Torin swallowed and searched the rooms. Her basket of herbs and ointments was sitting on the shelf, so Torin knew she wasn’t visiting her patients. Perhaps she had returned to the garden. He walked the rows, but Sidra was absent. He stood for a moment in the midst of the towering stalks, lush flowers, and vegetables ripe on the vine. She wasn’t here, but Torin could feel a trace of her among the green living things of the earth, amongst the wildflowers.

He next rushed up the hill to his father’s, but she wasn’t with Graeme.

Torin returned to his yard, frowning. He realized that he had no inkling where she had gone, and that brought him to his knees beside the herbs. He thought again of the last time he had spoken to her. The things that had come from his mouth—sharp, angry, and prideful.

She had said that she loved him, even at his worst. And he hadn’t responded. He had never told her how he felt, and now the chance had been stolen from him.

But in this forced silence, he had noticed the weeds overcoming the garden. He had noticed the sorrow in Sidra’s eyes and the exhaustion in her posture. She was hurting, and he wanted to help her carry that pain, as she had carried his.

He looked at his hands, lined with dirt and grime, scarred from blades.

Which will you choose for your hands, Torin? she had once said to him, words that had offended him. But they had been living words—a phrase that wouldn’t die no matter how he tried to snuff it. Words like seeds that had slowly been germinating in him, unfurling new growth.

He dwelt on his dreams. The ghosts of the men he had killed. He wanted to change.

He rose and fetched his horse. He didn’t even know where he was going, and he rode aimlessly, listening to the wind and studying the ground beneath him. He remembered the first day he had met Sidra. How he had fallen from his horse.

Torin turned the stallion south and rode to the most peaceful place on the isle, where Sidra had been born. The Vale of Stonehaven.

Sidra first visited her grandmother’s grave in the vale. She knelt and spoke to the grass, the soil, and the stone that held a trace of the woman who had raised her. She also stopped at her mother’s grave, although Sidra held no remembrances of her. After she lingered in the valley’s cemetery, she walked to the cottage where she had grown up.