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“Will you keep Edan for a bit?”

“Aye, of course.”

So I kissed my son’s head without waking him, and I had my cloak half on before I understood what I had done.

I had given my babe away to a woman I had known one month. Without asking whether she could manage him, or naming the hour I would return, or extracting a vow that someone would fetch me if he so much as sighed.

Because I trusted her. She was part of my family now.

Issa grinned and jerked her chin toward the door.

“Go on, then.”

I didn’t know how I was going to explain my decision to Maardok, but I would think of the words when I saw him. I had to tell him we were staying, staying here with him.

Forever.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Maardok

Mormmit had been avoiding me for a fortnight, which struck me as unjust, considering he was the one who’d put the hole in my arm. The youth couldn’t avoid me now, and I grinned with fierce joy as I lifted my sword on the practice field.

“Again.”

He came at me again. Same opening, same overreach, the same wide left shoulder that would get him opened up by any male who’d fought something fiercer than a sheep.

I let him commit, stepped inside the swing, and put him flat in the frozen mud.

“Yer shoulder, lad,” I sighed, pointing the tip of my blade at the problematic body part.

“Aye.” He wheezed at the sky. “My shoulder.”

“Do ye ken what’s behind yer shoulder?”

“My heart,” he said miserably, because we had done this four times already.

Matthias had pulled my stitches three days past and pronounced himself impressed, mostly with his own needlework. The new scar itched like fury and pulled when I raised the arm above my head, and I had been raising it above my head all morning out of pure stubbornness, which is a thing I have been informed I share with the mother of my sons.

Just the thought of Cataline’s stubbornness—and her inability to understand what I was offering her—caused my Kteer to growl. I did my best to force my thoughts away from her, but each day that went by with her in my arms but locking me out of her heart was a day closer to going mad.

So I took my frustration out on the Battleborn warriors I was supposed to train.

I drilled them until the sun was high and the frost had gone off the grass. Grips, footwork, how to fall without breaking something on the way down. Torrag took a blow to the ribs that would color up nicely by supper. Two of the younger ones were finally holding their guard where I’d put it a month ago, which meant they’d stop dying in my head every time I watched them move.

That is the thing about warriors. You take a green lad with an arm and no sense, and you correct him again and again, and one day he does it right without being told. Three years, mayhap four, but it eventually happens.

It happens because I can make it happen.

Cataline had lived in my cottage for a month. She had made the cottage hers—her preferences, her scents, her laughter. She had learned the names of half the clan and all the recipes worth knowing, and she laughed with my sister most days, and my son had two friends and a bed against the warm chimney, and when I came home each evening she smiled up at me like a female glad to see her male.

But she had never once told me she loved me.

I had said it in the springs, plainly, twice. And she had hummed at me, and leaned her cheek into my hand, and been very warm and very kind about it, and had said not one godsdamned word back.

The veil would thin again in three-and-twenty days. It would thin every moon after that until the thaw, and I had given her my word that she could walk through any one of them she chose. My word. Freely given, like a fool.

She would leave me.