When I returned, Hen was canted toward the cottage, lips peeled up in the way that meant he’d met a new person and was hoping to kill them soon. “Be easy,” I told him, firmly. “He’s harmless.”
You said, “I’m sure,” and stood blinking stupidly in the doorway, unaware that your life had been spared.
I slung my kill—a tierce of hares—over a downed log to skin and dress them. You began talking again almost immediately.
Words had never come easily to me, but you seemed to have twice the usual supply. You argued and joked, muttered and questioned, observed and wheedled. You moved constantly as you spoke, a ceaseless fidgeting, as if your skin had difficulty containing all the sentences you hadn’t yet said. It was strangely mesmerizing, like the swooping and twittering of a swallow, so that I found it difficult to focus on my work.
Until you asked, with the first stirrings of doubt in your voice, “What are you doinghere?” Then suddenly it became difficult to look up.
I wanted to make you understand. But how could I explain the things I’d done to a man who’d never had anything worse than ink on his hands? How could I tell you—you, who looked on me with the hungry awe of a child in search of a hero—what I was?
I bowed my head, instead, and did not answer. You understood then that I was not seeking the grail because I no longer wanted to find it.
You were angry with me, and a little repulsed. I listened in silence until you mentioned Yvanne.
I stood and stalked toward you, my muscles quivering with the promise of violence, my vision shifting so that I saw you not as a man but as a list of ways you could die: belly, spine, throat, skull. I wouldn’t even have drawn steel. I know what they say about Valiance, and God knows it’s anuncanny blade, but my body has always been my first and best weapon. It is a goshawk kept tightly tethered, a mad horse on a short lead. I didn’t need a sword to kill you, or even a reason; all I needed was a little slack in the reins.
You knew it, I think. Your eyes were wholly black behind your glasses and your pulse ran quick and wild as a rabbit in the hollow of your throat—yet you stood your ground. Whole armies had fled before me, and yet you—with your delicate hands and your doe’s eyes—did not move.
The sight sent a prickling, reckless heat through me. I wanted to teach you better. To shake you by the shoulders. To take your chin in my hand and cover your mouth with mine, hard enough to bruise. You would learn then, too late, to be afraid of me.
Shame saved you. I stepped away, sick with myself. “Forgive me,” I said. I tried, clumsily, to explain why I had come here, and why I had stayed. I thought disgust or pity would drive you away, where fear failed.
Instead, you crouched beside me. You unfastened your collar and bared your scars to me, and for the first time I thought you might have been telling the truth when you said you were a soldier. Only war could chew a man’s flesh like that, down to the bone.
There was a brazen look in your eyes as you held your collar open, as if you expected me to flinch from the sight of your scars. I didn’t, and you looked nearly faint with gratitude. I wondered idly who had flinched from you before, and if you would prefer their thumbs or their ears in recompense.
You were talking again, about honor and courage and the cost of loyalty. You told me I would be a legend. You told me it was worth it, and your voice was so sweetly broken that I nearly believed you. “Please,” you said, “I—we need you.”
Then you took my hand, and I lost hold of the reins.
Once I had touched and been touched easily, without thought. Soldiers would clap me on the back as I passed. Servants would rub salve into my bruises. A woman would slide my hand up her skirt, where the hair turns thick and damp as fresh-mown hay, or a man would put his open mouth beneath my ear. I was good at sex, as I was good at war; mine was a body born to be used.
But I had learned to mistrust myself, after the Bastion. I didn’t touch anyone, now, unless I knew they could defend themselves.
You were sitting beside me, touching my hand, and then you were beneath me, flat on your back, wrists pinned.
For the first time since you’d woken, you stopped talking. You looked up at me with the color rising fast in your face. You swallowed. Said, softly, “Let go.” You did not sound as if you meant it.
I released you hastily and stood. I was not—quite—so dissolute that I would take advantage of a madman, no matter how good he felt beneath me.
“You may stay if you like,” I said, and offered guest-right, as my fathers would have. “But do not touch me unawares, and do not go unarmed in my presence.”
Then I drew that useless little knife of yours from my boot and knelt to fold your long, fine fingers around the hilt. It wouldn’t save you, but if I ever forgot myself again, I hoped at least you would make me bleed for it.
“And tend to that,” I added, touching your bandaged hand. “The blood will draw beasts.”
I left you there, laid flat, flushed. It was not easy.
As I walked away, you told me God would come to me in a dream. He didn’t, of course. But you did.
I did not fear God. My fathers hadn’t raised me to believe in anything higher than the sky or lower than the earth, and Yvanne’s efforts to teach me piety had not survived my first battle.
Yet still: I did not sleep that night, or the next.
I slept only during the daylight hours, in fistfuls of minutes, waking at the first whisper of dreaming. I was in hiding, not from God, but from the truth: that these gentle, quiet days were stolen, and could not last.
But oh, they were sweet. I liked the honest work of the hunt—harder now, with only one good eye—and the clean smell of frost. I liked to watch your face as you scribbled in your book, your eyebrows arching and furrowing like a man performing a silent play. I even liked the fire, or at least the way it glittered in the glass of your spectacles.
