*
He woke during the night. The lamp had been turned down low. His eyes opened just slightly, and gleamed in the feeble light. He opened them wider. He saw Kestrel, and didn’t smile, not exactly, yet the set of his mouth changed. His hand tightened around hers.
“Father.” Kestrel would have said more, but he closed his eyes briefly in the way of someone who wants to say no without speaking, yet hasn’t the strength to shake his head. Softly, he said, “Sometimes I forget that you aren’t a soldier.”
He was thinking about when he’d entered the palace yard, and the way she had greeted him. Kestrel said flatly, “You believe I don’t know how to behave around you.”
For a moment, he was silent. “Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t know.” There was another silence, long enough for Kestrel to think that that was all he would say, but he spoke again. “Look how you’ve grown. I remember the day you were born. I could hold you with one hand. You were the world’s best thing. The most precious.”
Aren’t I now, to you? she wanted to say. Instead, she whispered, “Tell me how I was.”
“You had a warrior’s heart, even then.”
“I was just a baby.”
“No, you did. Your cry was so fierce. You held my finger so tightly.”
“All babies cry. All babies hold on tight.”
He let go of her hand to lift his, and brush his knuckles across her cheek. “Not like you.”
*
He had fallen asleep again. When the physician came at dawn to clean the wound, the pain woke him.
“More?” The physician nodded at the empty cup that had held the medicine. The general gave him a dark look.
When the physician had left again, her father rubbed his eyes. His face was slack with pain. “How long did I sleep?”
“About four hours after the healer first cleaned your wound. After you woke in the night, another three.”
He frowned. “I woke in the middle of the night?”
“Yes,” said Kestrel, confused, but already feeling wary, already tensing as if some blow was about to fall.
“Did I … say something I shouldn’t have?”
Kestrel realized that he didn’t remember waking, or the conversation. She could no longer tell if he had meant what he had said to her then. Even if he had meant it, had he meant to say it?
He had, after all, been drugged.
An emotion leaked away. It came from a small cut that Kestrel couldn’t close.
“No,” she told her father. “You didn’t.”