Their route at least provided some distraction for Po. He couldn’t stop looking around, his eyes wide. “It’s wild, this forest. Have you ever seen anything like this? It’s gorgeous.”
Gorgeous, and full of animals fattening themselves for winter. Easy hunting, and easy finding shelter. But Katsa felt palpably that the horses were moving as slowly as her mind. “I think we would move faster on our feet,” she said.
“You’ll miss the horses when we have to give them up.”
“And when will that be?”
“It looks possibly ten days away on the map.”
“I’ll prefer traveling by foot.”
“You never tire,” Po said, “do you?”
“I do, if I haven’t slept for a long time. Or if I’m carrying something very heavy. I felt tired when I carried your grandfather up a flight of stairs.”
He glanced at her, eyebrows high. “You carried my grandfather up a flight of stairs?”
“Yes, at Randa’s castle.”
“After a day and a night of hard riding?”
“Yes.”
His laugh burst out, but she didn’t see the joke. “I had to do it, Po. If I hadn’t, the mission would’ve failed.”
“He weighs as much as you, and half as much again.”
“Well, and I was tired by the time I got to the top. You wouldn’t have been so tired.”
“I’m bigger than he is, Katsa. I’m stronger. And I would have been tired, had I spent the night on my horse.”
“I had to do it. I had no choice.”
“Your Grace is more than fighting,” he said.
She didn’t respond to that, and after a moment’s puzzlement, she forgot it. Her mind returned to the matter at hand.
As it couldn’t help but do, with Po always before her.
What WAS the difference between a husband and a lover?
If she took Po as her husband, she would be making promises about a future she couldn’t yet see. For once she became his wife, she would be his wife forever. And, no matter how much freedom Po gave her, she would always know that it was a gift. Her freedom would not be her own; it would be Po’s to give or to withhold. That he never would withhold it made no difference. If it did not come from her, it was not really hers.
If Po were her lover, would she feel captured, cornered into a sense of forever? Or would she still have the freedom that sprang from herself?
They were lying on opposite sides of a dying fire one night when a new worry occurred to her. What if she took more from Po than she could give to him?
“Po?”
She heard him turn onto his side. “Yes?”
“How will you feel if I’m forever leaving? If one day I give myself to you and the next I take myself away – with no promises to return?”
“Katsa, a man would be a fool to try to keep you in a cage”
“But that doesn’t tell me how you’ll feel, always to be subject to my whim.”
“It isn’t your whim. It’s the need of your heart. You forget that I’m in a unique position to understand you, Katsa.
Whenever you pull away from me I’ll know it’s not for lack of love. Or if it is, I’ll know that, too; and I’ll know it’s right for you to go.”
“But you’re not answering my question. How will you feel?”
There was a pause. “I don’t know. I’ll probably feel a lot of things. But only one of the things will be unhappiness; and unhappiness I’m willing to risk.”
Katsa stared up into the treetops. “Are you sure of that?”
He sighed. “I’m certain.”
He was willing to risk unhappiness. And there was the crux of the matter. She couldn’t know where this would lead, and to proceed was to risk all kinds of unhappiness.
The fire gasped and died. She was frightened. For as their camp turned to darkness, she also found herself choosing risk.
———
The next day Katsa would have given anything for a clear, straight path, for hard riding and thundering hooves to drown out all feeling. Instead the road wound back and forth, up rises and into gullies, and she didn’t know how she kept herself from screaming. Nightfall led them into a hollow where water trickled into a low, still pool. Moss covered the trees and the ground. Moss hung from the vines that hung from the trees, and dripped into the pool that shone green like the floor of Randa’s courtyard.
“You seem a bit edgy” Po said. “Why don’t you hunt? I’ll build a fire.”
She allowed the first few animals she stumbled across to escape. She thought that if she plunged deeper into the forest and took more time, she might wear down some of her jitters. But when she returned to camp much later with a fox in hand, nothing had changed. He sat calmly before the fire, and she thought she might burst apart. She threw their meat onto the ground beside the flames. She sat on a rock and dropped her head into her hands.
She knew what it was rattling around inside her. It was fear, plain and cold.
She turned to him. “I understand why we shouldn’t fight each other when one of us is angry. But is there harm in fighting when one of us is frightened?”
He looked into the fire and considered her question evenly. He looked into her face. “I think it depends on what you hope to gain by fighting.”
“I think it’ll calm me. I think it’ll make me comfortable with – with you being near.” She rubbed her forehead, sighing. “It’ll return me to myself ”
He watched her. “It does seem to have that effect on you.”
“Will you fight me now, Po?”
He watched her for a moment longer and then moved away from the fire and motioned for her to follow. She walked after him, dazed, her mind buzzing so crazily it was numb, and when they faced each other she found herself staring at him dumbly. She shook her head to clear it, but it did no good.
“Hit me,” she said.
He paused for a fraction of a second. Then he swung at her face with one fist and she flashed her arm upward to block him. The explosion of arm on arm woke her from her stupor. She would fight him, and she would beat him. He hadn’t beaten her yet, and he wouldn’t beat her tonight. No matter the darkness, and no matter the whirlwind in her mind, for now that they fought, the whirlwind had vanished. Katsa’s mind was clear.
She hit hard and fast, with hand, elbow, knee, foot. He hit hard, too, but it was as if every blow focused some energy inside her. Every tree they slammed into, every root they tripped over, centered her. She fell into the comfort of fighting with Po, and the fight was ferocious.
When she wrestled him to the ground and he pushed her face away, she called out. “Wait. Blood. I taste blood.”
He stopped struggling. “Where? Not your mouth?”
“I think it’s your hand,” she said.
He sat up and she crouched beside him. She took his hand and squinted into his palm. “Is it bleeding? Can you tell?”
“It’s nothing. It was the edge of your boot.”
“We shouldn’t be fighting in boots.”
“We can’t fight barefoot in the forest, Katsa. Truly, it’s nothing.”
“Nonetheless – ”
“There’s blood on your mouth,” he said, in a funny, distracted sort of voice that made plain how little he cared about his injured hand. He raised a finger and almost touched her lip; and then dropped his finger, as if he realized suddenly that he was doing something he shouldn’t. He cleared his throat and looked away from her.
And she felt it then, how near he was. She felt his hand and his wrist, warm under her fingers. He was here, right here, breathing before her; she was touching him; and she felt the risk, as if it were water splashing cold on her skin.
She knew that this was the moment to choose. She knew her choice.
He turned his eyes back to her, and in them she saw that he understood. She climbed into his arms. They clung to each other, and she was crying, as much from relief to be holding him as from the fear of what she did. He rocked her in his lap and hugged her, and whispered her name over and over, until finally her tears stopped.