placing the burden on her shoulders. If the contents of the trunk were so valuable that a lord had proposed marriage sight unseen, they could have sold it for a fortune without ever needing to place their only child’s fate in the hands of a stranger.

But Wensleydale was atitledstranger. And people could still be selfish and ambitious when they were desperate, perhaps even moreso.

Oskar reached out and wiped a smudge of Amber Road dust from the sleeve of Guinevere’s cloak. This, too, was consolation, the way he had learned it growing up.

“You’re more than a pension fund, Gwen,” he said heavily. “You are your own person, with your own dreams for the future. I hate that your folks don’t understand that, but I wishyouwould.”

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