‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I ask.

‘I— saving you.’

I listen as he describes how he spoke to Mam, drove the villagers from our door. Never before has anyone not of my blood shown care for me. I don’t trust his kindness.

‘But you are unharmed,’ he says. ‘So all is well.’

‘What’s it to you?’ Fear and anger at this new turn in our dealings with the village surges through me. By standing with us he has defied them. I don’t understand why.

‘I cannot stand to see pain,’ he says.

‘Any creature’s pain, I suppose. Softer than the mud bank after a week of rain.’

He is steady. ‘Any creature’s, yes.’

My rant is set. My path, not his. To walk as I choose and face every obstacle how I see fit – and God knows, there are many, more than he can dream up.

‘But yours especially,’ he says.

And I am silenced. There is a stillness about him I feel I could be sucked into. He waits.

‘Well,’ I say. ‘That’s—’

‘What?’

‘Meaningless.’ I lift my chin, cannot quite meet his eye, heart rattles faster and faster.

A breeze stirs the grass at our feet, lifts his hair. He wears no hat, I don’t know why. ‘Not to me,’ he says.

‘You care for me no more than you would an injured foal.’

He frowns. ‘You are – wounded. But that isn’t what draws me. You make me feel different, as though I’m – solid, or more real. I – I don’t know.’

There is desperation in his expression. Nothing that’s ever happened to me has prepared me for such a conversation. I’m insulted that he sees a wound in me, hidden I thought, having trained myself to turn to fury rather than fear. Insulted that he, so clearly broken in his own ways, dares to voice it. He is fearful of any that have a low opinion of him and yet defies the village to protect my family. Feared of my kind, brave facing the wild horse. I take a step away, and he reaches out, then draws his hand back. Sweat gleams on his brow.

‘I don’t know if – have you conjured these feelings in me?’ he asks. ‘Is it – to what purpose if you do not share them?’

Something in his eyes stops me from leaving. A battle of fear and anger and hope, that I cannot bear to look upon. ‘Any conjuring here has been done by you, a notion of a lass that I am not and cannot be. You mustn’t be kind. I’m not used to it.’

‘You deserve kindness.’

‘I deserve what I get. It’s what I was born to.’

Clouds roll above us, uncovering a bright moon that gleams in the black water of the river.

‘Born to it how?’ he asks.

‘Chosen.’

He shakes his head. ‘By – God?’