“You have tobacco, do you?” he asked.
Judith, her back to the entrance, stood rigidly with a jar in her hands while Nathaniel helped the customer. The man left quickly, and a few minutes later, someone else came looking for soap. Judith stepped out of the shop.
She found the stranger a few paces from the shop’s entrance, leaning against a wall. He was carrying a long string of onions over his shoulder and smiled at her.
“What were you doing in there?” she asked.
“Getting myself a pinch of tobacco. It’ll make these onions go down better if I can smoke a pipe. This is my supper, you see, and rather meager it is.”
“You should have spent your money on meat instead of tobacco, then.”
“One must nurse a few vices,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a crust of bread, would you?”
“Leave town. Go beg in a big village.”
“Beggars are arrested in big villages.”
“In small ones too,” she said.
He looked thinner than when they’d first met, his high cheekbones straining against his skin. She imagined that underneath his clothes he was more bone than flesh.
“Come back after dark,” she said. “I’ll give you your crust of bread then.”
The shop boy returned, and Nathaniel headed back to the guesthouse. Before dusk, Judith told the shop boy that she’d close by herself. The boy was so grateful he practically skipped home. The stranger appeared a little afterward, and she locked the door, guiding him to the storage room, where she grabbed a jar of pickles and another with jam. She tossed them in a burlap sack, along with a loaf of bread she’d pilfered from the kitchen. She supposed he wouldn’t complain about its quality, like her sister did.
“There,” she said. “Count yourself lucky and don’t bother me again.”
“You are the very soul of charity,” he said, and his smile was sardonic and sharp as usual. Sharp as a blade he was, and those eyes of his were a bit like ice, bright and cool.
“Where are you sleeping? Not in the hut, I hope. You’re not allowed back there.”
“I wouldn’t go inside unless you invited me.”
“Good. Because if you break a window and try to wiggle in, you’ll be sorry. Are you sleeping in someone’s stable? Sneaking in at night?”
“Maybe I slide into the bed of a matron with a nightcap on her head and warm her better than a pelt,” he said.
“You’re silly and you must go away. Why should you remain here?”
“The winter is hard everywhere, and the local priest is more generous than the ones at other parishes,” he said. “On occasion he’ll hand a man a bowl of soup in exchange for clearing the snow from his steps. In other places, they’ll beat you with a club and give chase.”
She thought it must be a sorry existence to be wandering from village to village like that, begging for scraps and doing menial work, with the threat of the authorities dragging you to jail.
The stranger sat down and took off his coat and his leather gloves. His hands did not look roughened up, although he had dark, ugly hairs on his knuckles and his nails were long. Then again, he seemed hairy all over, with a full beard and his thick hair gathered at the nape. Nathaniel shaved his cheeks every morning, and she liked that. It made her think he was more dandy than village lad. A prince, not a pauper.
The man began gnawing at his bread, humming as he ate, and she looked at his face and at the gray bag dangling from his neck.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“Is that where you keep your money or a special heirloom?”
“If you let me fill this burlap sack with a few more supplies, I’ll tell you.”
She considered the proposition. It wouldn’t be too hard to conceal the disappearance of a few items, if they were small and unimportant. She nodded. He tossed a jar filled with carrots and one with parsnips into the sack.
He knelt in front of her, lifting the cord over his head. He opened the bag and emptied its contents onto his hand. There was a feather, a tiny bone that must belong to a bird, dirt, pebbles, dried petals, and thread.
“It’s only rubbish,” she said.
“It’s a spell to turn me into a wolf in the moonlight so I can go howling through the woods. I turn back into a man come morning.”
“If you can turn into a wolf, why don’t you hunt for your supper?”
“I do, but nobody wants to be chewing on the bones of a scrawny hare every other day. The winter has been bad for hunting. And one has a fondness for certain commodities.”
“Like tobacco.” She shook her head. “I don’t see how this bag helps you become anything.”
“Shows what you know. You take the petals of the black hellebore and the fat of a wolf, boil it up into an ointment and anoint yourself with it under the moonlight once you turn fifteen, and thereafter you’ll be able to transform into a beast.”
“I see. And this little bone, that does what?” she asked, pointing at his open palm.
“Does magic, that’s what it does.”
He placed the objects back into the pouch and handed it to her. Judith held it between her hands and shook it, hearing the contents rattle.
“Is that why you became a vagrant? You coated yourself with an ointment and turned into a wolf. Then you ate the neighbor’s livestock and were found out.”
“Possibly. Maybe it’s just warmer wearing a pelt in the winter,” he said, and rubbed his hands together.
“Before you said you stole a relic, that a warlock in a cave cursed you, and now that you spread an ointment on your body and cast an impious spell. Which one is the true tale?”
“What do you think, Judith of the Black Hair?” he asked, and his deep-set eyes were full of mischief.
“You’re older than me, but not by much,” she said, carefully dissecting him. “I think you were until recently an apprentice to a tailor or a cobbler, and you ran away with money from your master’s safe.”
“Maybe with his wife, who recklessly took me on as her lover.”
“Not that. You’re not handsome. You have no muscle, no brawn. And your hair looks like a crow’s nest,” she said. She thought that Nathaniel was quite the magnificent specimen in comparison. This man’s eyebrows were too thick; his nose had been broken. Yet she still blushed when he grinned at her with his jagged smile.
“How did you find this village?” she asked, meeting his eyes despite the crimson on her cheeks.
“I followed the river. It sang to me.”
The stranger began humming again as he tossed another jar into the burlap sack.
“What’s that tune?” she asked, pressing a hand against her hair and smoothing it back.
“You haven’t heard it before? It’s popular these days. It’s a ballad about a girl who’s dragged to the bottom of the river by her demon lover. You’d like it,” he said.
“I don’t know. I’d rather have a gentleman than a demon.”
“Better a shop owner in good clothes, then?” He looked at her with those sly eyes of his. “The man in the shop is your lover, isn’t he?”