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vegetables for us in the embers. Every time he had brought back food, he’d had such pride. He could take care of me. He could possess me. For children who had grown up as we had, with very little to possess, I were his greatest accomplishment.
    The words were nothing. The deed were incidental. Hammer waited for me in camp, and he thought I were something to be proud of. I made myself stop and trade my tiny looking-glass for more blankets. We were going to need them as winter progressed, and we were out in it.
    Still, when I returned, it were a hard thing to explain to him why no town would do.
    “We’ll probably have to turn from the coast and go inland,” I told him through a mouthful of bread. We were both eating it slowly; I’d just told him it were the last we’d be getting for a while. “Head for a kingdom on the western shore, far away from this one here in the east.”
    Hammer squinted in that way he had when he were trying to see things clear. “It says both of us? That makes no sense. You were last seen running from the town. I’m the one who went into his room!”
    I shrugged. “It’s not like I weren’t the one with reason to make him dead, Hammer,” I said, not particularly perturbed.
    Hammer made a sound like a hammer hitting earth. “You could have had a life,” he muttered. “Winter will be here quick.”
    I glared at him. “I didn’t want ‘a life’. I wanted you.”
    He rolled his eyes and stood. “We’ll camp here one more night before we go westward. There’s game around here. I’m going to set snares.”
    I sighed and stood. “We’ve got game, and we’ve got jerky. Stay around camp tonight, Hammer.  It’s getting cold and dark longer, and I fear for you in the dark like that.” I flushed as I said it. We weren’t girls, and gods help anyone who implied Hammer were such a one.
    His lips twisted. “Worried about me, Eirn?”
    I sighed and gazed at him helplessly through the fire. “Shouldn’t I be?”
    He shook his head and looked away. “Maybe you should simply run, you know. You can convince them it weren’t you.”
    “Wanting to get rid of me, Hammer?”
    He sighed, clearly frustrated to have his words turned back on him so neatly. “Shouldn’t I be?” he asked gruffly, and I smiled, because I’d won.
    We cleaned up our dinner and slung our rucksack of food up from a tree—there were bears in the woods, we both knew that—and set our bedroll by the fire, with the extra blankets I’d brought from town. Hammer had brought a thick sweater a piece for us from the orphanage, but once we were tucked into the bedroll, we didn’t need them. I lay on my stomach, my head pillowed on my arms, and watched him settle himself on his back, his interlaced hands behind his head.
    “Hammer?”
    “Mmm?”
    “If we find a new town, then what?”
    He blinked hard. This weren’t a question he’d answered in his head before. “I get a job smithing, you get a job at the printers. We find a flat together. Like we were, just somewhere different.”
    “There will always be us?” I asked, wanting to know for certain. He turned to me then, his profile lit by fire, and his eyes shadowed and opaque.
    “You want there to be?” I could not tell if it were his wish as well. I answered him honestly anyway.
    “Yes.”
    He rolled to his side then, and I to mine, and he held my chin firm as he kissed me. I kissed him back, hard and hungry, and he bruised my lips against my teeth with his want. I didn’t complain. His wanting didn’t stop at the kiss. He were hard and hungry throughout, turning my body roughly, prepping my arse with a bit of pain and haste, pummeling inside me with enough force to make me gibber into our blankets.
    He finished before I did, a rare thing, and after he groaned and roared into my shoulder, and spent, he flailed for a moment blindly, before his hands found their surety and began to stroke my body with some tenderness. For minutes there were just him, still