Your hand spasmed away from my skin. You shoved yourself backward, away from me, clutching the cloak to your chest. “I told you not to come near me, boy,” you said, roughly. “I could havekilledyou.”
I rolled my jaw. I suspected you could have ripped out my trachea bare-handed, but you hadn’t even applied enough pressure to bruise. “You’ve called out twice in your sleep already tonight,” I observed. “You haven’t killed me yet.”
“I still might,” you said, with such sincerity that I retreated to my own side of the fire. Your shoulders unknotted, fractionally.
After a long silence, you said, with effort, “Forgive me. I dream often of things I would rather forget. Old battles. Old wounds.” Then, a little defensively, “Many soldiers suffer so.”
It hadn’t been battle you were dreaming of, I was nearly certain. You hadn’t yelled or cursed or screamed in terror. You had begged, in a voice like two halves of a heart scraping together.
But I said, as lightly as I could, “So I’ve heard,” and resettled beneath the furs, head propped on the book.
You looked as if you might say something else, but your eyes fell to the book, and the scars pulled taut across your face. You said, harshly, “Keep to your own side of the fire,” and turned your back to me.
I did as I was bade.
When you called out again—that night and on the nights that followed—I did not go to you. Sometimes I pressed my palms flat to my ears, so that I could not hear the words you said, over and over, in that funeral of a voice:Please,you begged,come back.
On the sixth day, we passed through our first township.
There had been a few sad clusters of cottages near the edge of the woods, occupied by nothing now but rooks and field mice. When I’d asked, you told me there had once been people who made their livelihood from the forest. Huntsmen and furriers, poor crofters who set their pigs loose in the loam, weavers who gathered woad and rue for their dyes. Even the Roving Folk sometimes summered there, when they were not wandering, trading horses and telling stories.
“But no one lives in the wood now?” I’d asked.
You’d answered, neutrally, “It’s the Queen’s Wood, now, and no one else’s.”
The homes ahead of us were not abandoned. Clean, white woodsmoke unfurled from every chimney, and the hum of human voices buzzed in my ears. I braced myself for gawking and muttering, perhaps worse—
But the town was not the uniform, idyllic portrait of old Dominion that was conjured by columnists and cartoonists. It looked more or less like any modern city, minus the sewer system. Children darted down the streets, laughing and jeering in languages I didn’t know. A well-dressed man with dark skin led a pair of laden mules. There was even a Gallish temple on one corner, with finely painted alcoves for each of their forty gods, although most of the gods had been defaced.
I decided I would not mention any of this in the book. (An acerbic voice in my head noted that I was accumulating quite a list of things I was not mentioning; the voice sounded very much like Professor Sawbridge’s.)
People did gawk—but not at me.
You wore no armor and rode with no complement. You had even covered your shield with old canvas—but still, they knew you. They knew you by your bone-colored hair and your broad shoulders, by the glint of armor in your saddlebags and by Valiance, hanging always at your side.
They knew you, and they watched you. They nudged one another and pointed, twittering like starlings. Except—they were not joyous or reverent. They did not greet you with cheers or thrown flowers or babies in need of blessing, as they would a hero. They did not even greet you with a hot meal or a spare bed, as they would a weary stranger.
They only watched, as if you were a thing apart from them, neither man nor woman but some third chimerical thing, as likely to break bread with them as a dragon or a lion.
You ignored the stares, or seemed to. I felt the way you shrank inward, tucking your elbows and ducking your head in a laughable attempt to make yourself ordinary. When you dismounted to buy grain from a ploughman you spoke softly, with your eyes averted; his hand shook as he took your coin.
When you turned toward a young woman bearing a basket of sooty griddle cakes, she backed away, her face so pale her freckles looked like pepper sprinkled on a dish of milk. From the saddle, I saw your shoulders sag.
“Wait, miss,” I said, sliding awkwardly from the horse and stumbling on numb legs. “I’m starving, and she’s a terrible cook.” I could feel your glare on the back of my neck. I held my hand up behind me and, after a disapproving pause, you placed three small coins in my palm.
I pulled the girl a few steps down the lane, talking and gesturing.
Five minutes later, I returned to you with five griddle cakes and a half-full flagon of wine.
“And,” I announced, in some triumph, “she says there’s a bathhouse two streets north.”
For a moment—during which I discovered how badly I longed for hot water and soap—you looked as if you might refuse. Then, with a short sigh, you tugged the horse north.
The bathhouse was a lime-washed building that smelled of lye and charcoal. The attendants—businesslike women with substantial shoulders and red-raw hands—led us to a low-ceilinged room with a vast tub in the middle. The water was scummy and grayish, tepid at best; I thought I might weep at the sight of it.
The attendants set a crumbly cake of soap on the sill, bobbed in matching curtsies, and turned away.
“Uh, pardon me, but where should—” I began, but the door snapped shut behind them.
