After a silence Thierry said, simply, “Sometimes.”

He was having difficulty gathering and holding thoughts. There was a scent she wore that he did not recognize. It had probably been devised for her. He didn’t move in a world where women created their own perfumes.

“Often, I would say,” she murmured.

The steward, blessedly, was coming back across the grass now, leading a servant with a tray. Thierry found he needed time to hunt for composure. He saw wine, two silver cups, a bowl of apricots, another with spring apples. He had no idea how they had apricots so early in the year. The tray was set down. The steward eyed Thierry for permission and poured when he received a nod. Then he withdrew with the servant back into the house. The light breeze continued from the north.

The woman, his guest, selected an apricot and bit into it with small white teeth. Thierry realized that he very much wanted, alarmingly, to bite her lower lip. She looked at him, and he had a sense she knew that was his thought.

“There will be,” she said, looking past him to the trees, “a fog later. I can feel it in the wind. I shall ask Clare if I and two attendants may stay the night, rather than ride home in mist. I have already sent my hunting party home.”

How had she known to do that? Why was she…?

“Your room is on the second floor? The west wing? They usually do that.”

“It…it is, yes,” said Thierry Villar. His mouth was dry. He spoke the thought that came to him. He was prone to doing that, for better or worse. “My lady, are you…are you linked to the half-world? To know a fog is coming?”

And to look the way you look, he also thought.

She laughed, the perfect white teeth again. “Some do say that is so, I’ve heard. I find it amusing, even useful. But…not really. We just know our weather in the countryside. I disdain certain conventions of the world, and my husband is sadly away at war, and it is very quiet here, as you’ll have discovered, however much violence may be happening elsewhere.”

“Not really,” she’d said. Half-denial of the half-world?

You could use that last phrase, Thierry suddenly thought, in a poem of a certain kind. If your head ever worked properly again.

“Very quiet, er, yes, it is,” he said, wincing inwardly at how empty-headed he sounded.

She took another bite of the apricot. She removed a riding glove and used a finger to wipe away some juice on her chin. She licked the finger. Removed the other glove. She had long fingers. He reached, a little desperately, for wine.

—