That was all the answer he was likely to get, and he spent several minutes walking beside her, trying to decipher the meaning of this particular silence. She did not seem angry that he had asked it, nor did she have the air of hiding something from him. He thought it was born instead of a simple disinclination to speak at length on something she thought insignificant.

But then she spoke again, and he saw it was only that she had been looking for words to explain.

“There are always other ways.” She still did not look at him. “The king makes roads, and the Church, and lords and towns – them that have authority, they make roads so you will go the way they tell you to go. But there are some as would choose their own way, and make a path that suits them. Like how a bird will fly direct across the sky, and pay no mind to the roads men build.”

“A bird sees all paths from above, but you are no bird,” he observed. “How did you know the way?”

She frowned a little. “It’s only sense. We are far from any market town here, and for as many as must lead their cattle along the main road, there must be a path to take them to water. And so I kept my eyes open until I seen a little dirt track, and it goes past the fields and toward these trees that are like to grow near water.”

He looked back at where they had come from and wondered aloud, “How is it that I saw naught?”

She made no answer, and when he turned back he found her eyes on him. She looked away quickly, but he could feel the heat of it on his skin, a fire along his throat and jaw where her gaze had been fixed.

The bloom of color across her cheek told him it was not his imagination. The way she kept her eyes down as she resumed walking just a touch too quickly said more than words ever could.

“You’ve not needed to see it,” she said finally, in a hushed voice. There was something awkward in it, something like embarrassment. “It’s the lowly who must search out hidden ways, and stray from the path set out for them, to survive.”

If he were daring, he would ask if she meant her sister or herself when she spoke of straying from paths. But he did not, because he only wanted her unease to pass. Whether it was because she had met Hal or because she had a sister who shamed her, she seemed to be more conscious of how he was not as lowborn as she. It was another reason to be glad they journeyed alone and avoided civilization. They traveled the same path now, and it was not the one the world had set out for either of them.