She was crying, but not because of his words. It was because of a certainty she refused to consider while she sat before him. She stood. “I need to go.”

He jumped up. “No, Katsa, please.”

“I won’t go far, Po. I just need to think, without you in my head.”

“I’m afraid if you leave you won’t come back.”

“Po.” This assurance, at least, she could give him. “I’ll come back.”

He looked at her for a moment. “I know you mean that now. But I’m afraid once you’ve gone off to think, you’ll decide the solution is to leave me.”

“I won’t.”

“I can’t know that.”

“No,” Katsa said, “you can’t. But I need to think on my own, and I refuse to knock you out, so you have to let me go. And once I’m gone you’ll just have to trust me, as any person without your Grace would have to do. And as I have to do always, with you.”

He looked at her with those naked, unhappy eyes again. Then he took a breath and sat down. “Put a good ten minutes between us,” he said, “if you want privacy.”

Ten minutes was a far greater range than she’d understood his Grace to encompass; but that was an argument for another time. She felt his eyes on her back as she passed through the trees. She groped forward, hands and feet, in search of darkness, distance, and solitude.

ALONE IN the forest, Katsa sat on a stump and cried. She cried like a person whose heart is broken and wondered how, when two people loved each other, there could be such a broken heart.

She couldn’t have him, and there was no mistaking it. She could never be his wife. She could not steal herself back from Randa only to give herself away again—belong to another person, be answerable to another person, build her very being around another person. No matter how she loved him.

Katsa sat in the darkness of the Sunderan forest and understood three truths. She loved Po. She wanted Po. And she could never be anyone’s but her own.

After a while, she began to thread her way back to the fire. Nothing had changed in her feeling, and she wasn’t tired. But Po would suffer if he didn’t sleep; and she knew he wouldn’t sleep until she had returned.

HE WAS LYING on his back, wide awake, staring up at a half-moon. She went to him and sat before him. He watched her with soft eyes and didn’t say anything. She looked back at him, and opened up her feelings to him, so that he would understand what she felt, what she wanted, and what she couldn’t do. He sat up. He watched her face for a long time.

“You know I’d never expect you to change who you are, if you were my wife,” he finally said.

“It would change me to be your wife,” she said.

He watched her eyes. “Yes. I understand you.”