All they could do was to steal food, but that would mean they would have to come across food, and they wandered through the craggy countryside next to the road for hours and didn’t see anything edible.
The longer they went without anything to eat, the more irritable the both of them got.
He said it, though. He said it out loud. “I don’t know why I thought you and I would ever be happy together. One sign of trouble and you go immediately to pieces. If we spent our lives together, I’d spend it constantly catering to your whims and desires, and you are spoiled.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t know why I thought we’d be happy together either. I think I must have simply felt sorry for you. I think all I wanted to do was to help you get away from your horrible uncle and cousin. But now, I realize that no amount of pity could have made you less of a fiend.”
“If that’s how you feel, I don’t even know why we’re bothering to continue this,” he said.
“I don’t either,” she said.
And then she cried out in a sharp and agonized way, and even though she had been crying out and making all sorts of noises of dismay for the entirety of their journey together, this one was different and he knew it.
Something very bad had happened.
She went down onto the ground, her foot turning under her.
He went down too, and there was an ecstasy of words.Whathappened-myfoot-letmesee-doesthathurt—
She fainted into him, literally swooning, and his heart stopped beating.
He was terrified.
He hoisted her up, her body lulling, head falling back, limbs askew, and he carried her to a little spot under a rockyledge where he could lie her down on the soft moss. Her eyes fluttered and she regained consciousness, and she was stunned to see that she’d moved but then the pain cut into her again and she let out another of those agonized noises.
“I put down my foot and it was a hole,” she said. “And it turned, and all my weight was on it, and—”
“Hush,” he said, kneeling there to examine her foot, her ankle. It was already swelling. It was red. It was very bad. Could she have broken it, just from that?
No, it was probably just a sprain, but…
She was trying to sit up. “Give me a few moments, a quarter hour at the most, and I shall be able to continue on. I think it’s only twisted.”
“No,” he said. “You are not going to be walking on this,” he said, shaking his head. “No.”
She was sitting up now.
“Lie down,” he said to her.
“No, I’m all right,” she insisted, and then she caught sight of her ankle sitting next to its twin, and she could see how it was swollen compared to the other one. She let out a little noise of dismay. She lay back down.
“We need a horse,” he said. “And what I’ll do is lead it, gently, back to Foxglove Peak, and we will make up a story, we just need something plausible about why we’ve been away overnight.”
“We can’t go back!”
“We… you need a doctor,” he said. “What? I’m going to maim you so that we can escape them? I would never do that to you.” His stomach took this moment to growl loudly and pointedly. He felt lightheaded. He put his head between his knees, feeling defeated. He wanted to cry.
“But if we go back… we can’t. We simply can’t.”
“They’ll put the blame on me,” he said. “I’ll take it. I’ll say that I found out that you were going to marry him and that I stole you away—”
“No,” she said. “Because it won’t matter!”
“What do you mean? If it isn’t your choice—”
“It won’t matter whether I wanted it or not. We’ve beenaway together overnight, and I’ll be ruined regardless, and he’ll never marry me anyway.”
He lifted his head. No matter how much he wanted to cry, tears were not actually coming. “Of course,” he said. “Of course you’re right. Well… it won’t be like that, then.”
