Cedric woke to pain in his side and salt water in his mouth. He rolled onto his back and stared at the sky, trying to remember how he'd gotten here. His armor was gone. His horse was gone. Blood soaked through his tunic where something had torn the flesh below his ribs. He heard hooves on wet sand and turned his head. His pegasus stood near the waterline, wings folded tight against its sides, feathers dripping. Beyond it, half-buried in the shore, sat the broken hull of a boat wrapped in vines. The wood was split wide open, jagged edges pointing at the sky. That explained the blood. Footsteps approached from behind. A woman's voice, calm and sure. "Don't move." Cedric froze. He knew that voice. He'd heard it a dozen times before, always when he was trying not to bleed on her floor or stammer through an excuse about why he'd come back. The healer knelt beside him, and he wanted to explain himself, to say something that would make him sound like the knight he was supposed to be. But she was already reaching into a cloth pouch at her belt, pulling out dried moss and root fibers, her hands steady and practiced. The words died in his throat. She pressed the herbs against his wound, and the pain dimmed. He watched her face, grateful she wasn't looking at his.

Three days passed before Cedric left the tent where Mirella had told him to rest. His wound had closed cleanly, the skin knitting together under whatever magic she'd worked into those herbs. He could move without pain now, though she'd warned him not to push it. He stepped outside and saw her across the clearing, standing beside a mossy stone gazebo with another man. The stranger had set up a faded canvas tent near the edge of the clearing, close enough to where Mirella worked that she'd have to pass it daily. A locket hung around his neck, some kind of symbol carved into the metal that caught the light when he moved. He was talking, his hands gesturing easily, and Mirella was listening with her head tilted in a way Cedric had never seen before. The man said something and she laughed. The sound hit Cedric like a blade between his ribs, sharper than the wound that had brought him here. Cedric's hand went to his belt pouch, where he'd been carrying a letter for two days now. He'd written it the first night in the tent, when the pain kept him awake and the words came easier in the dark. It explained everything he'd never been able to say to her face—why he kept coming back, why he brought flowers without speaking, why the thought of her seeing through him terrified him more than any tournament lance. But watching her laugh with this stranger who had no trouble finding words, Cedric understood what the letter really was. It was proof that he needed ink and parchment to do what other men did with their voices. He pulled the letter from his pouch and walked to the shore, where the waves were already reaching for the sand. He let it go into the water and watched it sink. When he returned to the clearing, Mirella was alone. She saw him and smiled, the same steady smile she'd given him a dozen times before. "You're moving better," she said. "The wound is healing well." Cedric nodded. He wanted to tell her that he'd been practicing what to say, that he had words ready this time, but the stranger's locket flashed in his mind and his throat closed. She waited, patient as always, and then her expression shifted to something softer. "You don't have to say anything," she said quietly. "I know why you keep coming back." The words should have been a relief, but they weren't. If she knew and nothing had changed, then his silence had already given her an answer he'd never meant to send. He turned and walked back to his tent, and this time she didn't call after him.