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The straw man did not hit back. She drilled at the dummies most mornings, before the camp woke, out in the trampled snow beyond the gate while the light came grey and thin off the frozen lake. It was not for need. Her body knew the forms. It was for the quiet, and for the thing the quiet let her do, which was to still her mind and empty it and ask the Maker to make of her an instrument, sharp and certain and without doubt, for one more day in a world that had run out of certain things.
The Breach turned overhead, green and wrong, and threw its sick light across the snow even at this hour. She did not look at it. She had learned not to look at it. She brought the blade down across the straw throat instead, and again, and let the shock travel up her arms, and was, for one breath, certain of a single thing in all the world, which was the weight of a sword and where it belonged.
Then the gate opened behind her, and the Herald came out of Haven with a sack over one shoulder and walked past the dummies into the white, toward the tree line, and she understood that she was watching him run.
She knew that walk. She had spent two weeks learning to hate it, the loose unhurried roll of it, a man strolling through the end of the world as though he had wandered into the wrong party and was looking for the door. He did not glance at her. He simply walked out past the last of the camp toward the woods, blades on his back, sack on his shoulder, going.
Of course. She had wondered how long the Marcher would last. She had given him a week. He had managed two. She supposed that was something to put on the pyre.
She went after him, across the snow, and caught him before the trees.
"And where," she said, "do you think you are going?"
He stopped and turned, and looked at her the way he looked at everything, with a faint amusement that suggested the universe had been arranged for his entertainment and was, on the whole, doing well.
"Suspicious, aren't we, Seeker? I'm going out," he said.
"Out?" she asked.
"Yes, it's the large white area past the wall. You really can't miss it." He shifted the sack. "Don't wait up."
"The one man in Thedas who can close the rifts," she said, "is walking alone into the woods, with the sky on fire, and his answer when I ask why is an unfunny remark about the snow."
"It's good snow. Very fashionable this year." He tilted his head. "Are you going to move, or is this the part where you arrest me again? I lose track. You do it so often I've started to take it for how you say good morning."
"You are not a prisoner."
"No?" The amusement thinned to something with an edge under it. "Then I'll be on my way. Strange how that keeps not happening. You tell me I'm free, Seeker, and then I turn around, and there you are, behind me, with that look on. I am not yours to keep. You found that out the day you put a blade to my throat for a crime I had not committed, and I have been very gracious about it ever since. I am running short on grace."
"You are the only hope this world has of seeing the end of the month," she said, and heard her voice climb, and hated it. "Forgive me if I would rather it not freeze in a ditch because it grew bored of being useful."
"There it is." He smiled, and it was not warm, and it was aimed. "That is all I am to you. A hand. A useful hand that happened to come attached to a man." He looked her over, slow, head to boots and back, and let his mouth curl. "Though I'll say this. It can't be a hardship for you, this arrangement. A man you're allowed to order about, who has to come when you call and can't leave when he likes. I imagine it's the closest you've come to one staying." He shrugged, careless, pleasant, driving it in like it cost him nothing. "You don't strike me as a woman with much practice at being wanted, Seeker. No great mystery why. I expect men are not your particular triumph."
He had said it to wound, and for no reason but that he could, and he had no idea whether it was true. That was the thing she would understand only later, that he had thrown it blind, a stone into the dark on the chance it would hit something soft. It hit. It found the one place under the armor she showed no daylight, the small starved unspoken thing, and it did not matter at all that he had aimed without knowing, because the arrow lands the same whether or not the archer can see.
She did not give him the satisfaction of an answer. She had a better one.
She hit him.
There was no wind-up. There was only the form, drilled into the bone before she was twelve, the short brutal economy of it, her whole weight turning through her shoulder and into her fist and into the soft place below his ribs where the breath lives. The amusement went off his face. The air went out of him in one ugly sound. He folded around her hand like a closing book, and his knees gave, and he went down into the snow on all fours with his head hanging, hauling at a breath that would not come.
She stood over him and flexed her hand and felt better than she had in days.
He stayed down a long moment, shoulders working, and when the breath finally came back it came back wrong, hitching, and it took her a moment to understand that he was laughing. Low and breathless and entirely without performance, his face turned down toward the snow, laughing like a man who had been handed something he had not expected and found, despite everything, that he liked it.
"There," he wheezed. "Was that so hard?"
"Get up."
"In a moment." He spat into the snow and lifted his head, and there was something in his face she had not seen there before, under the watering eyes, something that was almost, infuriatingly, respect. "That's the first honest thing anyone's said to me since I came out of that rift. Maker, it's good to meet someone who means it." He got a boot under himself. "Everyone else here looks at the hand and bows. You look at the man and hit him. I could almost learn to like you, Seeker, if you weren't so determined to make it impossible."
He stood, slow, one arm still wrapped around his middle, and bent to gather up the sack he had dropped.
It was empty. She saw it as he lifted it, flat and light and folded near closed, nothing in it at all.
"That bag is empty," she said.
He paused.
"A man who means to run takes everything he owns." She heard herself working it out aloud, the certainty she had marched out here with coming apart in her hands as she spoke.
She looked at him. "What were you actually doing out here, Herald?"
Something crossed his face, caught, deciding. Then it was gone, and the careless thing slid back down over it like a visor.
"Running for the trees," he said. "Coward, deserter, bored of being useful. You had it all worked out, Seeker. Far be it from me to spoil such a confident performance." He slung the empty sack back over his shoulder. "You are so rarely wrong. It would only upset you."
He turned and walked on into the white, listing a little, going where he had been going all along, and he did not tell her, because telling her would have meant being seen, and he would sooner wear the name she had handed him than be caught carrying something for someone he would not admit to caring about. Whatever waited at the end of that empty sack, out past the lake where the requisitions were cached, he would rather she thought him a coward than say it aloud.
He was crueler than she had thought. He was, in the same breath and the same man, better than she had thought. She did not know where to put a person who was both. She had no shape on her shelf that fit him, and she stood in the churned snow with her knuckles aching and understood, with a sinking that owed nothing to the cold, that being wrong about this man was going to be a great deal more work than being right had ever been.
He vanished into the trees without looking back.
She went to the dummies and drilled until her arms shook and the straw split along its seam, and it did not bring the quiet, because her mind kept handing her the empty sack swinging in his hand, and a man who would take a blow to the body sooner than be caught doing a kindness, and a laugh in the snow that had sounded, for one moment, like the only true thing in this whole frozen camp.
She told herself it was anger.
She was, in her defense, half right.