Until the moment that she arrived and lifted her hand towards him, she had not realized how much of her avoidance of the Garde had been avoidance of that moment. But it passed with outward smoothness, and if his feelings were as turbulent as hers, he said nothing.

They moved in silence - broken by the crying of the seagulls, which seemed so natural here that she had already almost forgotten their own silence - towards the river, where she led with her heavy boxes under her arms, and he said nothing of her absence.

“I’m going to put up a couple of swings,” she said at last. It felt stupid and childish and silly; a few weeks ago the prospect had struck her very agreeably, and she had looked forward to installing it.

She then proceeded, as was her wont, to fill him in on everything that had happened to Joy, if not Elaine, since they had last spoken, lingering on Maus’s progress - he had seemed especially invested in Maus; she thought perhaps he might, one day, like to meet him - and on what was taking place in Grieve’s life. He had fewer questions than he normally asked, standing with his arms folded behind his back and turned towards the river, to watch the gulls wheeling over the water. She worked as she talked, but the task was easier than she’d anticipated, and as she spoke with an exhausted slowness rather than her usual cheerful speed, she was nearly done by the time she finished her update.

The first swing - a broad plank and nothing more - was suspended over the river on a crag of high land, where one might, with some effort, launch themselves from the furthermost point of the arc and splash down into the deep part of the water. The other she hung further in, and she crawled into it as she finished: a little wicker egg to hold her and to block out the view of anything but the broad and shining river - filled with cheap ivory cushions. It was not as comfortable as she had imagined; she curled up within it anyway, pushing herself gently to and fro with her toe and watching, as he did, the gulls.

“And is there - have you nothing left to say?” He asked it gently, but he could not quite conceal some strange hurt in the question.

“Should I have anything? I guess - my plans now that I'm -” She hesitated. “That’s not what you mean.”

“It is not. “

“I'm sorry I made you watch me cry. I’d feel better if you pretended you hadn't.” He made a restless movement, which she perceived although she could not see him, and she felt within her that tired stirring of annoyance. “What now?”

“I grow weary, Lady, of studying for the difference between pretending and lying to you.”

“You weren't very weary of it a few weeks ago.”

“Weariness does tend to start at nothing and grow over time, yes.” The sarcasm was his usual mildness, but the words emerged unevenly, and she was grateful not to see his face. “Forgive me. I grieve for you - am I not helpless enough without this silence - I who can give you nothing but noise -”

“I’m fine. It’s just - it was a lot. I’ll get used to it again. I’m already halfway used to it. You don't have to help me.”

“Yes. I do.”

This, she knew, was true. To tell him to do otherwise was just another instance of giving him a command he could not obey. “I am not helpless. I promise.”

“I know. That is all the more reason.”

How could she make him understand? She didn’t even have the words for her own tumultuous sense of betrayal. She had spent years shaping herself on purpose - being who she was on purpose - even wrestling Knighthood itself into a form that she could love, on purpose. And for nine months, now, she had been contending against a quiet terror that she had only been moving through a path that had been predetermined for her, and that even her fondness for a pale greyish blue had been planted in her against her will, to ripen her for service she had not wished for.

To know that even her own heart might have been making decisions without her input was pain enough. To imagine that in some way he might have turned towards her as inexorably and involuntarily as a flower turns towards sunlight was unbearable.

She pushed herself back and forth, and she asked the question, at last, that had weighed on her, and she asked it more calmly than she had imagined, with a buzzing stillness in her heart: “Who do you see when you look at me?”

He was silent, and resorted to simple confusion. “I beg pardon?”

“Who. It's a simple answer.”

“I see - yourself -”

“And who am I to you?” He was silent, and she did not know whether it was from anger or bewilderment or fear, or possibly all three. But she could not imagine that he did not know the answer, and it stirred that annoyance back to life again, quickening it to frustration. “Oh, now you can dissemble and pretend. Got it.”

“I do not know to what your questions tend.”

“When you look at me - when you're kind to me - you see her. Don't you? Whoever she was -” And again, that oppressive silence, which was confirmation, to her. “You do.”

“How do you know of her?”

“Pretend to be stupid, then.”

“If I am unable to account for this it is not - Lady. Please. I will - speak freely -”

“It's a little late for that.”

