The corners of his eyes crinkled up enchantingly at that, and she had to stretch up and kiss them. Skin slid on skin for the length of her body. His muscles were long and tapering, and the skin of his torso was unevenly tanned where his shirts had been on or off, paler still below his waist along his lean flank. A faint dusting of dark hair across his chest narrowed and thickened, going down in a vee below his belly. Her fingers twined in it, brushing with and against the grain. So, with his odd Lakewalker senses, what more of her did he touch?

She swallowed, and dared to say, “You said you could tell.”

“Hm?” His hand spiraled around her breast, and how could such a soft caress make it suddenly ache so sweetly?

“The time of the month a woman can get a child, you said you could tell.” Or wait, no, was that only Lakewalker ladies? “A beautiful pattern in her ground, you said.” Yes, and she’d believed Sunny, hadn’t she, on a piece of bed lore that, if not a mean lie, had turned out to be a costly untruth, and Sunny’s tale had seemed a lot less unlikely than this. A shiver of unease, Am I being stupid again…? was interrupted when Dag propped himself up on his left elbow and looked at her with a serious smile.

His hand traced her belly, crossing the malice marks there that had turned to thin black scabs. “You’re not at risk tonight, Spark. But I should be right terrified to try to make love to you that way so soon after your injuries. You’re so dainty, and I’m, um, well, there are other things I’d very much like to show you.”

She risked a peek down, but her eye caught on the parallel black lines beneath his beautiful hand, and a flash of sorrow and guilt shook her. Would she ever be able to lie down with anyone without these cascades of unwelcome memory washing through her? And then she wondered if Dag—with, it seemed, so many more accumulated memories—had a similar problem.

“Sh,” he soothed, and his thumb crossed her lips, though she had not spoken. “Reach for lightness, bright Spark. You do not betray your sorrow to set it aside for an hour. It’ll be waiting patiently for you to pick it up again on the other side.”

“How long?”

“Time wears grief smooth like a river stone. The weight will always be there, but it’ll stop scraping you raw at the slightest touch. But you have to let the time flow by; you can’t rush it. We wear our hair knotted for a year for our losses, and it is not too long a while.”