“I was ill,” said Winter. “Very ill; I ought to have died. It was your idea that saved me, to give your sister’s friend a reason to value my life. I didn’t die.” He didn’t look at the place where his arm had been.
“But—you could have—you could havegone.Once you werewell. Gone to be a prisoner, safe. You nearly died because you didn’t go.”
Winter said, “I knew you’d gone with Faland, Iven. Do you think I didn’t understand? I saw him, when they were taking me away. I tried to warn you. I wouldn’t let him have you. So I searched. I hid. I stole. I felt like a madman for trying, or a ghost myself. Or one of the wild men that poor boy thought we were. I was on the edge of despair that night in Poperinghe.”
Freddie reached out then—his fingers brushed down Winter’s face, jaw to throat, and he felt Winter go still, the blue eyes finding his.
But Freddie had yanked back; the touch sparked a sense-memory, remorselessly strong. He was suddenlythere,back in that shell hole, his hands on a different throat, also warm, thrashing against his, tension running through the cords of the neck, wet. There was rain and there was water and there was drowning, his own desperation, and he didn’t want to be alive, he didn’t want to remember.
“I can’t,” he said. His voice cracked, right at the end. “Winter, Ican’t.” He couldn’t articulate what he couldn’t do—not love, so much as live. He’d said he would try but it was no good, hecouldn’t.
“Iven—”
“I can’t,” said Freddie.
“You don’t have to do anything,” said Winter. “Just be here. Stay, Iven.”
But Winter was a man, and he did not lie, like Faland, beyond the bounds of the world, beyond what the world called right and wrong. There would be a morning. And perhaps another morning, and another.
But the world ended,Freddie thought, in strange wonder.Mother always said the world would end, and it did.As a child, he had imagined that it would be glorious. As a soldier, he’d thought it meant something gray and hopeless.
But now, with the first feeling of hope he’d felt since—since he couldn’t even remember—he thought,Everything’s different now. What does it matter if I reach for him, here in the dark and…Hedidn’t let the thought finish forming; he reached for Winter’s arm, and said, hearing his voice rough and abrupt, “Are you cold?”
He felt Winter go perfectly still. The arm under Freddie’s hand went steely and rigid. He saw the blue eyes black in the dark, the blunt-featured face, the sandy hair.
Time stopped. The question hung there, and the room was utterly silent.
Carefully, so carefully, Winter’s own hand came up, and closed on Freddie’s, where it curled round his arm. “Yes,” he said.
Slowly, awkward with his wound, he slid under the wool blankets, lying on his good side. Freddie could hardly see him, but it was better that way. He’d always—perhaps always would—know Winter better in the dark. Winter didn’t move, when Freddie touched him, but his heart beat hard under Freddie’s hand.
“Why did you stay?” said Freddie. His voice was just a stirring—even less—in the dark.
“I promised,” said Winter.
“Is that the only reason?”
Winter made a harsh sound. “Can you ask? Iven, we were dead together, we were born together. I cannot live without you.” He didn’t sound happy about it. In fact, he sounded much the way Freddie felt, as though he’d been changed against his will, and was marking out the new boundaries of himself.
Freddie’s hand trembled now, where it lay marking the swift tread of Winter’s heart. “I remembered you,” said Freddie. “I was losing everything else—but I remembered you. I’d wake up listening for you—”
Winter moved forward, sharply, and kissed him, his body warm, his grip almost bruising. It was shocking. It was inevitable. It was home. It was the first time Freddie had felt alive in his own skin since the night he went up Passchendaele Ridge.
He kissed Winter back, his own hands rough on Winter’s face, gentle on his wounded side. Winter drew away, but only to a finger’s breadth, close enough for Freddie to see his pupils blown wide, hisface afraid. Neither of them, Freddie thought, was who he’d been. But if they’d never changed, they wouldn’t be here, together, in the dark.
“Stay,” said Freddie, and twined his fingers with Winter’s, bit his lower lip. Felt him breathe.
“Yes,” said Winter.
THEARCADIA,OUT OF CALAIS, AND HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADIAN MARITIMES
Spring 1918–Spring 1919
Jones refused to tell her,however much she asked, what he’d paid, whom he’d bribed, to get documents for them all, and clothes, and berths—all plausible enough to get them home instead of arrested.
“No, Iven,” he said irritably, when she asked for the fourth time. “I won’t tell you. It’s done, anyway. You’re going back to Canada where you belong, and Godspeed.” The spring air was warm around them. They were standing on the deck of the ship. Freddie and Winter had already gone below. Winter was still feverish. He was a wealthy young American, according to his papers, maimed in combat. Laura was his nurse, and Freddie his servant. To the east, the war convulsed the very air; they could faintly hear the guns, even there in the port at Le Havre.
Laura said, “I am in your debt, then.”
