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"You're staring at the wrong part of me."

She threw the blanket at my face. I laughed, which was a mistake of significant proportions, and spent the next few seconds braced against the bedpost with my hand over my side while she watched me suffer with an expression of profound satisfaction.

"Serves you right," she said, and got up, and went to build the fire.

She made breakfast out of what the cabin had kept, oats from a sealed crock and dried apples and a little salted meat, all of it stored years ago by people who no longer existed, and she handled each item the way you handle something that belonged to the dead.

I tried to help.

"Sit down."

"I can manage a pot."

"You can manage to tear open your stitches and bleed into my breakfast." She took the pot out of my hands without ceremony. "Sit."

"Do you always order men around like this?"

She offered me a shrug and continued on. “Only the ones bleeding on my furniture."

"It's a bed."

"It's my bed."

I caught her eyes over the top of the pot, and held them. "I'm aware."

She stopped stirring the oats. I took a slow drink of water and let the silence do its work before I added, "Though I admit, Little Ghost, I hadn't imagined this was how I'd end up in it."

Color came up under her cheeks, and the sight of it did something to me I had no business enjoying so much. "Keep talking and you'll end up underneath it."

"There's the woman I know."

"You know very little about me," she said.

I studied her face for a moment. “I’m learning."

"Slowly."

"Then perhaps you ought to give me another lesson."

Her spoon stopped in the pot. "Careful what you ask for, Sheriff."

"I've discovered that with you, asking is half the pleasure."

She gave me a look that could have set the oats on fire. I decided it was worth every stitch I might tear laughing.

She set a bowl in front of me with rather more force than the bowl deserved. I had taken meals with earls and bishops and twice with the King, and none of them were half as difficult to sit across from as a woman in a one-room cabin handing me oats. She moved around the place like it was an extension of her own body, knowing which board creaked and which shutter hung wrong, reaching for a hook on the wall without looking at it. Watching her, I understood something no garrison report had ever told me, which was that this woman had been somebody's daughter in a house with corners she knew in the dark, and all of it had been taken from her on paper by a man who wanted her father's acres.

"You're very quiet for a man with so many opinions about stitching," she said.

"I was thinking that you've been looking after people for a long time."

"Someone has to."

"Does anyone look after you?"

She didn’t answer that. Instead, she got up and dealt with the fire, which was answer enough.

"Poor Sheriff," she said to the hearth. "However do you survive without servants carrying your boots?"