One day beside the pool, during a rare break between snowstorms, she watched him notch an arrow calmly to his bow and aim at something she couldn’t see. A ledge of rock? A tree stump? He cocked his head as if he were listening. He released the arrow, and it sliced through the cold and thwacked into a patch of snow. “What—” Katsa started to say, and then stopped when a spot of blood welled to the surface and colored the snow around the arrow’s shaft.

“A rabbit,” he said. “A big one.”

He started forward toward his buried kill, but had taken little more than a step when a flock of geese swooped down from overhead. He put his hand to his temple and fell to one knee.

Katsa strung two arrows and shot two geese. Then she hauled Po up. “Po, what—”

“The geese. They took me by surprise.”

She shook her head. “You could sense animals before, but the sense of them never knocked you down.”

He snorted with laughter, and then his laughter fizzled into a sigh. “Katsa. Try to imagine how things are now. My Grace shows me every detail of the mountain above me, and the drop to the forest below me. I feel the movement of every fish in the pool and every bird in the trees. The ice is growing back over our water hole. Snow is forming fast in the clouds, Katsa. In a moment I expect it’ll be snowing again.” He turned his face toward her now, urgently. “Skye and Bitterblue are in the cabin. Bitterblue’s anxious about me, she doesn’t think I eat enough. And you’re here, too, of course—your every movement, your body, your clothing, your every worry coursing through me. The sighted can focus their eyes. I can’t focus my Grace. I can’t turn this off. How exactly, when I’m aware of everything above, below, before, behind, and beyond me, am I supposed to keep my mind on the ground beneath my feet?”

He trudged away from her toward the red patch of blood. He yanked tiredly at the arrow in the snow. It came away in his hand, and lifted with it a large, white, bloody rabbit. He plodded back to her, rabbit in hand. They stood there, considering each other; and then flakes of snow began to fall. Katsa could not help herself—she smiled, at the fulfillment of his prediction. A moment later Po smiled too, grudgingly; and when they turned to climb the rocks, he took her sleeve. “The snow’s disorienting,” he said.

They set out across the slope, and he steadied himself against her as they climbed.

SHE WAS getting used to the new way Po had of considering her, now that he couldn’t see her. He didn’t look at her, of course. She supposed she would never feel the intensity of his gaze again; she would never again be caught in his eyes. It was something she tried not to think about. It made her stupidly, foolishly sad.