“You spend a good deal of time with her.”

Roshar’s cup paused in midair. “Arin.”

Swift jealousy. A caged resentment.

“I’m not—shall we say—interested in Kestrel.” The prince’s expression changed slightly, and in the pause that followed, a slow thought occurred to Arin, one that offered an entirely new explanation for why Roshar’s soldiers had done nothing when Arin had pushed him into the shadowed trees. “Women don’t interest me that way,” Roshar said.

It seemed to Arin that he had understood this for a long time without actually realizing that he did. He caught Roshar’s expression, which on another man Arin might have called tentative, but on the prince looked closer to soft curiosity. His black eyes were quiet. Arin felt things shift between them into more intricate patterns than before. “I know,” Arin told him.

“Oh do you?” A wicked grin. “Would you like to know for sure?”

Arin flushed. “Roshar . . .” He floundered for what to say.

The prince laughed at him. He filled Arin’s cup. “Drink fast, little Herrani. As you astutely observed, I have someone else coming to night, and while your company is almost always welcome, his is company I will best enjoy alone.”

Kestrel waited outside Arin’s tent. It was a muzzy sort of night, too warm for a fire. The camp was a dark terrain. He didn’t see her clearly, just the shape of her.

“I brought you something.” She held out her hand and dropped a round object into his.

He knew it instantly. He ran fingers over its firm, lightly pebbled surface. “An orange.”

“I found a tree not far from camp and took as many as I could carry. Most I gave away. This one, I thought we could share.”

He jumped the orange from one hand to the other, marveling at it.

She said, “I didn’t know whether you like them.”

“I do.”

“Did you tell this to me once? Did I forget?”

“I never told you. Actually . . .” He rolled it in the well of one palm. “I love them.”

He could have sworn that she smiled in the dark. “Then what are you waiting for?”

He dug his thumb in and peeled it open. Its perfume sprayed the air. He halved it and gave Kestrel her share.

They sat on the grass outside his tent. They’d camped in a meadow not far from the road. He touched the grass, sleek beneath his fingers. He ate. The fruit was vibrant on his tongue. It had been years. “Thank you.”

He thought he saw her mouth curve, and he was washed by a breathless nervousness. He spat a seed into his palm and wondered what little kernel lay in the folds of this moment. Then he told himself to stop thinking. An orange. A rare enough plea sure. Just eat.

After a moment, he asked, “How are you?”

“Better. Before . . . it was like I was trying to navigate a new country where there was no such thing as the ground. At least now I know where I stand.” He heard the sound of her brushing her hands clean, and then the sound of things unsaid, of words weighed and found wanting. Sorrow, radiating from her. The low throb of it.

Gently, he asked, “Are you truly better?”

He heard her breath catch.

“You don’t have to be better.”

The silence expanded.

He said, “I wouldn’t be.”

Her voice was a mere thread. “How would you be?”

He thought of the wrongness of loss, how as a child he’d step right into it, and fall, and then would blame himself not only for every thing he hadn’t done when the soldiers had invaded his home, but also for his fathomless grief. He should see the gaping holes in his life. Avoid them. Step carefully, Arin, why can’t you step carefully? Mother, father, sister. What could you say about someone who walked daily into his grief and lived at the bottom of its hole and didn’t even want to come out?

He remembered how he’d begun to hate himself. The sculpting of his anger. He thought about how certain words mean themselves and also their opposites, like cleave. Come together, split apart. He thought about how sorrow limns the places where parts of you join. Your past and present. Loves and hates. It sets a chisel into the cracks and pries. He wanted to say this, yet worried. He feared saying the wrong thing. He feared that his anger for her father might twist what he wanted to say. And he wasn’t sure, suddenly, if he should answer her question . . . if by answering it he might, without meaning to, push his own loss into the place of hers, or make hers look like his.

He stared at the dark outline of her face. Her question overwhelmed him.