Arin took the basket from her. “Coming or going?”

“I’ve an errand here, and won’t be home until late.”

“Shall I guess what brings you to town?”

“You can try.”

He peeked in the basket. Bread, still warm from the oven. A bottle of liquor. Long, flat pieces of wood. Rolls of gauze. “A picnic . . . with a wounded soldier? Sarsine,” he teased, “is it true love? What’s the wood for? Wait, don’t tell me. I’m not sure I want to know.”

She swatted him. “The cartwright’s oldest daughter has a broken arm.”

It dropped ice to the bottom of his stomach. He thought of the ruined bodies he’d seen, including the ones he himself had ruined. He realized that he had somehow expected that he’d never have to think again about the way people damage other people.

The night of the invasion. Kestrel’s back. His own. Roshar’s scarred face. His own. The way a body on the battlefield could look as if it had never been human, and that was exactly what Arin had wanted to do to Kestrel’s father, who was in this city, his city, in a prison made to be comfortable, when no comfort could return the man’s arm, and no walls could imprison Arin’s knowledge of what he had done and wanted to do and couldn’t regret.

Yet he did regret.

He could not.

He did.

“Arin, are you all right?”

“How?” he managed. “How did her arm break?”

“She fell off a ladder.”

He must have visibly relaxed, because his cousin raised her brows and looked ready to scold.

“I imagined something worse,” he tried to explain.

She appeared to understand his relief that pain, if it had to come, came this time without malice. Just an accident. Done by no one. The luck, sometimes, of life. A bad slip that ends with bread, and someone to bind you.

It was a long walk home. But a plea sure to regain, unexpectedly, the memory of walking home as a child, secure in the knowledge that he would find every thing he loved there, whole and unbroken, his certainty so absolute that he hadn’t even been aware of it.

The city gave way to cypress trees. His feet were dusty. The sun made every scent stronger: his hot skin, the roasted path, a breath of lavender blown from somewhere he couldn’t see.

The god of death was silent. Not gone. Inhabiting Arin, but comfortably, in a kind of kinship. Arin kept company with death, but death was not all that lived inside him.

A girl in his heart. In his home.

Waiting for him.

There were old stone steps cut into the final hill. His pace quickened.

The house rose into view, sequined with open windows. A war horse was cropping the meadow.

Although Arin was eager to see Kestrel, he would have to wait. He caught threads of music from far away. As he came across the grass, the piano’s melody strengthened. It opened within him a happiness that gathered and gleamed . . . glossy, but the way water is, with weight.

A lovely fatigue claimed him. He lay down on the grass and listened. He thought about how Kestrel had slept on the palace lawn and dreamed of him. When she had told him this, he’d wished that it had been real. He tried to imagine the dream, then found himself dreaming. Every thing made sense in his dream yet he felt the tenuousness of this perfect reason. The arch of Kestrel’s bare foot. An old tale about the god of death and the seamstress. Arin would lose, upon waking, his understanding of why touching Kestrel would arouse the memory of a story he’d not thought about in a long time.

He dreamed: one stocking balled in his fist, and the stray question of how it had been made, who had sewn this? He saw his hands—though they did not look like his hands—measuring and cutting fabric, sewing invisible stitches. A dark-haired boy tumbled from a room, a god-mark upon his brow. When a guest entered and said, Weave me the cloth of yourself, Arin thought that he was the forbidding guest and the child and the sewing girl all at once. She said, I’m going to miss you when I wake up.

Don’t wake up, he answered.

But he did.

Kestrel, beside him on the grass, said, “Did I wake you? I didn’t mean to.”

It took him a velvety moment to understand that this was real. The air was quiet. An insect beat its clear wings. She brushed hair from his brow. Now he was very awake.

“You were sleeping so sweetly,” she said.

“Dreaming.” He touched her tender mouth.

“About what?”

“Come closer, and I’ll tell you.”

But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a want, a promise. A story, in its own way.