“I am in the muck now, as you said to me.” He smiled to put her at ease, even as he felt her silence descending on them again. “Before this journey is done, I think me I will have learned very well how to search out secret ways.”

After that, the quiet between them was comfortable again – or as comfortable as it could be, when he spent every moment remembering her eyes on him, wondering what would happen if he ever dared to touch her again. He did not let himself think beyond that, but it was enough to fill his mind for hours. He imagined brushing his hand against hers, and how she might tremble as she had before. He allowed himself the fantasy of putting his fingertips to the inside of her wrist, where he had put his mouth days ago, and feeling her pulse leap with excitement.

They were innocent enough thoughts as she walked silently beside him, but at night his dreams took them further, until he was sure he would roast in hell for the sins he committed in his sleep.

At the end of the day she washed the dirt from herself as she always did, lifting her hem to bare her feet, her ankles, her calves to the water. Wet skin, just within his reach. The firelight played against her throat as she bent over the flames and his mouth watered, remembering the taste of her, the feel of his tongue sliding over her neck.

It was madness. He had been a fool to think he should travel alone with her for days, for weeks. He would go mad.

The next day he ignored the tendril of hair that had escaped her kerchief, and the look of her mouth when she gave a soft smile to her dog, and the faint scent of her that might only be his hopeful imagination. Instead he made himself look at the blades ranged along her forearms. They were short, small, deadly – like her. He thought they must have been made specially for her. The letter E was stamped into the metal at the base of each one, and he considered asking her what the meaning of it was, as his query for the day. Or perhaps why one was missing.

But the rain came down before he could ask anything, a light smattering that turned into a downpour just as they were preparing to light a fire and eat their evening meal. There was no easy place to shelter here beside the river, but they had passed a small building not long before stopping, an empty cowshed at the far edge of a field. Now they gathered their things and ran to it.