“Where is this?”

“We used to take vacations here when I was little,” she said.

They stood side by side, looking out over the stillness of a lake so unruffled that where it reflected the darkest parts of the sky, it looked as solid as the earth around it, until some movement of the clouds exposed the reflection of a wavering star.

“Not perfect, though,” she said. “I think it sort of - goes by what you remember. Last time I was here I think I was around fifteen.”

And so the trees were a little too large, and the sky a little too vast, and the world a little too strange. It was not unpleasant. It had, even, a sort of comfort in it.

She remembered that around a bend or two of this little path that led down between the trees, there was the snug and spartan rental cabin - could see, even, the warmth of some pale glow between the trees where it might be - and she said so. He offered her his arm, clad in its gold-trimmed woolen sleeve, but she hesitated.

“I want to look at the water,” she said, suddenly timid, and he betrayed neither impatience nor even obedient self-denial. He merely changed his gesture, and she, realizing that they had not had the pleasure of a sudden greeting, gave him her hand without thinking and let him raise it to his lips. He did not retain it, as he had before; he did not let it go with reluctance. With an easy formality he released her, as if he had had all that he would have asked for, if he had dared to ask - or possibly even more - and then he turned his attention to the lake, where some dark waterbird sliced through the mirrored surface, too distant to be clearly discerned.

She felt, as she had before, the pressure of time sliding past them, unknown and unknowable but ephemeral. He, too, must have been thinking of this, but his thoughts did not follow hers when he spoke at last.

“I do not want to rush to some ending,” he said gently, without looking at her. “I do not want to imagine that I have any less time than all of it. It is good to be near you and to feel no need to hurry through that nearness.”

“I'm sorry,” she said at last, still feeling his breath on her fingers and still unwilling to take the hand that he did not offer. “I've never been good at the whole - at this part.”

“As I know that you do not despise me,” he said quietly, “I make no demands for the shape of your goodwill. To have it is enough. Was enough, even before.”

“Still. I feel like - but part of me wishes I could just - be soft anyway. I feel like I'm depriving you -”

“If you were the sort of woman who might disguise her feelings for the sake of flattering me, I would not care for those feelings as I do. I know that your feelings for me are not soft.”

“Maybe some of them are a little bit soft.”

“But the rest,” he said with the mildness of his habitual sarcasm, “are severe and flinty, as I have often had reason to observe.” And then, more sincerely: “Pray, Lady, do not trouble yourself. I am not troubled.”

“No?”

“Not about that. And I do not wish to think of other troubles now.”

She was, she realized, holding his ring on its ribbon, unaware of when she had taken it out, possibly for the purpose of having something to do with her hands. She lifted it towards him, the red stone wine-dark in the nighttime shade of the treeline. “Was this yours?”

“Yes.”

“Did it - mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“It's very pretty.”

“It is. But - I had many things which had no meaning to me. I sometimes could not command respect and authority solely by my position as a knight in the cosmic sense. But my position as a knight in the earthly sense often served me in those times, and it was as well to have signifiers of it.”

“Rich men always get respect and they will until the world stops turning backwards.”

“Yes. Why do you ask? Where did you come by it?”

“I - I took it. In that room under - well. I took it. I'm sorry,” she added, almost impulsively, and he seemed somewhat alarmed by the apology, turning his eyes towards hers.

“Do not be. All things in the Garde are yours. What need have I for such a thing?”

“I couldn't sell it or return it, though. I kept it. And I guess I - I wanted it to mean something to you, because maybe it would mean something to me.”

He paused. “This is a soft feeling,” he said at last.

“I know. Don't rub it in.”

“You have,” he said, and she could forgive him in that moment for taking her other hand and lifting it again, for the sake of bringing the signet ring to his lips demonstratively, “the only ring that has ever had meaning to me.”

“Well. I guess that one will have to do,” she said, resisting the urge to turn away from this abrupt proximity to something like tenderness.

“No, Lady. That ring has a meaning separate from - keep this one, if you think it beautiful. It will have meaning to me then. It has new meaning already,” he added, releasing her hand at last, and the sick flip of her stomach at this compliment was strangely and wretchedly pleasant.

“This is a disaster for my image,” she said, with dismay only half-playful. “I have to say something - what did you say? - severe and flinty now, to make up for this.”

He did not smile. He was, instead, reaching back out, but not to take her hand. Instead he lifted the end of the ribbon tied around the ring, running it between his fingers, and undoubtedly, like her, recalling that moment that in futility she pretended to tie it around the spectral arm that could not receive it, as a gesture of his yielding the Garde to her. “Is this -”

“Yes. I kept that too. It felt wrong to get rid of it. You say everything at the Garde belongs to me now, but that's not true. This doesn't. This is yours.”

“I had not thought so. I had imagined that by taking it - even in thought - that I was rendering it as well as the arm it was on to you.”

“I thought of it as yours. But I suppose you're right. That was - that was my thought as well, when you did.”

He paused, and assayed, his voice uncertain: “You might, then, if to be severe is your aim -”

“You say that. But that's soft too, just in a different way. Still. It hurt me,” she said, with an air of uninvited confession, “that I couldn’t actually give it to you.”

“Then by all means, Lady,” he said, his voice more gently pleading than it might have been from a sudden creeping warmth in it, “let me again render myself to you, that you can do so without hurt.”

“It isn't real,” she said, unable to avoid pointing it out despite herself. “We wake up, it's back where I left it.”

“Forgive me for contradicting you,” he said, “but if I can believe nothing else, allow me to believe that it is real.”

Her eyes searched the contours of his face in the dark, its expression of unashamed sincerity nearly turning her away again. But she faced him, and loosened the ring from the ribbon, slipping the former onto her own finger and holding the latter out towards him. “You're right,” she said, and she didn’t have to tell him to give her his arm, as he already held it out towards her again. She paused, however, and instead of tying that favor around it, she wound her own arm through his, and turned towards that path.

“Somewhere where there’s light,” she said, and he did not need to ask why, but only turned with her. In the darkness she allowed herself a gratitude that she was glad he could not see, for what felt like generosity in him in asking for nothing more than she could give, nor even in asking her to give all that she might have wanted to, had she been better prepared and more certain. She was not a person accustomed to spending much time unsure of herself. It was a little easier, therefore, to walk arm-in-arm with someone who - for now, at least, despite all their angry storming and all the unsteadiness after it - seemed to have no doubts for her.