She stopped him. “It’s that exact, your sense of my hands and feet?”

“Hands and feet, fingers and toes,” he said. “You’re so physical, Katsa. You’ve so much physical energy. I sense it constantly. Even your emotions seem physical sometimes.”

She squinted at him and considered. “Could you fight a person blindfolded?”

“I never have—I could never have tried it, of course, without arousing suspicion. But yes, I could, though it would be easier on flat ground. My sense of the forest floor is too inconsistent.”

She stared at him, a black shape against a blacker sky. “Wonderful,” she said. “It’s wonderful. I envy you. We must fight more often at night.”

He laughed. “I won’t complain. It’d be nice to be on the offensive every once in a while.”

They fought just a bit longer, until they both tripped over a fallen branch, and Po landed on his back, half submerged in the pond. He came up spluttering.

“I think we’ve done enough barreling around in the dark,” he said. “Shall we check on your goose?”

THE GOOSE sizzled over the fire. Katsa poked at it with her knife, and the meat fell away from the bone. “It’s perfect,” she said. “I’ll cut you your drumstick.” She glanced up at him, and in that moment he pulled his wet shirt over his head. She forced her mind blank. Blank as a new sheet of paper, blank as a starless sky. He came to the fire and crouched before it. He rubbed the water from his bare arms and flicked it into the flames. She stared at the goose and sliced his drumstick carefully and thought of the blankest expression on the blankest face she could possibly imagine. It was a chilly evening; she thought about that. The goose would be delicious, they must eat as much of it as possible, they must not waste it; she thought about that.

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said to him. “I don’t want this goose to go to waste.”

“I’m ravenous.”

He was going to sit there shirtless, apparently, until the fire dried him. A mark on his arm caught her eye, and she took a breath and imagined a blank book full of page after empty page. But then a similar mark on his other arm drew her attention, and her curiosity got the better of her. She couldn’t help herself; she squinted at his arms. And it was all right, this was acceptable. For there was nothing wrong with being curious about the marks that seemed to be painted onto his skin. Dark, thick bands, like a ribbon wrapped around each arm, in the place where the muscles of his shoulder ended and the muscles of his arm began. The bands, one circling each arm, were decorated with intricate designs that she thought might be a number of different colors. It was hard to tell in the firelight.

“It’s a Lienid ornamentation,” he said, “like the rings in my ears.”