It worked. She pulled the blade away and brought her arm down; after that, she knew not what to do. It was too deep dark to start the journey back to her men. It would likely take all the next day and more, and she was weary to the bone. Nothing would please her better than to eat a hot and enormous dinner, and curl by the fire to sleep until the sun was high next day. The thought of it made her muscles ache all the more.

“Are you hungry?” he asked gruffly, pulling her out of her fancies. “Pray tell me you are not so witless as to forget to bring rations to last you the hunt?”

She waited for him to look up at her, irritated that he would imply she would be so foolish. When he did look up, she merely stared at him, her expression one that she had used many times: a quelling look, one that invariably made her men, betimes even her mother, react with a horrified deference as though she had caught them in an act of gravest insubordination. Ranulf of Morency only looked bored. He raised his brows slightly at her, the sharp arch of them over his dark eyes looking villainous in the firelight, and dismissed her yet again with that hint of a smile before he blinked and looked down at her hip. Her hand fell to the purse she wore there, stuffed with provisions. It was not much, but enough to last them both through tomorrow.

“Good,” he continued. “Then I’ll not have to share mine.”

He levered himself up to a kneeling position and reached toward the fire where the rabbit dripped juices into the flames. He had to know that she would raise her sword again, but he did not hesitate, nor even tense. She knew he had the knife, but they both knew it was nothing to her own weapon. And so again he made her feel foolish, for brandishing her sword against an all but defenseless man.

He is not defenseless, she reminded herself as she watched him reach a long arm to the spit. She felt as close to the heat of the fire as he was, though she stood further away.

And suddenly she was too tired and inexplicably lonely to care whether it was mad to trust him for the length of a meal. She sheathed her sword and the recurring thought rose in her once more, a childish whine that always awaited her at the end of her rope: I don’t want to discover the wisest way, let someone else do it. She lowered herself to the ground and willed herself not to dwell on the stupid resentment.