She gripped the edges of her saddle to keep herself from sitting down on the ground between the feet of her horse.
“You… you have a way of upending my plans,” he said, and she cried out and sank to her knees, then heaved herself up furiously before he could come to her, and help her, and touch her.
“Get on your horse,” she said, “right now. We’re riding.”
She mounted and took off, without even waiting to be sure he followed. They rode, and she allowed only one thought to enter her mind, over and over. I don’t want a husband. I don’t want a husband. She matched it to the rhythm of her horse’s hooves. And if he knew her thought, all the better.
———
When they stopped for the night she did not speak to him, but she couldn’t pretend he wasn’t there. She felt every move he made, without seeing it. She felt his eyes watching her across the fire he built. It was like this every night, and this was how it would continue to be. He would sit there gleaming in the light of the fire, and she unable to look at him, because he glowed, and he was beautiful, and she couldn’t stand it.
“Please, Katsa,” he finally said. “At least talk to me.”
She swung around to face him. “What is there to talk about? You know how I feel, and what I think about it.”
“And what I feel? Doesn’t that matter?”
His voice was small, so unexpectedly small, in the face of her bitterness that it shamed her. She sat down across from him. “Po. Forgive me. Of course it matters. You may tell me anything you feel.”
He seemed suddenly not to know what to say. He looked into his lap and played with his rings; he took a breath and rubbed his head; and when he raised his face to her again she felt that his eyes were naked, that she could see right through them into the lights of his soul. She knew what he was going to say.
“I know you don’t want this, Katsa. But I can’t help myself. The moment you came barreling into my life I was lost.
I’m afraid to tell you what I wish for, for fear you’ll… oh, I don’t know, throw me into the fire. Or more likely, refuse me. Or worst of all, despise me,” he said, his voice breaking and his eyes dropping from her face. His face dropping into his hands. “I love you,” he said. “You’re more dear to my heart than I ever knew anyone could be. And I’ve made you cry; and there I’ll stop.”
She was crying, but not because of his words. It was because of a certainty she refused to consider while she sat before him. She stood. “I need to go.”
He jumped up. “No, Katsa, please.”
“I won’t go far, Po. I just need to think, without you in my head.”
“I’m afraid if you leave you won’t come back.”
“Po.” This assurance, at least, she could give him. “I’ll come back.”
He looked at her for a moment. “I know you mean that now. But I’m afraid once you’ve gone off to think, you’ll decide the solution is to leave me.”
“I won’t.”
“I can’t know that.”
“No,” Katsa said, “you can’t. But I need to think on my own, and I refuse to knock you out, so you have to let me go. And once I’m gone you’ll just have to trust me, as any person without your Grace would have to do. And as I have to do always, with you.”
He looked at her with those naked, unhappy eyes again. Then he took a breath and sat down. “Put a good ten minutes between us,” he said, “if you want privacy.”
Ten minutes was a far greater range than she’d understood his Grace to encompass; but that was an argument for another time. She felt his eyes on her back as she passed through the trees. She groped forward, hands and feet, in search of darkness, distance, and solitude.
———
Alone in the forest, Katsa sat on a stump and cried. She cried like a person whose heart is broken and wondered how, when two people loved each other, there could be such a broken heart.
She couldn’t have him, and there was no mistaking it. She could never be his wife. She could not steal herself back from Randa only to give herself away again – belong to another person, be answerable to another person, build her very being around another person. No matter how she loved him.
Katsa sat in the darkness of the Sunderan forest and understood three truths. She loved Po. She wanted Po. And she could never be anyone’s but her own.
After a while, she began to thread her way back to the fire.
Nothing had changed in her feeling, and she wasn’t tired. But Po would suffer if he didn’t sleep; and she knew he wouldn’t sleep until she had returned.
———
He was lying on his back, wide awake, staring up at a half-moon. She went to him and sat before him. He watched her with soft eyes and didn’t say anything. She looked back at him, and opened up her feelings to him, so that he would understand what she felt, what she wanted, and what she couldn’t do. He sat up. He watched her face for a long time.
“You know I’d never expect you to change who you are, if you were my wife,” he finally said.
“It would change me to be your wife,” she said.
He watched her eyes. “Yes. I understand you.”
A log fell into the fire. They sat quietly. His voice, when he spoke, was hesitant.
“It strikes me that heartbreak isn’t the only alternative to marriage,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He ducked his head for a moment. He raised his eyes to her again. “I’ll give myself to you however you’ll take me,”
he said, so simply that Katsa found she wasn’t embarrassed. She watched his face.
“And where would that lead?”
“I don’t know But I trust you.”
She watched his eyes.
He offered himself to her. He trusted her. As she trusted him.
She hadn’t considered this possibility, when she’d sat alone in the forest crying. She hadn’t even thought of it. And his offer hung suspended before her now, for her to reach out and claim; and that which had seemed clear and simple and heartbreaking was confused and complicated again. But also touched with hope.
Could she be his lover and still belong to herself?
That was the question; and she didn’t know the answer. “I need to think,” she said.
“Think here,” he said, “please. I’m so tired, Katsa. I’ll fall right asleep.”
She nodded. “All right. I’ll stay.”
He reached up, and wiped away a tear that sat on her cheek. She felt the touch of his fingertip in the base of her spine, and fought against it, against allowing him to know of it. He lay down. She stood and moved to a tree outside the light of their fire. She sat against it and watched Po’s silhouette, waiting for him to fall asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The notion of having a lover was to Katsa something like discovering a limb she’d never noticed before. An extra arm or toe. It was unfamiliar, and she poked and prodded it, as she would have prodded an alien toe unexpectedly her own.
That the lover would be Po reduced her confusion somewhat. It was by thinking of Po, and not of the notion of a lover, that Katsa became comfortable enough to consider what it would mean to lie in his bed but not be his wife.
It took more than the thinking of one night. They moved through the Sunderan forest, and they talked and rested and made camp as before. But their silences were perhaps a bit less easy than they had been; and Katsa broke off occasionally, to keep her own company and think in solitude. They did not practice fighting, for Katsa was shy of his touch. And he didn’t press it upon her. He pressed nothing upon her, even conversation, even his gaze.
They moved as quickly as the road allowed. But the farther they traveled, the more the road resembled a trail at best, winding through overgrown gullies and around trees the size of which Katsa had never seen. Trees with trunks as wide as the horses were long, and branches that groaned far above them. They had to duck sometimes to avoid curtains of vines hanging from the branches. The land rose as they moved east, and streams crisscrossed the forest floor.