“No, no hovels for you, little fair elf.”
“Don’t call me that.”
He sighed again. “Goodnight.”
She didn’t say it back.
14
NO HOVELS FORher, indeed.
Dathor remembered it. She’d been sixteen when they’d tried to run away together. They had not made it very far. She couldn’t pull herself up on the box car.
Dathor had been on the train, and she’d been struggling, and he’d been reaching down to help her, and she’d been falling behind, and it had been hopeless, and he had to jump out.
They went on foot for a time. He said they would try again, that they just needed practice.
They tried four or five times. She couldn’t do it. He tried once to sort of hurl her up, toss her into a box car, but that turned out to be impossible.
Night fell, and they sought shelter in some abandoned lean-to used for hunting or something. It didn’t even have four walls. He made a fire, and she was exhausted. She sobbed into him.
He’d had all these ideas of the two of them alone together on that box car, things he might do to her, with her. He wasn’t going to… well, at that point he was still convinced he would never actually fuck her, because he was serious about never making a half-breed child. But he remembered that one night they’d had together, her hand on his erection.
However brief it had been, he craved it. He craved her. He wanted to see her breasts. He wanted to uncover her andlook at her between her thighs. He wanted to pleasure her, to make her sigh and burst against him. He didn’t know how that even worked for women, but he knew it did work, had heard enough talk from female servants to know there was a way to be good at it as a man and a way to be awful, and he wanted to be the former.
But none of that was happening, because she was exhausted and defeated and it was very cold.
She sniffled against him and said, “Neither of us know how to cook, do you realize this?”
He felt acutely stupid. He glared into the fire he’d made, which was already burning through its fuel. He needed to leave her to get more wood. They’d brought food along, of course, but he knew what she was saying. “We’ll figure it out. It can’t be so hard.”
“You mean I will,” she said. “Because cooking is for women to do, but can you imagine it, all of it? Bread and potatoes and roasting chickens and stringing beans and—”
“I can help you,” he said. “We must not think this way. We must think instead of our plan.”
“I am thinking of our plan and how it doesn’t work!” she cried. “We cannot volunteer to go across the channel to where they are giving land away to anyone who wants to farm it and make something of ourselves if no one cancook.”
“I have to go and get more wood,” he said.
“Well, no one is stopping you.”
“And I see you aren’t volunteering to help?”
“Me?” She was truly stunned. “Help how?”
“Gather some wood, perhaps?”
“Oh,” she said, as if he had just proposed that she go and take a bath in filth.
He sighed. “Never mind.” He went to get the wood himself.
When he got back, she was still sniffling, hugging her knees to her chest, the fire making changing patterns on her tearstained face.
“If you want to go back, you’ll have to go without me,” he said to her. “I can’t go back after I’ve stolen you away. Youknow what they would do to me.”
“I have not said anything about going back,” she said in a tiny voice.
He knelt down and began to feed the fire, not putting all of the wood he’d brought back in, but a few sticks here and there. When he had it blazing to his liking, he settled down next to her.