But he spoke freely, anyway, or at least he tried to, his words strangling themselves in his throat. “I have had - the thought is not unknown to me. It came late - it was only a suspicion - it disquieted me - but I had no certainty - and now I would beg to know -”

“I don't know anything. I got one of her memories, and it was short, and I didn't ask for it and I wish I'd remained in the ******** dark. I'm not her. I don't care how starseeds work. I don't remember being her. I'm Elaine, I'm me, I'm not -”

“I know.”

“Do you? How can that ******** be, when you hid it from me, because you knew -”

“I do not think of you as her. Lady, I swear it.” His voice grew desperate; another time, another place, she might have taken some sick pleasure in the pleading supplication. But it only made her feel sick. “Ask me to swear it. I will, on anything you ask. My own life is gone. I cannot swear on it. Ask me to swear on anything more dear. Ask me to swear on the Garde - or on -”

But she did, against her own will, find herself yielding to that desperation, assailing her as it did on the side of all her weaknesses. She was silently grateful that he did not, then, throw himself at her feet, and perhaps destroy all her resolve. He only stood off to the side and somewhat behind her, where she could not see him as she leaned her cheek on the cheap cushions and looked blankly at the water. “You can tell me something that isn't true and not be lying. I can't - don't you see? You can believe yourself - I can't go back to not knowing - do you - do you see me move or speak a certain way and remember her? How can -”

But this moment of small forgiveness only seemed to ignite in him the willingness to be angry in return. “Have I never moved or spoken in a way that brought to mind someone else for you? Even your own arrogance cannot possibly -”

She sat up, the swing careening until she planted her foot on the ground to stop it. “Even that! Even that. She was arrogant, wasn't she? I felt - she felt so ******** smug -”

“Lady. Please.” It was not a simple aimless desire to be heard. He hesitated, and she felt in that hesitation some direct plea that went unspoken.

“What?”

He was silent, and when he answered it was in a voice so quiet and so level that it could do nothing but betray the amount of effort he had spent to get it there. “Only tell me - what that memory was -”

And the rage came back. What right had he, to a memory that was not even her own, let alone his? Why? To hold it and consider how she, Elaine, might fit into the shape of it? Maybe some weeks ago she would have hated herself for thrilling at the thought of him trying to fit the idea of her into a situation that looked a little like affection; now she sickened at the idea, and hated herself for that as well. “If you can withhold things I can too.”

“I do not wish to withhold.” He added, with sudden impulsive impatience as she lapsed back into the cushions: “Ask me anything. I am done with this incessant secrecy. Good God, Lady, after last time - can we not speak freely to one another even now?”

“No. We can't.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm scared.” This did not result in the explosive anger she had anticipated, and instead resulted in nothing at all. She waited, tense, for the silence to break, and waited in vain. “Now you're quiet.”

“It is not the answer I expected you to give.”

“Why? You used to call me a coward.”

“And I have been wrong, and said as much time and again. But chastise me for that mistake once again, if it brings you relief.”

“It doesn't.”

“What are you afraid of? Please.”

“I can't stand - even if you don't think it's true - the idea that every kind thing you've ever done for me, you did for her - how am I supposed to think any kindness you ever had for me was on purpose -”

“I did not even know her name, Lady. This is madness. You are above such -”

“You think I’m petty, but I’m not. It matters. It matters that you - that whatever good thing you have ever done for me - that maybe that was a conscription to you, too.” And it still had to be that - didn’t it? - that they were only good deeds and chivalrous forgiveness for her short temper and irrational impatience, and not some other feeling that it was even more terrifying to give a name to, and even more devastating to think that he had not chosen. She thought, again, of his saying that he had loved the sound of her voice; the idea that perhaps he had only loved it because she had put language into what had been alien music to him turned her stomach. “It matters more than anything that I am me, to you.”

He was silent again, and then, brokenly, but with a sincerity that could bring her no pleasure: “Lalaine.”

“Gouvernail,” she said, and she could not help it, that there was a coldness in it.

She wondered, at first, if he would answer. She wondered even if he still stood there, where she could not see him, or if he had simply left her to her anger - anger that felt, for the first time in a long time, justified, and came without the stings of a reproachful conscience. Where it might have been goaded into rage by a consciousness of her own fault, it was instead humbled into grief. There was no way to make him understand her. He had, perhaps, never understood her to begin with.

But he spoke, at last, and carefully despite the occasional fumbling in his voice. “I have never done anything for you that was not for your own self. What things have I even had in my power to do? But I would do any of them, if I could. Because you think yourself a queen, and you fancy yourself a saint, but you did not hesitate before telling me that you were afraid, and you said it without shame. God help me, what I would have done to be so unashamed of my fear, when it might have served me. God help me, that I might have guarded my own life so tirelessly.”

