He shook his head. “Nay. But I cannot understand how you have no hate in your heart.”

She almost laughed at that. No hate.

“There is enough hate in my heart to burn down the world entire.” Her voice shook, her throat ached from the effort required not to scream it. She looked at his profile and gathered the rough fabric of her dress tight into her fists until her fingers grew numb. “But you are in the world,” she said. “You are in my heart.”

He turned to her and she felt naked again. She meant to say they must go to the market today, that he would never reach his home if they wasted days in wandering.

Instead, she stepped forward into her fear and kissed him, because he made her greedy and fearless. He made everything new and beautiful. She had no care for the market, or the road that awaited them, or their journey’s end. She only cared for him, and so they stayed there all through the day and night.

He had begun to imagine Nan in his mother’s solar, looking out over the valley below, framed by the carved stone of the window and the hills beyond. But then he reminded himself that the stone was probably rubble now and even if it weren’t, he could never go there again.

As they moved westward, she became more real than his memories – of the thieves, the abbey, the years spent as hostage. Only Aderinyth seemed as vivid as she was, as important. His mind kept serving up images of her there, with him. He saw her on the mountain path that led to the most hidden nest of white gyrfalcons. He imagined her listening intently to Philip Walch, who would love her like a daughter. He knew with a certainty she would never sneer at the place or the people, and that she would look at the mountains in the same way she had looked at the ceiling of the cathedral.

He knew he wanted her there, but was afraid to ask for it.

“I’ve no coin,” she announced as they entered Chesterfield. The way she said it and the set of her mouth told him that the money she had sent to her sister was the last she had. “I must earn some while we are here.”

His assertion that she need not do so, as he still had a little left from the long-ago sale of the hawk, was politely disregarded. He watched her eyes light up at the sight of an old man selling meat pies, then was amused to hear her quiz the man on his method of cooking them. It seemed to meet her approval in the end, and she said she would return to buy some once she had found a place to sell one of her knives.