Free The Ruby Moon by Trisha Priebe Page B

queen to pass out at court. She shuddered to think how close she might have come to being sent to the tower prison over that unintentional choice.
    Avery jumped from her bed, threw on her clothes, and followed the sound to the dining area. And there sat Babs.
    “Good morning!” he said, mouth full. “You missed breakfast, so I’m eating yours. Hope you’re not offended.”
    He laughed heartily and motioned to a chair across from him, but Avery didn’t budge.
    “Not offended,” she mumbled. “No appetite.”
    “And I know why,” Babs said with a wave. “It was all anyone could talk about at breakfast. Tuck selected Ilsa over you, and you’re unhappy about it. C’mon, sit.” He shoveled an enormous bite of salt fish into his mouth, making her wonder how he could have been whistling.
    “I don’t want to talk about it. Anyway, why do you care?”
    Babs set down his fork and looked wounded. “And here I thought we were friends.”
    “What do you want from me?” she asked.
    “I want you to sit and keep me company a few moments,” he said, his smile returning then fading. “You’re angry. What have I done?”
    “I don’t trust you,” she said quietly.
    His ice-blue eyes looked genuinely kind, but Avery knew better. She meant nothing but a rich bounty to him. She pulled from her pocket the bulletin she’d pilfered from him and tossed it on the table.
    “Found that in your pocket,” she said. Babs stopped chewing and folded his meaty hands in his lap. “Friends, are we?” she continued. “You’re just here to protect me, look out for me?”
    “I can explain,” he said weakly.
    “Don’t bother. I can see what I am to you.”
    “No, it’s not like that. I needed to know who you were. The fishwife described you, but she gave me the bulletin because of the drawing. She told me the eyes and nose weren’t quite right, and they aren’t, are they?”
    Now it was Avery who was taken aback. How could the fishwife know that unless she was real? “I don’t look anything like the drawing,” Avery said weakly.
    Babs shrugged. “Sure, I knew about the reward. But if I was going to snatch you up, don’t you think I’d have done it before now? You’ve got to believe me. I’m not out to hurt you.”
    This, at least, made sense. Had she been wrong to assume the worst?
    She moved around the table and sat across from him. “Start from the beginning. I have to know who this fishwife is. What can you tell me about her?”
    “I’ve told you all I know! I’d never met her before.”
    “You said that, but anything, anything at all. A scary presence who intercepted my first visits to the tunnels here smelled like fish. Does she?”
    “Well, of course she does!” Babs said, his smile returning. “But all fishwives do! Everybody who works the harbor does. Hey,
I
probably do!”
    Avery nodded. “Anything else? Nothing is too insignificant. Her size, shape, an accent, anything?”
    Babs pressed his lips together and shoved his plate and utensils aside. “Well, she has strange eyes, I’ll say that.”
    “Strange how?”
    “I didn’t notice the first time we talked, because it was after sundown and she approached me when I came out of the tunnels. But when I talked to her in the fish market one morning, in fact the morning she gave me the gold coin, the sun caught her full in the face. Those eyes, I’ll tell you … One is blue and the other brown.”
    Babs reached for an unused knife and fork, placed them on his plate of half-eaten food, and nudged it across the table to Avery. “You really should eat,” he said.
    But eating was the last thing on her mind. She rose and solemnly strode back around the table, took the big man’s broad face in her palms, and planted a huge kiss on his leathery forehead.
    “Why, thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I think.”

    Avery hurried back to her bed where she stretched out and spread open the bulletin. She had looked at it a hundred times since Kendrick first