She had not ever imagined that he could be a creature of empty flattery. She sat in the basket and looked at the pinpricks of sunlight that wound down through the wicker and speckled her arms. These words sounded like praise for her - for Elaine - but he had once, some untold centuries ago, touched a woman’s face with tenderness despite knowing nothing of her, not even her name, and that woman might have gone on in some way to be a thread in the tapestry that was to become Elaine, but she was not Elaine, and she wanted nothing of this man’s empty compliments any more than that woman had wanted his tenderness.

But that was a lie of her own, wasn’t it? She did want them, because she wanted to believe that they were not empty at all. She even wanted - in the way that she had not, in that unasked-for memory - that tenderness some other woman had gently turned away from.

(Because she had not earned it, perhaps. Perhaps because it was an empty flattery.)

Spite rose up. She wanted to tell him what he must have long suspected - that there had been no affection in that woman, only kindness - but was there any point, if she was unwilling to give him any affection of her own? But she said it anyway, her voice flat. “I was - she wasn't sure how you felt. She pretended to put a halter on you. I guess nowadays she'd have gone for a collar. She thought - she thought you were too soft. Too tender. She didn't want you to mistake her for being tender too.”

“Thank you for telling me this,” he said, gently and quietly, his voice muted as if with shame.

“I've withheld things from you too. I still am. I still will.”

“You have never sworn to do otherwise.”

Justice compelled her to observe, not without bitterness: “Neither did you.”

“Shall I now? I will.”

“No.”

“Lalaine. Please.” Again, that gentle desperation. “You told me that you would hear me -”

But she turned from it, as she or someone like her had once turned towards it and away from his meaningless affection. “And I said I might hate you for it. But that was before I knew what you were offering to tell me, anyway. I’m not keeping a promise that I made without knowing what I was promising. I don't want to know everything. I don't want you to either.”

“Lady -”

“It's an order, if that's easier for you than a request.”

He was silent, again, for a long and crawling moment, while she watched fish break from the river to snap at dragonflies. “It is, yes,” he said at last, without inflection.

She had withheld things from him, but she could still not resist that voice within her that repeated in righteous indignation that he had wronged her, but she had not wronged him. He had asked her, again and again, not to withhold the truth for the sake of his feelings, and then he had proceeded to do so to her, only to leave her to discover the devastating truth by happenstance.

She had told herself that she would keep whatever promises she had made to herself, and she would. Her urge to bring him kindness and relief would not be removed for some reason as petty as this. This one sin against her - made, even, in what she chose to believe was a misguided kindness and not simply a desire to serve his own secret wishes - was not enough to destroy what she had told Lyndin: that he was a good man, who deserved her help. It was good to think of this from the distance of objective reason, rather than the closeness of her awful fondness.

Still.

She spoke, at last, resuming pushing the swing back and forth with her toe listlessly. “When we talked - about how if you could have that moment in the storm again. Would you still want it?”

“Yes.”

“Even if it was brief - even if you didn't get to keep it -”

He was quiet. Perhaps he felt himself, now, entitled to ignore her questions, especially those that he had begged her not to ask him again. But he did answer, at last: “Lady, if you put a man into a prison without the touch of the air on his face for centuries, do you think he would shy away from a chance to feel sunlight, even if it were only briefly?”

“Ok,” she said numbly. “Forgive me. But I needed to know.” She waited for him to ask why she needed to know, but he did not.

But he did speak again, and it was with that muted voice of gentle shame, as he had sometimes used when he humbled himself for her. It worked on her, as it always did, but from a distance now that could not cause that flutter in her ribs.

“Would you be there?” He asked, and she did not allow the lurch in her stomach to interrupt her gentle swaying. “If - I were given some moment of life again - would you be there?”

And he asked it with an urgency, as if perhaps he had guessed at some of what she did not tell him: that she only did not speak of that possibility because she, too, was avoiding incurring in him a painful feeling of devastated hope.

He had wronged her. For the first time since that initial meeting, he had wronged her. But she could not wrong him about this, and she fought in silence until she knew that her answer would be cool and steady.

“Would you want me to be?”

“Yes,” he said, and that single shaken word seemed to enclose a thousand unspoken ones.

“Then of course,” she said, and while the thought was not without a pang of unasked-for, traitorous pleasure, it was also not without a painful anger, and this, too, she concealed from him. “I would be there.”