Market Day

The trouble with peace, Oriel decided, was that it had so many small tasks in it. Buying bread. Knowing the bread-seller's name. Remembering it the next week, and the week after, until the bread-seller stopped being a stranger and became a fixture, a thread in a life. Oriel had been good at a great many things in the bad years and was discovering, with some alarm, that none of those things were this. Tam was better at it. Tam could stand in the market and let a conversation happen to him, let an old woman tell him about her knees, and not once look for the exits. Oriel looked for the exits. Oriel looked for the exits in a bakery. She caught herself doing it, counting the doors, and had to step outside and stand against the wall and breathe until her hands unclenched. Tam found her there. He didn't ask. He just leaned on the wall beside her and ate his bread and let her have the wall for as long as she needed it.