Then one evening, Dasius reined up on me, stopping their horse, a lithe hunter, a few meters from where I was walking in the field.

"Conquering hero," I said, whipping the grass as I went with a long weed.

"I'm not trying to impress you," he said, affronted.

"Good, not impressed."

The hunter guttered and huffed. I looked at her, and she was looking at me with one silky black eye. I could see my red hair reflected in it.

"Don't like him either, aye hunter?" I asked. "He looks stupid up there. You're so big and he's not much."

"Will you come with me or not? I am not meant to leave you alone."

"Why, where are you going?" I asked, moving to pet the horse. She had long eyelashes, the same black as her coat, which seemed brushed and looked after. She shuddered her wither under my hand, as if shooing away a pest. "You didn't even saddle her. She won't like it if you're going to ride her hard. You are, aren't you?"

"I'm going to Rouen. Laurent has been out too long." He pushed his hair back from his forehead. He'd loosely bound it in a high chignon. Self-consciously, he smoothed his cotton shirt.

"Look at you, the little nursemaid. He goes out all the time. So what if he's gone a few more hours?" I asked, cooing at the hunter.

Dasius paused a moment, looking at the sky. He tilted his head at me, as if I were an imbecile. "Listen, you daft cow. If I've got the hunter, how the hell did he get to Rouen? Are you understanding now?"

"Oh," I said, offering my weed to his horse. She wouldn't take it.

"Oh. That's right. You have been here a month and you think you know everything there is to know."

"No I don't," I said, looking at him finally, hands at my hips. There was a cool breeze, and it made me feel cold.

"You don't know anything at all. Go back to the house. God forbid some ravager find you. I'll be hung up for it. He will blame me though he's the one who's run off."

"What's he gone for?"

"It's none of your business, is it? You're so clever, figure it out. Go back to the house."

"What do you mean, 'ravager'?"

"Miriam, I don't have the time or will to explain everything there is to you right now. If you want me to, and if I have the means, I will come to your bed later and answer all of your questions." His voice sounded measured, calm, focused.

"Sure. That'll be nice," I said. D'accord. Genial.

"Go home."

So I went home, not knowing what a "ravager" was, and huddled in my bed under the covers in case it was something that wanted to hurt me, listening for every bump and whisper through the grass, because it was the first time I had felt very alone since dying. I would never have noticed such aloneness had he not revealed it to me by warning me about it, and it was long hours before I heard him and Laurent coming, and piercing screaming, such that I had never heard before. It was like a fox imitating a human child's voice, long keening screams which chilled me utterly, so that I pushed myself against the wall.

I heard my name, urgently, and "Help me" and heard, "Don't make me do this!" and another voice, which I knew to be Dasius's, crying out in pain, and the fox cry out in response, as if they were the same flesh, deep and vibrating in my bones. I hid. Dasius has never forgiven me for being a vainglorious coward. I heard, "Let me go, I need my child, my baby," keening, whimpers of pain delivered, and it went on for a very long time. And finally, I felt hands taking me up, and the covers being ripped back, hands at my arms, and Dasius gave me a very hard slap across the face.

"It is you he is afraid of!" he shouted at me, "And you are hiding!" shaking me.

I moaned some words and he shook me harder, rattling them out of my throat so that I couldn't speak at all. His hands gripped me so hard that he cut at my flesh, and blood ran from his fingertips. He whispered.

"You have made me break him. You have made me do it. Will I regret you all my life? Should I kill you now?"

I coughed and croaked to him that he was emotional, and it would look better by morning, and other nonsense which came out of me like muscle memory. Don't hurt me. It will be better soon. When you calm down a little, you'll feel better about me, I promise. "Please," I whispered, "please."

"Do you know why he doesn't sleep by you? What you did to him, tearing out his throat. You act like it can be forgotten about, as if it never happened, as if you are the victim because of having a stove in head. You have made him so vulnerable he has lost his mind. He can think of nothing but dying. He has absolutely lost his mind."

"What's a ravager, Dasius?"

His eyes softened them, rolling up and then down to me again, because he was exhausted, and it was only adrenaline keeping him up. I noticed his body, which was so slim but so strong, and he dipped his face close to mine. For a moment I thought he meant to kiss me, so I tilted my chin up, but then his head was at my throat, and I held him like a brother, my hand in his hair. "They are lost creatures. They are abandoned. They kill young ones like you for your old blood. They think it will make them stronger. It won't," he said, so softly, breath warm against my neck.

I held him tightly. His body was heavier than it looked. "Even here? There's nobody here. We are so far from anyplace."

"It doesn't matter where. Laurent thinks of it constantly. He raves about it. He begs me to let him go find Nicky because Nicky will be killed. Nicky is so small, but he'll never find him. Not ever. He can't understand that. The entire world to hide in."

