He nodded and let go of her face. The shapes of his hands were printed faintly on her cheeks.

“Ye frightened me,” Susan said, and then shook her head. That wasn’t right. “Ye do frighten me.”

“I can’t help what I am.”

“And I wouldn’t change it.” She kissed his left cheek, his right cheek, his mouth. She put her hand inside his shirt and caressed his nipple. It grew instantly hard beneath the tip of her finger. “Bird and bear and hare and fish,” she said, now making soft butterfly kisses all over his face. “Give your love her fondest wish.”

After, they lay beneath a bearskin Roland had brought along and listened to the wind sough through the grass.

“I love that sound,” she said. “It always makes me wish I could be part of the wind... go where it goes, see what it sees.”

“This year, if ka allows, you will.”

“Aye. And with thee.” She turned to him, up on one elbow. Light fell through the ruined roof and dappled her face. “Roland, I love thee.” She kissed him... and then began to cry.

He held her, concerned. “What is it? Sue, what troubles thee?”

“I don’t know,” she said, crying harder. “All I know is that there’s a shadow on my heart.” She looked at him with tears still flowing from her eyes. “Thee’d not leave me, would ye, dear? Thee’d not go without Sue, would ye?”

“No.”

“For I’ve given all I have to ye, so I have. And my virginity’s the very least of it, thee knows.”

“I’d never leave you.” But he felt cold in spite of the bearskin, and the wind outside—so comforting a moment ago—sounded like beast’s breath. “Never, I swear.”

“I’m frightened, though. Indeed I am.”

“You needn’t be,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully... for suddenly all the wrong words wanted to come tumbling out of his mouth. We’ll leave this, Susan—not day after tomorrow, on Reaping, but now, this minute. Dress and we’ll go crosswise to the wind; it’s south we’ll ride and never look back. We’ll be—

—haunted.

That’s what they would be. Haunted by the faces of Alain and Cuthbert; haunted by the faces of all the men who might die in the Shavéd Mountains, massacred by weapons torn from the armory-crypts where they should have been left. Haunted most of all by the faces of their fathers, for all the rest of their lives. Not even the South Pole would be far enough to escape those faces.