“It was her who taught me this, after. How to go on, I mean.” She raised her eyes to look squarely at him now. “That’s my purpose in telling you the tale. You ask what I see when I look at you, and I see you cringe and shrink as I did in the days after. Not just from shadows and hares, but from your memories of it. You look to hide from it, and that is what I call a mistake.”

He could feel heat flare in his face. Cringing and shrinking. That was what she saw, and he would only look more foolish if he tried to deny it.

He dropped his gaze to the half-peeled turnip in her hands, too distracted by her face to think clearly. He turned her words over and over in his mind.

“A great lady taught you – what? To throw knives at villains and play the mute for days?”

Nan shook her head. “She said, ‘even do you never care to speak again in your life, Nan, you must not lose your voice.’” Her hands resumed the slow paring. “She taught me when you run and hide from a thing, you make it into a monster that can only live in your darkest dreams. Without your running, it’s naught but a thing that happened once. Now it is only a story for me, and not a great beast that seeks to tear me apart.”

He raised his eyes to her face in the firelight and saw she was completely serious. Baudry and his men – what they had done, what he had seen...and she thought it was a simple matter of words. He fought against scoffing outright, but there was still a trace of scorn when he said, “This is your great wisdom, that it is but a story that needs telling?”

There was a stubborn set to her jaw. “I claim no wisdom, but I know what I know. When you make it a thing you can hold in your two hands, it belongs to you. Until then, you belong to it.”

It was better to say nothing than to tell her she was wrong. Or even if she was not, he preferred forgetting, and was far more skilled at it. He let the silence stretch out between them, and thought how he had spent days wishing she would speak. He watched her hands remember their task, gripping the knife, carefully sliding the blade under the peel as she spoke softly into the hush.