I held him an hour or so, petting his hair, and at length he whispered to me not to blame him for what he did, and that he had not done half of it, and some other things, softly, as if in a trance of my cold comfort, which he so needed, which made him confess things he would never have confessed. "He stumbles from your room in the small hours because in pleasure he is so vulnerable," he murmured, like a boy.

"I'm afraid," I whispered.

"I know," he said, "but you should put fear aside. If you know one thing, you should know that."

But I have never been able to do it so well as he does. Dasius, who dispenses with fear and acts as needs doing. It's why so many fear him and think him so cold. Is it not a human thing to be afraid? Is it not a human thing to think him inhuman for being terribly efficient and slavish to duty? To put aside trying to understand him in order to succumb to the mindless comfort of fear, I am guilty of it. And I felt, regardless of his words, nameless horror at what I found behind the house, the broken creature, with its snapped fingers and blooded lips, its faintly vulpine features drawn in savage tranquility, so very still. Laurent.

He was lying against the back of the house, legs askew, eyes shut, bound to a horse hook. At my approach, he opened his eyes lazily, warm brown irises somehow cool, and I saw him as little human as he ever looked, bloody patterns drawn into his flesh as if by a weaver's silver pin.

I crouched out of his reach, and he drew himself away from me, legs bent. He was wearing nothing but a shapeless woman's shift, tunic-like, and leather sandals which were beaten from long-walking. His legs were dusted to the thigh, at which point they gave over to bloody gashes, raw and angry, and I could smell his blood mixing with the dirt beneath him.

"David broke my nose," he whispered, startling me utterly. He whispered it, almost as if embarrassed, "Please put it right." His tone was lower than I had known it to be, in the back of his throat and vibrating.

"If I touch you there will you try to bite me?" I asked.

"Him of great temerity is fearful of my teeth," he whispered.

"I was not of my own mind when I hurt you," I said, just as quietly.

"We do not know what your mind is," he hissed.

"You have said that you love me."

He shut his eyes again and I whipped my hand out, going to my knees so that I could reach his face. He sat very still while I felt for the broken part of his nose and straightened it. I felt it move beneath my hand. I felt it knit. It took my breath away. His eyes opened when he heard my breath go, and his eyes were luminous in the faint moonlight. "You have kissed this skin. Did you not know it for peculiar when you kissed it?"

I sat back on my heels, and he struggled to find a more comfortable position, his arms bound over his head. As he shifted his body, his delicate fingers, with their rounded fingernails, moved against the cool air as if palpating soft flesh. The shift tightened against his torso and loosened again, giving a glimpse of his shape through the fabric.

"Why bind you? You seem sane to me."

"You are so stupid there aren't words for it. Do I have to speak to you?" he whispered. But then I knew, because of how he didn't look at me, and avoided my eyes, that he was like me, and had memorized a hundred phrases to make himself safe.

"Are you afraid of me?" I whispered.

My eyes wandered over his arms and the wreckage of his thighs. Looking closely, the deep lacerations on his arms were in pattern, like a witch's runes, and so I knew that he must have done them himself. His eyes swam away from my gaze, looking up at the sliver of moon which cast light on him. Then, he seemed goggle-eyed, a trapped vixen, naked of his fear. I sat with my arms hugging my legs in the dirt, watching him.

"Does he do this to you often?" I asked.

"I want my child," he said, very clearly, in that strange, vibrating tone. And then, suddenly, he was in tears again, and thrashing, and I pushed myself back so that he couldn't hurt me, even bound as he was. But the thrashing did not last long, because he was exhausted, and he had hurt himself already beyond imaginable limits. Half of his delicate, stroking fingers were broken, popped apart by Dasius in subduing him.

"I think you're beautiful, even like this," I said softly.

"Unbind me," he whispered, barely audible, in that strange voice. But what did I know of him? Did I know anymore about his true nature than him mine? Though I had felt his pulse against my lips and tasted him so many times. Though I knew his smell intimately, which in later years he hid behind the scent of oranges and alcohol, obscured self. He was naked then. Perhaps that was him. He begged me to unbind him, and whispered to me his true name, and whispered, "See? I will tell you anything. I will tell you what you want to know. I will give you all of myself. Let me go and find my child." He played every card he could, and whispered, "Goddamn you," and threats.

Then, at long last, he dissolved into tears, and I watched that, too, unspeaking. He said, "Will you take everything from me? And still keep me prisoner?" and wept. But it was only because I was a coward, and didn't know what he would do, or what it would mean if he left me.

When Dasius came near sunrise, footsteps announcing him, and cut his master loose, whose body had begun to mend and whose voice had gone, Dasius kissed him all over, from staring face to collarbones, and took him inside the house without a glance at me at all.