“Don’t,” she said, her first word.
“You are safe,” the man said. “I rescued you.”
He flung his leg over the saddle and slid down, the girl still in his arms. Then he set her, gently, on her feet, and backed away. She was wrapped, she saw, in a rough brown blanket. She had pushed it open when she’d shielded her face from the light, and standing now, she looked down to see her breasts exposed.
The man was an arm’s length away, and he kept his gaze on her face. “You are safe,” he said again.
The maiden adjusted the blanket so that it covered her more fully. Her questions were many—too many—and they assaulted her all at once. Suddenly her legs were weak and she let them give, collapsing to the ground.
Her hair shifted around her face like a curtain closing, and the girl noticed, with surprise, that it was red.
The man knelt at her side. He reached out as if to touch her, but when she flinched, he drew his hand away.
“Do you know your name?” he asked. “Do you remember what befell you?”
With a mingled sense of shame and regret, the girl shook her head. She remembered nothing.
“I am no one,” she said. “I know nothing.”
“You are not no one,” the man told her. “You are the damsel I rescued from a dragon. You are my destiny, and I am yours.”
She looked up. His face was open, earnest. Dark curls pulled back from a strong brow; deep-blue eyes, dark like the night sky, were lined with thick, dark lashes. The beginning of a beard, black like his hair. Soft, full lips, parting to reveal a mouth of even, white teeth.
He was smiling, she realized. Not threatening to bite.
“Who are you?” she asked, for though it seemed too much to hope that he might know who she was, he may, at least, know himself.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I am Prince Emory of Harding.” He bowed his head formally, and one of his charming curls fell forward, softening his face.
“I saved you,” he said again—Why did he keep saying that? she wondered— “and I will keep you safe.”
The maiden nodded as if she believed him. Did she? Perhaps. It did not matter if she believed him. What she believed would change nothing.
“I need . . . clothing,” she said, her cheeks flushing red.
Emory of Harding cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “It’s my regret that I have no gown to offer you. But it would be better than nothing, I am sure,” he said, returning to his horse and rifling through his saddlebags, “to wear some things of mine?”
He offered her a white shirt, stale with the smell of his sweat, and a pair of brown breeches. “I wish I had a fur to offer you, as fall chills the air these past nights, but I am in the habit of traveling light. This should suffice, until we reach home. They are not clean, but they are in better repair than what I wear.” He gestured to his own black shirt and pants, which, she now saw, were stained both with some sort of white powder and something else, something darker.
Blood.
She took the clothes he offered. “Thank you,” she said.
“Of course,” he answered. Then his hands went to his waist and he pulled free his belt, and a shock of fear jolted through the place between her legs. But all he did was hand the belt to her. “You will need this more than I do, I suspect.”
She took the belt. “Thank you,” she said again.
The clothes were ill fitting, of course, but the relief of having her skin covered outweighed the discomfort they caused. She had pulled the waist of the trousers high and wrapped the belt tightly around herself, doubling its knot. The sleeves she’d rolled up to her wrists, and she did her best to ignore the way the shirt smelled and just be grateful for having anything to wear at all.
When she emerged from the thatch of trees where she had dressed, the blanket wrapped around her yet again—for she was cold!—she could remember nothing, but still she felt certain she had never been this cold—she found that Emory had unsaddled the horse and was gathering wood for a fire.
He smiled at her and said, “My clothes look better on you than they do on me,” for which she had no answer. Instead of trying to formulate one, she scraped together a pile of browned pine needles to use as kindling.
“The trees are dry enough here that I would normally just use my sword to fell a few branches,” Emory said ruefully, “but . . .” He gestured to the belongings he’d pulled from the saddlebags—some dried meat; an empty water bladder; a pair of gloves; a rope; a bag of dust, or sand; a sword, in two pieces, blade and grip.
There was a pickax, as well. “Why not use that?” the girl asked.
“I shall, if need be,” Emory answered. “The last time I swung that tool, it was to save my life.”
The girl waited, expecting he would say more.
“I nearly fell to my death on my way to save you,” Emory said, grinning, and he told the girl about his climb.
“Did we leave the . . . dragon’s lair that same way?” she asked when he was done.
“Indeed, we did,” Emory answered. “I tied you to my back with that rope and climbed us down, nearly a thousand feet.”
The girl searched her memory for any recollection. Surely that was something she would remember. If not her time with the dragon, then being tied naked to a man’s back in this freezing cold, descending a thousand-foot cliff that way?
But she remembered nothing. The only sensation was a vague embarrassment upon learning her naked body had been cargo.
“I hope I wasn’t too cumbersome” was all she said.
“You’re a parcel I’d gladly bear for any distance,” Emory answered.
This time, when he smiled, the girl allowed him a small smile in return.
A Woman’s Name
By nightfall, the girl had a belly full of fresh-caught rabbit, and a name.
“We shall call you Ama,” declared the prince after they had picked the last of the meat from the rabbit’s bones, and it seemed a rather rude time to protest, given that this day he had already saved her life, clothed her, and fed her supper.
“A woman’s name should begin with an open sound, don’t you think?” he continued.
Ama had never thought of it at all, as best she could recollect. “Ama,” she repeated. It would do.
The fire warmed them as the sky filled with stars. Nearby, Emory’s horse placidly shifted from foot to foot, tail flicking, his lower lip drooping as he slowed and stilled and fell, at last, into a standing sleep.
Ama stared up into the vast brilliance of the stars above and connected them into pictures that only she could see. Emory sat across from her, watching her watch the sky.
She felt nothing. Perhaps somewhere she had, as Emory had, a family waiting for her return. She must. Everyone has people: parents, or siblings, perhaps.
She looked out into the stars and tried to connect them into faces—the faces of the people that might be missing her face, which, she realized, was as a stranger’s to her as well.
Abruptly, she said to Emory, “Tell me what I look like.”
He started, as if broken from some reverie, and said, “You are lovely, lady, like a flower on a fresh spring day—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Stop. Please.”
Emory blinked. A moment passed, and then he said, “You have long red hair. It is neither curly nor straight, but somewhere in between. Your skin is pale, almost pink. You’re slender. Your breasts—”