spun away. The gleam on her hair like warm carnelian, she raised her blood-smeared wrist to her cheek to blot her ashamed tears.
Arithon’s patient remonstrance pursued her. “A past act of abuse can’t vanquish the strength of the survivor I see before me.” He petitioned for truce. “Tonight’s calm is equally real. And without pretence, despite the after-shock of an unspeakable trauma.”
Vivet quivered. Fragile poise undone at a stroke, she snatched the knife from the trestle and bolted. Her tempestuous exit slammed the plank door, forceful enough to shake cobwebs down from the rafters.
She could not be gone long. Without a wool mantle, the relentless cold must outface her emotional storm. Arithon slid the black sword out of sight behind the stacked firewood. Then he took charge of the half-prepared meal, goaded by the ruthless irony: that his platitude consoled nothing. Within and without, his presence was emptied by desolation. The core of his heart had been just as savaged as Vivet’s used body. Naught existed in the wide world to salve the anguish encountered within these four walls. His own needled urge to take flight found no respite in the rote plucking of carcasses.
Yet a master’s awareness viewed the hard road ahead without quarter. All pain must be measured, and met, and finally conquered. Life demanded resilience. Or else the mired spirit would languish, forlorn, crippled under self-indulgent regret.
Arithon stuffed the split birds with wild onion, then wrapped them in herb leaves for flavour. Spitted, they roasted over the coals, while his makeshift oven contrived with flat rocks baked the tubers inside their scrubbed skins.
Vivet returned to that savoury aroma, her downcast eyes puffed, and her arms burdened with additional evergreen. Not to seem useless, she dropped the fresh boughs for his bed in the opposite corner.
“I’m sorry.” Her strained limp brought her back towards the trestle. “I’ve given poor thanks for your civil forbearance.”
Arithon shifted at once to restore space between them.
“Stay,” Vivet objected, singed red with shame. “Don’t freeze yourself on the floor for my sake.”
The first torch had burned down. She kindled another and wedged the stake upright before perching in rigid defiance across the table.
His own raw emotion battened in shadow, Arithon studied her. Up close, underneath the patched bruises, her skin was too young for crow’s-feet. Barely into her twenties, she had a sparrow’s pert grace, a firm chin, apple cheeks, and an expressive dimple beneath coral lips. Her independence carried the cracked fragility of fine porcelain, savagely used but not ruined, though her shadowed glance had forever lost the care-free sparkle of innocence.
“I was returning to Ettinmere Settlement,” she admitted, a brazen effort to forge trust in good faith. Sooty circles beneath downcast lashes wore the pouches of recurrent weeping. Trembling unmasked her false confidence as she added, “I have family there. A father, now passed. Three brothers. Two married sisters. My mother fell ill. I heard through a fur trader. But no word since then to know if she’s living.”
Vivet’s lids flicked up, her bloodshot eyes the vivid blue of a fair-weather lake. “My people are proud of their insular ways. They’ll say, perhaps rightly, I should not have run off on a feckless adventure to Deal.”
The moment filled with the sibilant crackle of flames, while wind off the peaks swooped over the roof shakes, and prised a complaint from a squeaky shutter. Arithon studied Vivet’s clenched hands, without obvious marks of a gainful profession. Distress obscured her true personality. Left to his musician’s gift, he sifted the overtones of her remark and answered her plaintive uncertainty. “You’d have had good reason to seek your own way. One just as important as the resolve that drives your contrite return.”
Vivet’s breath hitched. “More than anything, I wanted the learning to read and write.” More tears might have spilled, had she not been wrung dry. Her loosened hair hazed under flame-light, she huddled like a storm-battered bird, fluffed after a cruel drenching. Her panicky outburst escaped before thought, “Fatemaster’s mercy, I daren’t be seen by my people like this!”
And that sharp, fateful phrase struck the sensitive ear of the Masterbard. Arithon sounded the unpremeditated truth and mapped Vivet’s untenable conflict. Beneath fear, under desperate, trapped rage and stunned hurt in the aftermath of violation, her mangled spirit required the unpressured solitude to recoup and heal. There, vital need floundered into the pit of her frantic anxiety. Wing-broken, her shattered confidence quickened the terror of being alone.
Arithon committed himself without thought. Rootless after his own love’s betrayal, the ashes of his desire embraced Vivet’s agonized need, uncontested.
Distraught incentive cared very little how long her predicament shackled him. Since his ancestral compassion abandoned no wounded spirit to languish, the man sanctioned as the Crown Prince of Rathain plucked the spit off the hearth in deferent anonymity.
“Your brace of woodcock appear to be roasted.” Pain masked by the trivial matter of supper, he set the unwarranted seal on his future. “You need go nowhere before you are ready. I’ll keep watch at the door while you sleep. When you’re comfortable travelling, and if you wish, I’ll guard your way back to your kinfolk in Ettinmere.”
Vivet’s tension unburdened in flooding relief. Arithon rode the impulse of his generosity, salved by his power to offer redress, where his personal hurt found no solace. No farsighted glimpse of dire complication ruffled his sensitive instincts.
Instead, as the evening deepened, the quiet camaraderie shaped by the meal wove a web of frail magic. Meat knifed off the bone and eaten with fingers wore down reserved self-consciousness. His teasing remark about duelling with straws to determine who washed up, without pots and plates, almost raised Vivet’s shy smile. The fleeting flicker of forgotten joy touched the moment she thought he looked elsewhere.
Eased by a beauty that transformed her marked face, Arithon conceded her path to recovery was not entirely one-sided. Though a prolonged stay at the cabin did nothing for his pierced heart, his earnest offer of escort to Ettinmere perhaps posed an unforeseen advantage. Vivet’s grateful family might give him shelter. If not to over-winter in safety, at least he might bargain for warmer clothing and needful supplies. The settlement was remote. Its insular society, hidebound in tradition, shunned outsiders and distrusted Sunwheel priests. As a passing haven, the site could thwart the deadly reach of his enemies.
The present meanwhile rested on the ordinary. While Vivet attended her necessities outside, Arithon tossed their leftovers through the window to fatten the scavenging mice. He secured the loose shutter, replaced the spent torch with a rushlight, and banked the embers in the fire-place. After Vivet’s return, he took up his sword and moved the piled evergreen boughs for his bed to the threshold. Then he sat with his back against the shut door. Tired himself, he honoured his word: burned reckless resource to keep wakeful vigil until the woman settled her nerves and rest overcame her anxiety.
The rushlight burned low. Melted into shadow, the swept boards smelled of damp. Long fled, the sweet fragrance of the bundled herbs once hung to dry in the rafters. No ephemeral trace of the healer’s presence remained to chafe Arithon’s overkeyed senses.
Aching, bereft, he watched Vivet fight the stir of incipient nightmares. Reflection sparked a fitful gleam in her opened eyes until the reed ember winked out. She did not toss and turn but lay in taut stillness into the deeps of the night. Chafed by her turbulent tension, and haunted by other ghosts from his gapped memory, Arithon yearned for the balm of his talent on the lyranthe. The cabin’s too-personal history made the silence ring loud on his ear. Each breath offended his nostrils with the stinging pungency of balsam: a strong scent, not her, and a signal wrongness that frayed every natural instinct.
Fretted past sense, Arithon shouldered the watch through another wearisome hour. The thud of his heart-beat yearned for another woman’s secretive thoughts. He felt more alone than ever before in his years of extended life.
The onerous minutes crept