“Well, you’ve saved me the trouble of mending my shirt. For that, I’m grateful.”

She made a dismissive gesture at the garments on the table. “Your trousers need to be let out again. And what you are wearing now looks no better. You look more like a scarecrow than a soldier.”

She said the words carelessly and probably didn’t intend that they stung, but they did. “I know,” I said tersely. “The men in charge of uniforms have not been very forthcoming. They simply say they’ve nothing that will fit me, and give up. Today the colonel said that I might say it was his order they be more helpful. But—” My words halted of themselves. I didn’t want to tell her what had happened or why. “I didn’t have time to stop there,” I finished lamely.

An awkward silence fell between us. The kettle was boiling. I took it off the hob and added more hot water to the teapot and another pinch of leaves. Amzil was looking everywhere but at me. Her eyes roamed around the room and then she suddenly said, “I could come and live here and do for you. Me and my children, I mean. And I could keep your washing done and sew you up a decent uniform, if you got the cloth. I can cook and mind that little garden you’ve got going.”

I was looking at her incredulously. I think she thought I wanted more from her, because she added, “And we can keep care of your horse, too. And all I’ll be asking of you is a roof over our heads and what food you’re willing to spare us. And, and, that would be all. Just those things.”

My mind filled in what she hadn’t named. She wasn’t offering to share my bed. I had the feeling that if I pushed for that right now, she’d add it to the list, but I didn’t want to have her. Not that way. I chewed on my lip, trying to think of what to say. How could I tell her that I wasn’t sure I’d be staying in this world? With every step of my ride home, the forest had looked better to me.

Her eyes had been scanning my face anxiously. Now she looked away and spoke more gruffly. “I know what’s going on, Nevare. What they’re saying about you in town. In a way, that’s why I came here.” She folded up the shirt and set it very firmly on the table. Then she spoke to it. “My children aren’t at a boardinghouse. They’re at a…one of Sarla Moggam’s girls is watching them for me. She can’t work right now because, well, because she can’t. But no one knows I came here. See this?”

She reached down the front of her dress. While I regarded her, dumbstruck, she fished up a brass whistle on a chain. “The girls at the house, they give this to me when I first got there yesterday. They told me some officer’s wife in town, she started this thing where all the women wear them, and if they feel they’re in danger, all they have to do is blow the whistle, and every woman what’s wearing a whistle has to promise that no matter what, if she hears a whistle blow, she’ll run toward the sound and help whoever is in danger. That’s the deal. And when I said, ‘Well, what kind of danger?’ they told me about not just whores but decent women getting beaten up and raped, and that a girl from Sarla’s own house had just vanished and everyone thought she was murdered and even though most people knew who did it, no one was stepping forward to protect the whores, so they’d decided they’d join the whistlers and protect each other. And when I asked who killed the girl, one of them said a big fat sonofabitch named Never that guarded the cemetery.”

She stopped and took a deep breath. The words had spilled out of her like pus squirting out of an infected boil, and I felt much the same way about what she had told me. I wanted to cry. It wasn’t a manly reaction, but it was my overwhelming response to what she’d said. Even after what had happened to me in town today, it was still shocking to hear that people were talking of me as a rapist and murderer, naming me as the man who had killed Fala. I wondered why they were so sure she was dead and why they blamed me. I had no way to clear myself of their suspicions. Unless Fala showed up somewhere, alive and well, I could not prove she hadn’t been murdered and that I hadn’t done it. I muttered as much to Amzil.

“Then you didn’t do it.” She spoke it as a statement but I heard it as a question.

I replied bluntly. “Good god, no. No! I had no reason to, and every reason not to. Why would a man kill the only whore in town who would service him willingly?” Anger and fear made my heart race. I got up and left the table and went to the door to stare out across the graveyard toward the forest.

“They said—” I heard her swallow, and then she went on, “They said that maybe she wasn’t willing, that you kept her in the room a lot longer than any man ever had before. And that maybe you caught her alone, and maybe she said no, not for any money, and that maybe then you raped her anyway and killed her in anger.”

I sighed. My throat was tight. I spoke softly. “I don’t know what became of Fala, Amzil. I hope that she somehow got away from Gettys and is having a nice life somewhere. I didn’t kill her. I never saw her again after that one night. And I didn’t force her to keep to her room with me. As far-fetched as it sounds, she wanted to be there.” Even as I said the words, I realized how unlikely they would sound to anyone else in the world.

“I didn’t think you had, Nevare. I thought of all the nights we were alone in my house. If you were the kind of man who would force a woman, or kill her if she refused, well—” She paused, then pointed out, “If I’d believed what they said, would I have come all this way out here, alone, not telling anyone where I was going and leaving my kids with strangers who’d toss them out on the streets if I never came back? I didn’t believe it of you.”

“Thank you,” I replied gravely. I felt truly grateful. I thought about that. I was grateful because a woman didn’t think I was a murderer. When I’d been tall and handsome and golden, everyone had thought well of me. Carsina had told me how brave I’d looked. Encase the same man in this slab of flesh and these worn clothes and women saw a rapist and murderer. I lifted my hands to my face and rubbed my temples.

“So. Nevare. What do you think?”

I dropped my hands and stared at her. “What?”

“I know it’s not much time to think about it, but I have to have an answer. Last night they let me stay for free. They say that my little ones can sleep in one of the empty rooms at night while I’m working. But that won’t change that they’ll be growing up as the children of a whore. And I know what will happen to my girls if they do. Don’t know what would become of Sem. Truth to tell, I don’t even want to wonder what happens to a boy growing up in a whorehouse. I got to get them out of there today, or I got to go to work there tonight. And I know that you know in the past, I’ve done whatever I had to do to get by, but Nevare, I never thought of myself as a whore. Just as a mother doing what she had to do, once in a while, to get stuff for her children. But if I start working there, night after night, well, I will be a whore. And no denying it.”

“Why did you leave your cabin finally? What drove you out?”

She met my gaze squarely. “You remember that fellow up the hill? He tried to break in. I had my gun and I warned him, four, five times I shouted at him to get away from the door or I’d shoot. He shouted back that he’d never seen me fire that thing and he didn’t think I knew how or that I had any bullets. And the way he was yelling, I knew that he wasn’t just going to break in and take what he wanted. He was going to get rid of us, to be sure he could have all we had. So I shooed my kids behind me, and when he finally got the door chopped in, well, I fired. And I killed him. And then I packed up my children and what we could carry and we ran away from there.” By the time she finished speaking, she was hunched over in her chair as if she expected me to strike her, wringing her hands together. She looked up at me from her cower. “So now you know,” she said very softly. “I am what they accuse you of being. I murdered him. I’m telling you the truth, because I want you to know the truth before you decide if you’ll help me or not.”