Still silent, she reached out and offered him half of what she held: some of the roasted hare they had prepared last night, stuffed into the last of the hard bread she had brought with her. He took it in his damp hands and rejected her quiet closeness by moving to the opposite bank where the mossy root of a tree stood above the water and mud. He sat there, across the short distance of water from her and watched as she swallowed her food quickly, without speaking.

He savored the meat, alternately following the progress of a snail across the smooth, flat stone near him, and watching her as she pulled a whetstone no bigger than her hand from the pouch she carried. Before he could utter a protest, she reached for his sword where he had left it on the bank – now easily in her reach and far from his own – and, laying it across her knees, began to hone the blade.

“Is not near sharp as it could be, past two fingers from–”

“From the tip, aye,” she interrupted, her words overlapping his.

Her face was grim and set, no enjoyment of the task there. In her manner, he saw she did it not from solicitude, but because she saw the sword as her own property. It was just another weapon under her care which she allowed him to use, driven to it by circumstance and naught else. So she said in her brisk movements, in how she touched the blade as though it were her own.

Ranulf put his hand on the rock, in front of the snail, to see if it would turn in its slow afternoon course across the stone. Her legs glinted white in the filtered sunlight. The linen of the tunic was wet where it clung to her knees, and he followed the line of her muscle up her thigh until it was hidden, midway up, by the long shirt of mail she wore. The sound of stone grated on him, almost as much as her critical look, keenly assessing the blade as she worked.

“Does my lady forge iron, too?” he snorted. “Haps I could use a blacksmith on my estate. You’ve the proper build for it.”

He did not look up, though he dearly would have loved to see the anger spark to life in her eyes. He could feel it across the water, hear it in the pause of the whetstone’s stroke. Her cousins must not remark on her sex at all, else she would not let such small things provoke her. Clearly she preferred the illusion that she was not female, so long as she was not dressed as one, and hated any reminder of what she was beneath the armor. But she said nothing, and he could not but admire her restraint.