“Forgive me, Katsa,” he said. “I beg you to forgive me.”

Well, and that was easily answered. She did not forgive him.

The trees in Randa’s garden were still green, and some of the flowers still in bloom. But soon the leaves would turn and fall. The gardeners would come with their great rakes, and scrape the leaves from the marble floor, and carry them away in wheelbarrows. She didn’t know where they carried them. To the vegetable gardens, she guessed, or to the fields. They were industrious, the gardeners.

She did not forgive him.

She heard him move a step closer. “How . . . how did you know?” he asked. “If you would tell me?”

She rested her forehead on the glass pane. “And why don’t you use your Grace to find the answer to that?”

He paused. “I could,” he said, “possibly, if you were thinking about it specifically. But you’re not, and I can’t wander around inside you and retrieve any information I want. Any more than I can stop my Grace from showing me things I don’t want.”

She didn’t answer.

“Katsa, all I know right now is that you’re angry, furious, from the top of your head to your toes; and that I’ve hurt you, and that you don’t forgive me. Or trust me. That’s all I know at this moment. And my Grace only confirms what I see with my own eyes.”

She sighed sharply, and spoke into the windowpane. “Giddon told me he didn’t trust you. And when he told me, he used the same words you’d used before, the same words exactly. And”—she waved her hand in the air—“there were other hints. But Giddon’s words made it clear.”

He was closer now. Leaning against the table, most likely, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on her back. She focused on the view outside. Two ladies crossed the courtyard below her, on each other’s arms. The curls of their hair sat gathered at the tops of their heads and bobbed up and down.

“I haven’t been very careful with you,” he said. “Careful to hide it. I’d go so far as to say I’ve been careless at times.” He paused, and his voice was quiet, as if he was talking down to his boots. “It’s because I’ve wanted you to know.”

And that did not absolve him. He had taken her thoughts without telling her, and he had wanted to tell her, and that did not begin to absolve him.

“I couldn’t tell you, Katsa, not possibly,” he said, and she swung around to face him.

“Stop it! Stop that! Stop responding to my thoughts!”

“I won’t hide it from you, Katsa! I won’t hide it anymore!”

He wasn’t leaning against the table, hands in pockets. He was standing, clutching his hair. His face—she would not look at his face. She turned away, turned back to the window.

“I’m not going to hide it from you anymore, Katsa,” he said again. “Please. Let me explain it. It’s not as bad as you think.”