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blanket on the ground beside the fire; she reached for it and pulled it around her. She caught a scent, faintly wild and male. And only then realized this must be where Kane had been sleeping; she had literally put him out of his bed.
    There were men who would not have allowed that, she thought. And of late she had learned there were men who would not have cared that she was unconscious; she was female and of only one use, and her participation was not necessary. Kane apparently fell into neither of those categories. But she was no closer to knowing what one he did fall into. No closer to understanding him at all. In fact, she was farther from it than ever.
    What had she said that had put that look in his eyes, that cold, vacant, dead look? She’d seen too much of death of late to use the term lightly, yet there seemed to be no other; Kane’s clear gray eyes had gone flat and empty, as if she’d somehow killed the soul inside the man.
    And she didn’t know what she’d done. She’d not even begun her entreaty, had not yet said a word about why she had truly come here.
    Panic gripped her; what if he didn’t come back? He had looked, in that moment before he had turned and walked away, like a man who could easily do just that. He looked like a man who had lost all of value to him. Or like a man who had never valued anything, including himself. Who could walk away from everything without even a glance back over his shoulder.
    The storyteller had warned her it would be difficult to deal with Kane. More difficult, in fact, than if he had been the myth some thought him. Myths were immune to human failings. Kane, he’d said, was not. “Some wounds never heal,” he’d said in that sometimes infuriatingly vague manner. “And he carries many.”
    She knew that to be true, now. There had been pain in Kane’s face, in his voice, in his posture when he’d spoken of enemies. But when he’d left her just now, there had been nothing. No pain, no anger, no emotion at all. It was, she thought, coming back to it again, a dead man who had walked away.
    She would have preferred his anger. She had disrupted his life; she knew that. If nothing else, she had noticed that about this place; except for the occasional call of the wild things and the whisper of the breeze, it was the quietest place she’d ever been. She imagined days could pass, one after the other, with a mind-numbing sameness that could, to an uneasy mind, pass for peace. Perhaps it was that which she had taken away simply by coming here; perhaps it was that loss that had provoked him to anger.
    But what had caused that total extinguishing of the light from within?
    She thought of going after him, but she doubted she could manage much distance. And if she found him, she had no idea what she would do. How could she, when she had no idea what she’d said that had sent him into the shadowy forest?
    He would come back, she told herself, trying to think logically. Where else would he go? He didn’t seem to have many possessions, surely not enough that he would take their loss lightly. She herself had few things that were of value to her—and her idea of value no doubt differed from many—but those she had, she treasured. From what she’d seen, Kane had even less, so little that what he did have must be important to him, she thought.
    Or did the sparseness of his possessions only mean it would be easier for him not to come back? The storyteller had come to them with little, a few belongings in a sack, no more. He had said he preferred to travel lightly; possessions tied you to a place, kept you there when it might be better if you moved on.
    She’d been afraid then that her people would lose the one small joy remaining to them, the joy of listening to the storyteller around a fire, spinning his tales in that mesmerizing voice, been afraid he would move on when he realized how little safety they could promise him. As if he’d read her fears, he had smiled gently and