A log fell into the fire. They sat quietly. His voice, when he spoke, was hesitant.

“It strikes me that heartbreak isn’t the only alternative to marriage,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He ducked his head for a moment. He raised his eyes to her again. “I’ll give myself to you however you’ll take me,” he said, so simply that Katsa found she wasn’t embarrassed. She watched his face.

“And where would that lead?”

“I don’t know. But I trust you.”

She watched his eyes.

He offered himself to her. He trusted her. As she trusted him.

She hadn’t considered this possibility, when she’d sat alone in the forest crying. She hadn’t even thought of it. And his offer hung suspended before her now, for her to reach out and claim; and that which had seemed clear and simple and heartbreaking was confused and complicated again. But also touched with hope.

Could she be his lover and still belong to herself?

That was the question; and she didn’t know the answer.

“I need to think,” she said.

“Think here,” he said, “please. I’m so tired, Katsa. I’ll fall right asleep.”

She nodded. “All right. I’ll stay.”

He reached up, and wiped away a tear that sat on her cheek. She felt the touch of his fingertip in the base of her spine, and fought against it, against allowing him to know of it. He lay down. She stood and moved to a tree outside the light of their fire. She sat against it and watched Po’s silhouette, waiting for him to fall asleep.

Chapter Twenty

THE NOTION of having a lover was to Katsa something like discovering a limb she’d never noticed before. An extra arm or toe. It was unfamiliar, and she poked and prodded it, as she would have prodded an alien toe unexpectedly her own.

That the lover would be Po reduced her confusion somewhat. It was by thinking of Po, and not of the notion of a lover, that Katsa became comfortable enough to consider what it would mean to lie in his bed but not be his wife.

It took more than the thinking of one night. They moved through the Sunderan forest, and they talked and rested and made camp as before. But their silences were perhaps a bit less easy than they had been; and Katsa broke off occasionally, to keep her own company and think in solitude. They did not practice fighting, for Katsa was shy of his touch. And he didn’t press it upon her. He pressed nothing upon her, even conversation, even his gaze.

They moved as quickly as the road allowed. But the farther they traveled, the more the road resembled a trail at best, winding through overgrown gullies and around trees the size of which Katsa had never seen. Trees with trunks as wide as the horses were long, and branches that groaned far above them. They had to duck sometimes to avoid curtains of vines hanging from the branches. The land rose as they moved east, and streams crisscrossed the forest floor.