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"He always smelled like smoke and leather. Even after he bathed." She was quiet a second. "I used to think every father smelled that way."

"He sounds like a good man."

"He was." She turned the edge of the blanket over in her fingers. "I'm starting to lose the sound of his voice. I can see him perfectly. I can tell you how he stood and how he held a bow. Even the face he made when he was pretending not to laugh. But I can't hear him anymore, and I don't know when that happened."

I didn’t tell her it would come back, or that time would heal her wounds. I didn’t say any of the other things people say in rooms like that one to make themselves more comfortable. I handed her back the compass and let her sit with it.

"I wish I'd known him," I said.

She looked up. "Why?"

"Because I think I would have liked the man who raised you."

She took the compass from my palm, her fingertips grazing the inside of my wrist. The touch lasted no longer than a breath. I felt it long after she withdrew.

I wondered whether she knew how thoroughly she could undo me with the smallest kindness. I suspected she did not. Robin understood weapons, threats, bargains. She had no idea what happened to a man when she trusted him enough to hand over the one thing she had carried from her old life.

Something moved across her face then that I had not seen on it before, and she looked away from me quickly, as though I had caught her at something.

In the afternoon she checked the stitches again.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed with the bandage off, and she found, as anyone would have, that the only practical way to reach my left side was to stand between my knees.

I was extremely aware of this. So was she.

Her fingers moved along the edge of the wound, light and clinical, and I held perfectly still and thought about tax rolls. Somewhere in the second minute her touch stopped being clinical and became something slower, drifting along my ribs without any particular medical purpose, and her breathing changed, and the air in that cabin went thick and sweet.

Her scent had been shifting all day. I had been pretending not to notice since dawn.

"You're staring again," she murmured.

"You're standing between my knees."

"I'm examining your wound."

"Your hands haven't moved in quite some time."

She looked down. Her palm was flat against my bare chest, well above the bandage and nowhere near the injury.

"Perhaps I'm checking your heartbeat."

"And?"

"It's rather fast."

"There's a beautiful woman standing between my knees," I said. "I'd be concerned if it weren't."

Her eyes came up, wide.

"Beautiful?"

"Don't pretend you haven't heard it before."

"Not from you."

"Then I've been remiss."

"You might say it again," she suggested, almost casually.