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“I am tired. I want to sit here next to you and shut my eyes.”

So he does.

He sleeps. Really sleeps, with his mouth a little open and his breathing slow enough that I can hear it over the fire, a man who has never truly needed it, on my master’s hearth, with my hand on the only warm part of him.

I sit there and watch him do it and cry without any noise at all.

A day ago he was going to outlive me by centuries and carry me out of this world at the end of an ordinary woman’s life.

Now he is going to grow old beside me, at the same speed I do, and the first thing he did with the rest of his life was fall asleep on my master’s hearth.

That night Corentin asks for bread.

Katell cuts it too thick on purpose. He eats all of it and asks for another slice, and she cuts that one thicker.

Tuesday morning Riwal is up before me, in the yard, with his face turned north.

I know before he says it. He is wanted.

“Somebody is dying,” he says. “Out past Trevern. I can feel it from here. I have to go.”

“I know.”

“I am sorry.”

“Don’t be. That’s what you are.” I do not want him to go. I want to say so and I don’t, because the person out past Trevern needs him more. “Come into the shop first. One minute.”

Corentin is at his bench. He is not working; he is sitting at it with a blanket over his knees because Katell insists, with his hands flat on the wood, and the shop door is open to the yard, and I have lit the furnace so that there is something to hear.

I stand in the middle of the shop floor, where he stood me when I was eleven, and I clap once.

It comes back. B flat, and the crack in the north wall that he never did mend. The first room I ever learned to hear.

Riwal is in the doorway with the reins in his hand.

“Say something,” I tell him.

“Something.”

It crosses the shop and stops with me. Warm, with the room under it.

“Good. Stay there. Don’t move.”

I’m frightened. Not of the thing that was in the lane.

Of this, which is harder.

Two nights ago I stood in the dark and said no to a thing wearing my face. No to a future of lies.

I want to stand in the light and say yes to future I want.

So I put my shoulders back, and I say it at full volume, in the first room I ever heard, with my master at his bench and Katell in the door and the horse in the yard.

“I love you.”

It goes out across the shop and comes back to me off the north wall, half a beat late, warm, with the crack under it. I hear it land. My knees want to go and I do not let them.

“I’m saying it in here because this is the room I learned to listen in, and I wanted to hear it come back. I’m staying with you. Not for the month. Forever. Because I want to. And I wanted everybody within hearing of this shop to know I said it first, in daylight, with the door open.”