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Quiet is a funny thing, Clare thinks. You learn to get used to it, and then you get used to its absence, and then when it returns it’s strange again.
These past few days, Jean had been – not talkative, exactly, but there were moments when she would point something out, a small shrine or an inn that wouldn’t turn warriors away from a hot bath and a meal, a hidden waterfall, a clump of wildflowers by the side of the road. Clare would not have guessed, without being told, that Jean was the kind of person who had always loved flowers, that she used to make crowns of daisies and wear them in her hair. She seems too stern for that, her smiles too rare. It’s enough to make Clare wonder what others would not have guessed about her, seeing what they do, and whether she ought to tell the truth. But now they’re both silent, sitting side by side on a fallen log in a meadow gone brown with autumn but still scattered with tiny white and yellow blossoms that look like stars. The air is heavy with the scents of earth and grass, forest, rain on the way but not here yet. The storm will come when it comes. Every warrior is good at waiting.
Jean is better at it than most. Little though they’ve known each other, Clare has discovered already that she reacts to uncertainty with stillness – not the fear of prey, nor the calm of the hunter waiting, but a quiet kind of restraint that has nothing to do with either. She has that stillness about her now. Her eyes have been on the darkening sky all evening, but when she looks in Clare’s direction, her gaze is unnervingly forthright. She seems to want to speak, and then, color touching her cheeks, she does.
“You know I owe you more than life,” she says, “but that’s not – ”
She frowns, shakes her head once, and starts again. “I’d like to think that if we met a different way, in a different world, I’d still choose to stay with you while I could. I mean, if you would want me to.”
A different world... that’s a disquieting thing to consider. Clare has never liked wasting time on impossibilities, but even so, she can’t deny wondering what it would be like to simply exist for a while, with no need for vigilance and no blade at the ready, no mission to drive her on. She can’t imagine it. She can imagine Jean, though, if she tries – a different Jean, freer and less weighed down by duty, a wild girl running these mountain paths dressed in boys’ clothing and wearing flowers in her hair. She would be dark-haired, perhaps, and smile easily, and Clare can imagine what it would be like to shift those few inches closer and lean against her, comfortable in her warmth, to kiss her like people do in storybooks or touch her like they laugh about in taverns with whiskey on their breath. She has, too often and too easily.
“I would, I think,” she says. “But it would be a mistake in that world too.”
Jean goes quiet, and for a time there’s nothing but the sound of wind and birds calling from tree to tree in the woods behind them. A few scattered droplets of rain hit Clare’s upturned face, and she wonders what it would be like to yearn for shelter.
“It always is, with us,” Jean says, and reaches down to pluck a flower and twirl it between her thumb and forefinger. “These don’t last long either. I’m still glad to have seen them.”
“Jean,” Clare says, and finds her voice arrested by something – the sight of her in the half-light, maybe, the sharp line of her jaw and the deep-set eyes, not beautiful but striking. Jean looks away at the sound of her own name, down at the patch of earth between her feet.
“I don’t think it would matter much to me,” she says. “Whether it was a mistake, or why. I’d still want to be your friend, if I could, and your – your lover, if you’d have me. Your companion. The sword at your side, if nothing else suits.”
Clare feels the words hit her like a pebble in still water – small, but heavy enough to send a ripple through the surface of her calm. She’d known, or suspected, though she had thought at times that she only hoped. But hearing it makes it real, not a dream to turn over in her mind at the edge of darkness but a decision to be made.
Yes, Clare thinks. She deserves the truth.
“And in this other world,” she says, “if what I meant to do with my life was throw it away in a battle that there is no surviving?”
“Then you would need a sword.”
“I have a sword,” Clare says. “I don’t need another one.”
She sounds harsh, even to her own ears, but that’s only habit, and not what she had meant by it. But Jean only nods – yes, she understands, or believes she does, and Clare knows she won’t speak again of anything more than debts. And suddenly she’s not sure whether it would be wise or foolish to leave it at that, but it doesn’t matter. She touches Jean’s arm, and Jean looks up at her, abrupt motion and then stillness.
“So it’s a good thing that you’re more than a weapon,” Clare says. Her mouth is dry, her palms cool with sweat, her heart beating fast and giddy. She’s afraid of what she wants and what she can’t have, but still she takes the flower from Jean’s hand and tucks it behind her ear, and says, “I’ve never had a lover.”
Silence falls over them again, not unwelcome. Jean takes Clare’s face between two hands, and leans closer – a storybook kiss, sweet, mostly gentle.
By the time they pull away, it’s raining.