‘In what way?’

‘Every way. What she eats, and when, what she wears, where she goes. Who she talks to, even. I don’t know how she stomachs it.’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘Are you not married?’ Harriet said.

I laughed. ‘No. But not all marriages are like that. It’s possible to love someone without marshalling them. Without being so… protective.’

She put the wine bottle down slowly. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

She wouldn’t look at me. Something I had said brought on quite the change in the young woman.

‘Oh?’ I said, allowing a silence to grow and grow until, like most people, Harriet felt the need to burst it like a soap bubble.

‘Others have been nicer to my night-sister, I know that much.’

‘Was Gregory Harsson one of them?’

‘Gregory was kind all right,’ she said. ‘He and Jan didn’t deserve to be sent away.’

‘Not even because of Jan’s theft?’

‘He didn’t take anything. Least, I didn’t believe it.’

‘Do you believe Olesca had him sent away?’

She started pulling in her line. ‘Between you and I,’ she said, ‘when he’s a mind to, I don’t think there’s anything that boy can’t do.’

‘But what does he want?’

Harriet stared at the end of her empty line, at her empty hook. ‘A fresh start,’ she said.

‘So I understand. Seems to me he already has that, in your home, marrying your night-sister.’

‘No, leaving the southern tribes was just part of it,’ she said.

‘Of the coming war?’

She shook her head. ‘The way he talks sometimes… He wants to wipe the slate clean. It’s more than the war.’

‘More than war,’ I echoed.

‘I think he wants to save us from ourselves.’

That pronouncement, like the tolling of a bell, left a silence in its wake that neither of us could dispel. My suspicions of Olesca, and his relationship with Harriet’s night-sister confirmed, I left her to her angling.

*

As I was banished from the common room, I had to smuggle a bottle of wine upstairs. I had no glass so drank straight from the bottle. I made sure the vintage was not 1717. I couldn’t find anything older, and there was indeed a slight bitterness to the wine that I couldn’t place.

I paced the floor, bottle in hand, unsure what to do, but certain I should be doing something. The hour was late, not long until sunset. No use seeking company and I didn’t have the appetite for it, regardless. My appetites had been hard to predict recently. I sat on the end of the bed; the place our body would rest for an hour or so before Christophor navigated us through another Drekenford night. The blankets and sheets, all clean, gave a degree of comfort to the simple, homely ritual that started with the chewing of ettiene and ended with a head on a pillow. It was easy to forget that so many people enacted this ritual in the company of another. My night-brother and I had been alone for so long. I didn’t believe it bothered him; but I did believe he knew how, at times, it bothered me. I had chances to settle, marry even, but always made excuses.