Ysabet leaned her shoulders back against the polished stone root and looked straight into Pip’s two amber eyes.
“I can’t promise you what I would have done in every possible world, Pip,” she said plainly. “If I’d had a fever that evening, or if Vennick had paid me on time and I’d gone straight to the baker’s instead of walking past Darr’s ring, or if I’d been a harder woman than I was that Tuesday—I don’t know. Anyone who swears they’d be good in a life they didn’t have to live is lying to look pretty.”
Pip stayed completely still on the threshold of the hollow, listening without clicking.
“What I know is what I actually looked at through those fish slats,” Ysabet said. “I certainly didn’t think I was buying a god, or a bridge-holder, or a shield against lightning. I thought you were the ugliest, poorest-fed marsh cull I’d seen in ten years, and I was angry with myself for opening my purse before the bidding even stopped.”
A tiny glint of green light warmed beneath Pip’s breastplate at that, though it did not interrupt.
“I bought the crate,” Ysabet continued, touching three fingers of her left hand one by one, “because there was a dead black beetle lying in the corner of the mud, and you had pulled clean dry straw around it with your mouth so the salvager’s boot wouldn’t mash it flat. And because when he jabbed his ash stick through the bars, you tucked…
