For all her building terror of it, what it might mean, for all that he is in her arms it's like she isn't touching him at all. He will neither turn to her nor break loose from her, she can feel it where her fingers lay against him, and it is this nothing that hurts what words could not.

Perhaps he is gone. Perhaps she had painted him over himself: older, tired, roughened, hard, but somehow still waiting for her. How deeply, how foolishly she had wanted him to be still waiting for her, grasping after such a thing even as she held him at arm's length for fear of gaining it. She had wanted it since she'd heard him, the naive little girl in her furiously spinning a tale of redemption. To set right what she had wronged. To make the blighted garden grow.

"Perhaps you are right."

She lets him go. Turns away, stepping as she does, and breathes to collect herself. What reason is there to say more. What reason to show him any more of her witless softness than she has.

"There there, pet," soothes Rolant de Ezoire, the Fade's answer to the hope she crumples in her hands. "We'll find you another dog."