“Oh, my dear—I only want everyone to be happy,” she said.

He nodded. “What would you say if I said that’s how I feel for you?”

She made the face again. “I’d say that you are twenty-three or -four and you’ll feel differently in a year or two.” She held up a hand. “I’d say that your preoccupation with war makes it impossible for you to love me—or God—very deeply.”

He nodded. “Yes. I’d tell a squire with a new girl the same.” He crossed his booted legs. “So—to hell with love. What did you do?”

She looked at him. So close. So much himself. So many things about him she hated. And loved. Not always as easy to let it go as she claimed, even now, when she could feel the—the simple reality of God’s creation as firmly as she could feel the rock under her hip.

“I used…” She paused. She had a great deal to lose. And at another level, there were parts of this she had carefully avoided admitting, even to herself. “The Abbess was dead. The fortress almost fell. I had all that power Thorn released. I was failing—oh, Gabriel, how I was failing. The potentia was too much for me. The King—and the Queen—required healing.”

She closed her eyes. “And then God put a hand on me and steadied me. And the potentia turned steadily to ops. And I cast and cast.” She stared at the falls, but in her eyes were the results of a hundred healings, of men and women broken by battle and remade.

“I healed everything I touched,” she said. She still wondered at the thought.

Gabriel nodded but said nothing.

She turned to him. “Whoever—steadied me. Spoke to me.” She took a deep breath. “Then and later—but not since, which troubles Miriam. And me.” She pursed her lips a moment and frowned. “Then—the night I was going to… I might have—” She paused.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said. “I’m sorry, Gabriel. I don’t want to explain. I made a decision. Just as you do. The kind of decision that you make in battle—irrevocable, and binding. It is made. I have never hidden what I feel for you.” She looked him in the eye. “But I will not act on it.” She nodded crisply. “Ever.”

“But—” he began.

She got up. “Don’t ask. You love me? Don’t ask. If you sent Michael to his death to save your company—would you?”

He pursed his lips. Had he known, for a moment his expression was the twin of what hers had been. “You’re not an easy friend. Yes, I can see myself doing it.”

She nodded. “Let’s say it worked. Michael dead, the company saved. How often would you care to revisit that decision?”

He rose, too. “I think—I think I understand.” He shook his head. “Oh, Amicia.”

Impulsively, she put a hand behind his head and kissed him—quickly, on the lips, the way she might kiss Katherine or Father Arnaud. “I will teach your children,” she said. “I just won’t bear them.”