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So I sat there, back against the wall, feet up on my pallet, trying to make sense of what I had learned…or thought I had learned…and realizing that some things were not possible—even for the order-master I wasn’t.

A glimmer of yellow from the shadows caught my eye.

…whhsttt…A whisper of slipped feet followed.

Deirdre stood back from the curtains to my alcove. How long she had been there, I didn’t know, but her dark eyes flickered from me to the book and back.

In my shorts and nothing else, I felt undressed.

“You can come in, Deirdre.”

She did, but not far, only just inside the curtain that served as the doorway to my alcove. She wore an old maroon woolen robe over a worn white shift, and her shoulder-length hair was tied back.

“Lerris?”

“Yes?” I turned and swung my feet off the bed, setting them on the floor and sitting sideways on the pallet bed.

“Were you once a priest?” Her voice was soft, as it always was. Not timid, just soft.

I did not answer her, and she said nothing, finally sitting on the end of the pallet, the faintest scent of roses reaching me.

“You couldn’t sleep.”

She shook her head. “I worry about Papa.”

“So do I.”

“I know…” She edged herself toward me. “He sees it, too. He won’t say anything.” She reached out a slender hand and laid it on my forearm. Her fingers were firm and cool against my skin, and I swallowed, fighting against wanting to hold her.

“Lerris…” She eased even closer.

I tried not to shiver. It had been too long since I had held a girl, far too long.

“Please…stay…whatever you want…” Even though she had moved almost beside me, deep within she was shivering, and not with desire; yet at the same time she was calmly purposeful.

Taking a deep breath, I removed her hand. “Deirdre…I will do what I can for your father.” I took another breath. “I want to hold you—really hold you—and more, but that would not be fair to you or to your father.” Then I smiled crookedly. “And if you stay that close to me for long, it will be very hard for me to behave myself.” I wasn’t kidding. She smelled warm and wonderful, and she brought home how lonely it had been. But she didn’t want me. She wanted me to save her father.

She edged back, just enough to let me know she was grateful, but not enough to make me think she found me that unattractive—or something like that. I wasn’t sure.

“Thank you.” That was all she said, but she meant it, and that was enough. She sat there for a time. Finally, she asked, “Where are you from?”

“A place far away, so far that I may never be able to return.”

She looked at me, and I looked back, and she opened her mouth and then closed it before asking another question. “Why are you here?”

“You’d have to say that it’s a pilgrimage of sorts, a time for me to learn, and to decide.”

“Have you learned things you didn’t know?” She wrapped the robe around herself more tightly, reminding me that the shop was chill, that winter still held Fenard.

The cold didn’t bother me as much as it once had, but that was because I had begun to look at my own internal order, I suppose.

“Some days…” I admitted. “I never seem to learn what I thought I was going to learn, though.”

She nodded at me to continue.

“I left woodworking once, when I was an apprentice, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever do it again. It seemed…well…it was boring. Why would anyone want to care about whether the grains lined up just right, or whether there was too much pressure on the clamps?”

“You seem to like it now…some days I stand and watch you, and you don’t see me, even when I’m almost beside you. Grandpapa was like that.”

I licked my dry lips, catching the scent of her again, and feeling my heart beat faster. “You’d better go.”

A faint smile crossed her face as she rose, almost a grin, but touched a little with a sadness I could feel without reaching. “Thank you.”

She was gone too soon, and almost too late, and I wondered what harm it would have done to have taken what she had offered. But the words of my father, and Talryn, and the book hammered