“Not exactly,” I say. “Sebastian is a special case, but I’m glad he kept you company.”
“He was very entertaining. His stories were funny.” She takes a deep breath, throwing off any lingering discomfiture, and turns to me. “I have information you want. I would like to trade for it.”
I glance around. Dalton’s taken Storm to get her stitched up at the clinic, and he’s left me to this.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s go into the police station—”
“I would prefer to stay outside.”
“May we at least leave the town square? Everyone can hear our conversation here.”
She nods, and we begin walking.
“You found a baby,” she says. “That’s why you came to my grandfather. You didn’t tell me that. You should have.”
“Edwin had already told us where to find the baby’s parents.”
“He lied.”
“So we discovered,” I mutter. “The clothing came from the Second Settlement, not the trading family he sent us to.”
“Did you speak to the traders?”
I nod.
“And what did you think?”
“You were right. Not the sort of people I care to do business with.”
“They can trade fairly. The problem is that we only use them when we must, and then they know how badly we need their supplies, so we pay far too much. Grandfather would prefer not to do business with them. He’d rather do business with you.”
“Understandable. We’d rather do business with him.”
“Good.”
She slows to look up at a decorated pine towering over us. I imagine her assessing not the beauty of the object, but the relative wealth that it requires—the expenditure of both time and goods.
“It’s the holidays,” I say. “Time to celebrate the solstice.”
She nods. “We do that as well. We do not string berries in trees, though.”
“The birds will appreciate them.”
She snorts. “The birds that come for those will not be good eating.”
Apparently she thinks our decorated trees are luring dinner. I’m about to say not everything is about food, but fortunately, I do nothing so thoughtless. For settlers, everything is about food—or shelter or basic survival.
“People enjoy seeing the birds,” I say simply.
“You sound like those from the Second Settlement.”
I glance over at her. “I thought you didn’t have contact with them.”
She shrugs. “That is my grandfather’s way. It is their elders’ way. It is not our way.” She pauses to watch a few residents race by, sliding on the packed snow and laughing like children. She shakes her head. “It is different here.”
“They’re just on lunch break before their afternoon shift.”
“So you met the Second Settlement,” she says. “What did you think of them?”