“Po,” she said once, when one clear thought pierced her mind.

“It’s in the medicines,” he whispered. “There is seabane in the medicines,” and his hands, and his mouth, and his body returned her to mindlessness. He made her drunk, this man made her drunk; and every time his eyes flashed into hers she could not breathe.

She expected the pain, when it came. But she gasped at its sharpness; it was not like any pain she had felt before. He kissed her and slowed and would have stopped. But she laughed, and said that this one time she would consent to hurt, and bleed, at his touch. He smiled into her neck and kissed her again and she moved with him through the pain. The pain became a warmth that grew. Grew, and stopped her breath. And took her breath and her pain and her mind away from her body, so that there was nothing but her body and his body and the light and fire they made together.

THEY LAY afterward, warmed by each other and by the heat of the fire. She touched his nose and his mouth. She played with the hoops in his ears. He held her and kissed her, and his eyes flickered into hers.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She laughed. “I have not lost myself. And you?”

He smiled. “I’m very happy.”

She traced the line of his jaw to his ear and down to his shoulder. She touched the markings that ringed his arms. “And Raffin thought we’d end this way, too,” she said. “Apparently, I’m the only one who didn’t see it coming.”

“Raffin will make a very good king,” Po said, and she laughed again, and rested her head in the crook of his arm.

“Let’s pick up the pace tomorrow,” she said, thinking of men who were not good kings.

“Yes, all right. Are you in pain still?”

“No.”

“Why do you suppose it happens that way? Why does a woman feel that pain?”

She had no answer to that. Women felt it, that was all she knew. “Let me clean your hand,” she said.

“I’ll clean you first.”

She shivered as he left her to go to the fire, and find water and cloths. He leaned into the light, and brightness and shadows moved across his body. He was beautiful. She admired him, and he flashed a grin at her. Almost as beautiful as you are conceited, she thought at him, and he laughed out loud.

It struck her that this should feel strange, to be lying here, watching him, teasing him. To have done what they’d done, and be what they’d become. But instead it felt natural and comfortable. Inevitable. And only the smallest bit terrifying.

Chapter Twenty-one

THEY HAD entire conversations in which she didn’t say a word. For Po could sense when Katsa desired to talk to him, and if there was a thing she wanted him to know, his Grace could capture that thing. It seemed a useful ability for them to practice. And Katsa found that the more comfortable she grew with opening her mind to him, the more practiced she became with closing it as well. It was never entirely satisfying, closing her mind, because whenever she closed her feelings from him she must also close them from herself. But it was something.