Leo woke to stillness.

  The cottage was dim, the hearth burnt down to a bed of white ash that gave off no heat and barely any light. Grey crept through the gaps in the shutters, and the air smelled like cold tallow and the faint, herbal tang of the poultice Hanna had left.

  Sera was still beside him.

  That was unusual. Sera was never still beside him at this hour. By the time Leo opened his eyes on any given morning, the space next to him was already cold, her scent fading on the pillow, and the quiet sounds of her moving through the cottage - water pouring, the scrape of the pot on the hearthstone, the soft thud of her boots - had become a part of waking up that Leo’d gotten used to. The rhythm of her morning was the rhythm of his.

  Today she y curled on her good side, knees drawn up, one arm tucked under the pillow and the other resting across her ribs where the bandage sat beneath her shift. Her breathing was slow and deep. A strand of hair had fallen across her mouth and moved with each exhale.

  Leo eased himself out of bed, slow and careful, and reached for his boots. He had one on and was working the ces of the second when the bedframe creaked behind him.

  "Where are you going?"

  Her voice was thick with sleep but already sharpening.

  "The field," he said, keeping his voice low. "Go back to sleep."

  The bnket rustled. Sera propped herself up on one elbow, wincing as the movement pulled at her stitches. "I can come. It's just weeding and..."

  "Sera."

  "It's three stitches."

  "And a week of rest. Hanna's orders."

  She exhaled through her nose - a frustrated sound of a woman who had already done the math and didn't like the answer. Her fingers plucked at the edge of the bnket.

  "I don't like sitting here while you do my work," she said quietly.

  "I know, but you've done a lot when I was on that bed," he finished cing his boot and stood. He filled a cy cup from the water bucket by the door and set it on the crate beside the bed. Then he sat on the edge of the mattress, leaned down, and kissed her.

  His hand found the side of her face, thumb brushing the line of her jaw, and he held her there for a moment, feeling the warmth of her mouth, and the slightly chapped texture of her lips. Sera's fingers curled into the front of his shirt, and she kissed him back with a softness that was reserved for these early, unwitnessed hours.

  When Leo pulled away, her grip lingered on his shirt a half-second before releasing.

  "I'll be back by midday," he said.

  "Hmm."

  A few hours ter, the cottage door swung open and Leo stepped inside, smelling like sweat and turned earth. The green residue of pulled weeds was still drying on his forearms.

  Sera was not in bed.

  She stood on her toes beside the shelf above the washbasin, one arm stretched overhead, fingers reaching for the bundle of dried rosemary she kept tucked behind the salt crock. Her shift had ridden up on the wounded side, and the edge of the bandage was visible, the fabric pulling taut with the stretch.

  She heard the door and froze. Her arm dropped. She turned to face him with the expression of someone who had been caught stealing bread and was already calcuting which lie would nd best.

  "I was just..."

  "Yeah."

  "It's rosemary. I wasn't..."

  "Uh huh."

  Color flooded her cheeks, and she drew herself up, shoulders squaring. Caught Sera became Prickly Sera in the space of a breath, the same way a hedgehog curled when you touched it.

  "Don't look at me like that," she said, her voice gaining an edge. "I've been lying in that bed all morning staring at the ceiling and I was going to lose my mind if I..."

  Leo crossed the room in three steps, caught her face between both hands, and pinched her cheeks with just enough pressure to squish them together, turning her face into something ridiculous and round.

  "Wh... mmph!"

  She swatted at his wrists, but there was no real force behind it. Her eyes were wide with both surprise and embarrassment.

  "Leo! Let go of..."

  He squished harder. She made a sound that was almost a ugh, and swatted him again, and he let go before she escated to actually hitting him.

  Sera stood there with her cheeks fming and her mouth working around words that wouldn't form. Her fingers twitched at her sides.

  Then she turned on her heel, walked back to the bed, and sat down on the edge with exaggerated care, pulled the bnket over her legs, and stared at the wall.

  Leo reached up and pulled the rosemary from the shelf.

  "This what you wanted?" he asked.

  "Put it on the table," she said to the wall. "And don't ever do that again."

  The Stonemorels sat in a cy bowl on the table, and Sera stared at them with the expression of a woman attending a funeral.

  They looked worse out here than they had in the dungeon. Pale brown caps no rger than the pad of Leo's thumb, wrinkled and irregur, their stubby white stems still dusted with stone grit. Half of them were fttened. Caps split open, edges crumbled, the wrinkled flesh bruised to a dark amber where Sera's pack had smmed against the tunnel wall during the fight with the giant beetle.

  "That's a lot of coins that we lost." Sera picked up a crushed cap between two fingers, turned it over. "Even Kerrin won't buy these."

  "So we eat them."

