Filigree lichen tickled his fingertips. He inhaled the dry mineral scent of sun-warmed stone. The scents of Yorkshire surrounded him, their subtleties allowed to come forth in this world free of coal-soot, carriage horse droppings and midden carts slopping down the street before dawn.

Lysander closed his eyes and drew in the scent of grass and flowers and even the distant whiff of sheep wool. The air washed into Lysander's lungs and out again, carrying with it the dark skies and acrid pain of the past. He breathed in again, and again, until the skin of his face tingled with the sufficiency of it. The silence, the sweet, blessed silence! It bowled him over, flattened him, forced him open and wrested down the stones he had built around his senses. He contained walls that kept out the noise, the people, the sounds and sights and smells and glances from his loved ones and the careful way they stepped around him.

Those inner walls shifted, their foundations shaken by the beautiful stillness.

He opened his eyes. And then there was Gemma Oakes, the Lady of the Dale. She'd undermined his walls from the first moment he'd lain eyes upon her. She had swept beneath his walls like a freshwater spring seeping up from the earth itself, pure and clean, gentle and yet ruthlessly determined.

She walked ahead of him now. Her bonnet hung from her fingers as she lifted her face into that pure breeze that teased her hair from its pins to flutter like a banner behind her.

Gemma. Healer, indeed.

She glanced back at him over her shoulder. The shy smile upon her face made him ache.

London? A thousand miles away. The muddy, bloody killing fields of Spain even farther. As Lysander passed between one cairn and the next, he felt as though he crossed a border of an altogether different kind.

Gemma walked the other way, and together their paths traced a twining meeting and parting, like the laces of a corset. When the cairns stood between them, Lysander felt a loss, as if stepping into shade on a bright chilly day.

She smiled at him in the crossing, as measured as a formal steps of a dance, and dipped a playful curtsey and swirled her skirts as she passed.

The next crossing, he bowed slightly, one hand on his heart, one hand behind his back. The flash of grin upon her lovely face was reward aplenty.

When he spied her at the next crossing, she was flapping her open hand like a fan, pretending to gaze aloofly past him. He lifted his chin and looked scornfully down upon her — a rift in the courtship, another step in the dance, another stone in the crossing.

Then he rounded the final cairn and she was not there. Lysander blinked, startled, and stepped forward.