Or, worse, I might imagine what came after the dragon. What was waiting for you at Cavallon Keep, and how you would look laid out on your bier.
At this thought my lungs would refuse to work properly and my hands would shake again, and my ears would fill with a sound like radio static.
You never remarked on such fits. You only folded yourself around me while I shuddered and panted, letting the heat of your skin soak into mine. It was an impersonal courtesy, a service rendered, but still: I lingered longer than I should have, afterward.
Forgive me—a coward so rarely feels safe.
The farther north we rode, the grayer and more miserable the villages became, until they did not resemble villages so much as wild outcroppings of huts, sprouting like pale mushrooms between the rocks. The people werebent and wind wracked, their faces hollowed in a way that made me think of the Hinterlander children who used to steal our empty bean tins in the war, running their fingers around the edges for the last drops of brine.
The whispers grew sharper, more vicious, and the stares grew colder. We did not speak of it, but you began to guide the gelding more often away from the road, along the gorse-eaten slopes and stone ridges.
But we couldn’t avoid every village. In a narrow pass between two peaks, we came upon a place so desperately poor it was difficult to tell if it was a settlement or an encampment. Several of the structures were nothing but stacked rocks and goatskins, and the smoke that slunk from their roofs smelled of green wood and animal shit.
We had to lead the horse—blindfolded, to reduce civilian casualties—and pick our way through the churned mud between huts. I’d been planning to trade the fresh hare you’d tied over the saddlebow for some ale and a few more stories, but the expressions of the gathering villagers changed my mind. They did not whisper at all, but only stared, mute and hostile.
A stooped old man spat deliberately on the ground as we passed.
A bony young woman dumped her wash water so that it slopped over your boots, leaving them filmed with lye and grease.
A boy contrived to knock a cart of shriveled swedes directly into the path, so that the horse stumbled.
The villagers watched you avidly, but you did not scowl or recoil, or even break your stride.
They reminded me of the crowd I’d once seen in a lion-tamer’s tent. The lion had been torpid and rheumatic, and the less dangerous it seemed the more vicious the crowd became, as if they were owed blood, and were determined to get it one way or another.
We were at the very edge of the village when a man approached at your back. He was thin and nearly bald, the flesh of his head covered in slick pink scars, as from fire.
The gelding tossed his head as he approached, nostrils wide, but you did not turn. The man spat something in a guttural language I didn’t know, and I understood that he hated you. They all did.
Then he grabbed a fistful of your hair, and I thought, fervently:You should not have done that.
You stopped walking, chin jerked upward by the tug of your scalp.
There was a tiny pause, during which the reins slipped from your hand,and your expression turned remote, as if you had gone away and left your body behind. It was the way you looked when you woke from your bad dreams, reaching for my throat, and I knew that very soon there would be a dead man in the street.
Some dark, subterranean part of me—the part of me that saw those dirty knuckles wrapped in the shine of your hair and wanted to put the entire godforsaken village to the torch and salt the ashes—didn’t really mind.
But I thought you might. I should have grabbed your arm—but I hesitated, and then you were moving.
You were so damn fast. You had turned, blade drawn and lifted, already falling downward, by the time I shouted your name. “Una!”
You flinched. Not much, but enough to ruin the perfect arc of the blow. Instead of falling across the man’s neck, Valiance fell at his wrist, with a sound like a hatchet into wet wood.
All of us—you and I, the scarred man, and the straggling villagers behind us—looked for a moment at the neat pink meat where his hand had been. The white stubs of his arm bones sheered cleanly away. Then the flood of red, and the wailing.
You watched, impassive, as he collapsed. The gelding reared, blind but bloodthirsty, and you made no move to catch the reins.
I said your name again, and you looked at me in a way that suggested there might still be a dead man in the street soon. Who was I to you, after all? A lost scribe, a slightly-above-average fortune-teller, a stray you dragged reluctantly along with you.
I didn’t blink or step back. I only held your gaze, and held it, my fists clenched so tightly I felt my palm crack and bleed fresh.
Eventually something flickered in the depths of your eyes. Valiance hissed back into its sheath. You caught the gelding and quieted him. A pair of women came running to the man’s side, tears running down their cheeks. One of them reached toward the hand—now sticking upright in the mud, as if someone were reaching up from under the earth—but drew back.
You watched them weeping with no expression at all. Then you turned your back on the village and walked on.
After a mile or so you paused and dropped to one knee, head bowed, hands cupped in the shape of a stirrup. I blinked down at you for several seconds before stepping gingerly into your palms. You lifted me into thesaddle without effort but did not swing yourself up behind me. You walked instead, apparently too furious with me to bear my company.
It was a long way before we made camp that night.