  "That's literally eating money."

  "We eat mushrooms that a spice merchant in Rockhaven would y out on bck cloth like jewelry," Leo pulled the cy bowl closer. "Come on. Tell me how to cook these."

  In the end, the Stonemorels went onto the ft hearthstone with a smear of rd and Sera's instructions delivered from the bed like a general directing siege works.

  The rest of the cooking was chaos. The barley came out mushy. The potatoes charred unevenly. Leo burned himself on a pot handle and Sera said she'd been about to warn him. But the morels roasted to a deep, toasted gold and filled the cottage with a savory and impossibly rich smell for something so small and ugly.

  Leo divided everything between two bowls and brought one to the bed. Sera took it with both hands, her expression still carrying the st traces of mourning for the lost coins. They both picked up the two rgest caps - no bigger than a coin, still glistening with rendered fat - and bit into them.

  They both stopped chewing.

  The fvor hit in yers, the same way it had in the dungeon. Then the savory richness spread, dense and concentrated, carrying that impossible buttery depth. The rd and the heat had deepened everything.

  Sera chewed again, slower. Her face softened, starting at her brow and moved downward, easing the tight line of her mouth. She looked down at the bowl as if seeing it for the first time.

  She ate every st morel first, picking each one out with her fingers and pressing it between her tongue and the roof of her mouth to catch the full weight of the fvor. Then the potatoes. Then the mushy barley. She cleaned the bowl so thoroughly it barely needed washing.

  When she set it down, her expression had changed. The funeral was over. In its pce was the reluctant satisfaction of a woman who had recalcuted the money they lost and arrived at a different answer than expected.

  It was worth every coin.

  Evening came slowly, the light in the cottage deepening from gold to amber to the soft orange of the single candle Leo lit when the sun dipped below the shutters. The air smelled like the ghost of Stonemorels and the clean linen Hanna had left folded on the table that morning during her check up.

  "Come here," Leo said.

  Sera sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her shift up to her ribs, holding it bunched against her chest with both hands. The bandage was still clean - no fresh blood, no discoloration - but Hanna's orders were Hanna's orders.

  Leo knelt in front of her. He unwound the cloth slowly, his fingers following the spiral of linen around her torso, feeling the warmth of her skin underneath. The wound was a thin line below her left ribs, closed with three neat stitches in dark thread. The skin around it was bruised - a mottled purple fading to yellow at the edges - but the flesh was not swollen.

  He dipped a cloth in the warm water Sera had heated - she'd insisted on doing at least that much - and pressed it gently against the wound. She hissed, more from the temperature than the pain, and her stomach muscles contracted under his fingers.

  "Sorry."

  "It's fine."

  He cleaned the area with careful strokes, wiping away the residue of the poultice. He then picked up the fresh linen and began wrapping.

  "Tighter," Sera said.

  He pulled the cloth snug.

  "Not that tight."

  He loosened.

  "Leo."

  "I'm finding the middle."

  "The middle was two adjustments ago."

  He found it. The bandage sat firm against her ribs, secure without compressing, the end tucked neatly under the st wrap the way Hanna had shown him. He smoothed the edge with his thumb and looked up.

  Sera was watching him. Her shift still bunched against her chest, her arms bare, her hair loose around her shoulders. The irritation had left her face. What remained was something warm and unguarded. Her lips were slightly parted, and her eyes held his.

  Leo's hand was still resting against the bandage. Against the warmth of her skin, and the rise and fall of her breathing.

  He leaned up and kissed her.

  Sera's hand found the back of his neck and pulled him in. Her mouth opened against his as her fingers tightening in his hair. She made a sound against his lips, low and urgent, and Leo's hand slid from the bandage to the bare skin of her waist, pulling her closer, feeling the shudder that ran through her when his thumb traced the curve of her hip.

  His other hand found her thigh. She arched into him - and gasped.

  Not the right kind of gasp.

  "Nngh... damn it!" Sera pulled back, her face crunched up, one hand pressed ft against her wounded side.

  Leo's forehead dropped against her colrbone. He exhaled - long and heavy with a frustration from the exquisite torture of having his wife warm, willing and right there and being unable to do a single thing about it.

  "A week," he said into her skin. "A whole week."

  Sera's fingers were still in his hair. Her breathing was uneven, her pulse hammering against his lips where they rested against her throat.

  "Could be worse," she managed.

  "How?"

  "Could be two weeks."

  Leo groaned. Sera's ugh was breathless and cut short by a wince, and she pressed her lips against the top of his head - a quick, fierce kiss that could be understood as a promise.

  He pulled back and straightened the bandage she'd shifted. While he was helping her ease the shift back down over her ribs, his fingers linger a half-second longer than necessary on the fabric.

  Calrel_04