The breeches were running a muddy cold puddle. He pulled the tie and pulled them half off before she knew what he was about: he held her in one arm, lost the quilt from around him and got them down to her knees before her struggles got violent. He held onto her and hissed into her ear: "Girl, I'm cold, I'm tired, you cut me close to where it matters, and if you kick this damn bucket over I'll let you freeze in it. Settle down. Settle down, my word I'm not after your skinny body, you're all right, settle down."
He stopped pulling, she stopped fighting, and he wrapped the quilt around both of them and held onto her, just held her while she broke into a new spate of shivering, no hands where she would not want them, not that the thoughts were not there, but there were sober ones too—that he had pressed her hard enough, that things were already at the brink of no forgiveness with her, and that she stopped fighting now was the last little trust she had in him. So he held her like something fragile, and did no more than stroke her wet hair and sit there while his joints stiffened and one shoulder chilled, where the quilt would not reach.
He sneezed finally, and winced, and she moved.
"Let me go," she said in a faint voice.
He relaxed his arms. "There. You're free."
She struggled to get up. She hit the cut on his leg, and he grunted and took her by the arms while she was trying to disentangle herself without touching him at all.
He gave her the quilt. She snatched it around herself and averted her eyes from him, sitting with her back to him. The lamp was guttering, sending the shadows crazy.
"I haven't quit," she said in a thin, hoarse voice, and sent a chill of a different sort through him.
"I beat you," he said to her back, rationally, desperately, "with an attack you didn't know. I've been at this all my life. There'll always be one you didn't know. And I could have hit you with a hundred. Do you understand? There's no hope for you. No man will even fight you fair. They won't bother. They'll shoot you if you're lucky. That's what's true, never mind what you want. I can't teach you enough. I don't want to see you dead. You wouldn't believe me. You wouldn't listen. Listen now. You're good. You're possibly the most gifted student I've ever seen, including myself. But skill is worth nothing against men like that, against odds like that. I thought you'd come to the sense to see it. But you hadn't. You pushed me, and you're ready to push everything else; and you weren't ever going to see it until I pushed back."
She turned half about and looked at him from the corner of her eye.
"I haven't quit."
"Don't be a fool," he said.
"So you can beat me. That's no news. So what did you prove? That I was sorry I made a mistake? That I did make one when I hit you?" Her voice went to a croak and died. She turned half about, clutching the blanket around herself, himself sitting there in the cold with not a stitch on. But she stared off ahead of her with her chin trembling and the tears running down beside her mouth. "You didn't believe I could hit you again. I knew I could. You remember it wrong."
He smothered his anger, got up and grabbed a quilt off his mat and hugged it around himself. "There's truth in that. Not all of it's true. You listen to me, girl. The damn leg caught. I strained it, it went bad on me. I'm not what I was. But luck won't always run in your favor. And I won't help you kill yourself."
"If you stop now," she .said, "I'll go with what I know."
"You'll get yourself killed!"
"Maybe I will." The voice croaked and broke again, the face, the unmarred side, like a white jade image in the guttering lamplight. "But I keep my promises."
That stung. He stared at her a long while, and when he spoke his own voice cracked. "We'll talk about it. Tomorrow, not tonight. Go lie down on your stomach. I'll bring the rags. Are you hurt anywhere?"
She shook her head, kicked off the sodden trousers from about her ankles and got up holding the quilt around her. She tried to clean up—picked up her dripping clothes and his and put them in a pile by the door on her way to her mat. For his part he got up, tied a cloth about himself for decency and pulled on his remaining shirt for warmth before he put the rest of the rags on to heat at the hearth and brought the hot ones to her.
She made no fuss about it when he peeled the quilt back by degrees and applied the compresses.
And tempting as it was to talk to her and try to explain while she was quieter, he did not think there was reason in her, not tonight. He picked a bit of mud from her hair—she had made a mess of the quilt as well as his armor that was lying out on the porch in the storm; and he ventured to peel her wet hair away from her face. The scar stood out plain on her pallor. And she flinched from that slightest and only touch that had nothing to do with treating her injuries, flinched and turned her face the other way.
"Are you so angry with me," he asked, "only for showing you the truth?"
She did not answer.
"Well," he said, "they chop heads for that in Chiyaden. I can't say you're different than the rest of the world."
He rested his hand on her shoulder, gave her a pat if only to annoy her and went to trim up the guttering lamp-wick and fetch the second round of compresses, cold, himself, and wishing he had someone to return the favor.
Chapter Eight
She was moving moderately well in the morning. He was the one limping, and he sat down gingerly with his bowl of rice. They ate on the mats inside, considering the chill of the morning, although they had the door open, and the shutters, for light.
His armor was a sodden mess, still. That would take long work, to recover it from its muddy heap on the porch. He had wrung out their muddy clothes and spread them by the hearth to dry before he went to bed, and they had them to put on. The cabin was a shambles, the matting and the quilts muddy and stained with leaf-mold and blood, rags and buckets competing for hearth-space with the rice-pot.
He had cooked the breakfast too. He asked nothing of her this morning. He gave her no orders. If he asked himself why, he thought with the edges of his mind that he had tried her too far and done something wicked, pushing the girl to a desperate self-defense: and that was how he had ended up on the defensive, not that he was less than he had been, not that he had outright failed to defend himself, but that he had known damned well he was in the wrong and had no wish to hurt her in the bargain.
But, he told himself, she was not a student, she was a girl, and no one would have reasonably expected a girl to go berserk. No one of his skill should use his arts all-out against a woman—that was why his instincts had laid him open to a cut on the leg, that was why he had given ground. He could have taken the sword away from her. He should have. If it were a boy, he would have. He would never have felt that moment of dismay. He would never have taken the first step backward. Or the second.
Damn her.
He had set the empty laundry bucket in front of the door last night, as if it were carelessness; and tried to stay awake, or at least not to sleep too deeply, for fear she would try to escape in the night. Not for fear of murder. He had no thought she could succeed at that; and certainly he deserved better than that, even if she was a peasant and a woman, without any concept of honorable behavior. But he was mortally afraid of her trying to slip away and leave before he could make himself clear to her. It would be like her obstinacy to try to leave in the middle of a rainstorm. Damn her again.