Fool, she wanted to say at the end of it, but clamped her jaw against it. She sat up. In the soft sound of his breath she could hear that infinite patience of his, steady and calm, the way he waited for the falcon in its flight. It was not a helpless or hapless state, this patient waiting of his. He was there within it, unmovable. He would not advance unless invited, but nor would he yield his place, or himself, only because of her mood.

“You said naught of this, when you told me what happened.” It was not so much accusation as it was bewilderment. “Yet you did teach me it must be put into words. Can you not speak of it?”

She almost scoffed. Not speak of it? She had spoken of it countless times, and she did not care to speak of it again to satisfy his curiosity about the details. They cut her, they burned her, she lived. It was simple enough to understand. She stood and reached for her shift, pretending it did not affect her to stand naked before him, scrawny and small and marked with ugly scars.

“I tell what I want to tell and not a word more.” She gestured to the places she was marked. “Talking won’t tell you no more than you can see with your own eyes, will it.”

She turned away and pulled her linen over her head and then her dress. Fuss sprang up from his place beside the trees that hid this tiny clearing, eager to see where the day would take them. She fastened her belt with the blades in it around her waist, and pulled on her boots without her hose.

There was the long, elegant dagger for her boot, but she did not slip it in at the ankle. She held it close like a talisman, bundled her hose and the braces of knives into her cloak, and said, “I’ll go gather more water.”

She did it every morning, but never announced it. She could feel the meaning of it fall on him, that he was not welcome to follow her. It was all she could do to remember to take the flask.

At the stream she knelt and put a hand into the water, wishing it was colder. Cold enough to shock and numb, to freeze the hot tears that seemed ready to spill. It was not fair. The world and all its ugliness had intruded on this soft place they had built between them. And it was her who had carried it in, written on her flesh.