He was a secretive person, and she didn’t want to push him away or make him feel that there was a price to pay for staying. She didn’t want to lose him just because she needed to yell at someone before she collapsed in a puddle of grief. She stuffed both anger and grief down to pull out later. She wasn’t entirely successful, judging by the lump in the pit of her stomach—but the tub offered an opportunity to find another way to relieve her emotions.

When the heavy screen had been placed in front of the tub to reduce the cold drafts, she dismissed the servants.

She stepped behind the screen and began stripping rapidly out of her travel-stained clothing. Perhaps it would be best if she answered his question; it would give him a graceful way out of answering hers. Now, what had he asked?

“It seemed best,” she said with playful obscurity, stepping into the tub.

“What seemed best?” From the sound of his voice, Wolf had moved from where she’d last seen him, curled before the fire with his eyes closed—a pose that seemed to reassure the servants, who had eyed him uneasily.

“That I leave here and not come back.”

“Best for whom?” He is closer now, she thought, smiling to herself.

Sinking farther down in the luxuriously large bathing tub, she rested her head on the wide rim. Should she give him the short answer or the long one? She laughed soundlessly, then schooled her voice to a bland tone. “Let me tell you a story.”

“Of course,” he replied dryly.

This time Aralorn laughed aloud, a great deal of her usual equanimity restored by the hot water and the macabre voice of her love. She chose to forget, if only for a while, the reason that she was here, in her old bedchamber. “Once,” she began in her best storyteller manner, “and not so long ago, there was a lord’s son who, for all that he was still but a young man, had already won a reputation for unusual cunning in war. Additional notoriety came to him from a source no one had reckoned upon.”