I helped Lira out of the carriage.
Lifted her — one arm under her knee, the other around her back — and carried her to a fallen log by the roadside, where I set her down gently, kneeling before her, checking the stump, asking if it hurt. She cried. Said it did not. I smiled. Touched her face.
I cooked. At a stream crossing, I caught fish with my hands — a skill from my previous life that translated perfectly — and roasted them over a fire built with twigs and the Serpent's Fang's flint mechanism. I seasoned them with herbs I found growing by the water. Fed the sisters. Fed the horses. Fed Seraphine and Elwen.
The food was good. Not great — not the cooking of a chef — but good in the way that food prepared by a man who knows what he is doing is always good. Seraphine ate and asked for seconds, and the surprise on her face when she realized what she had done was genuine.
"You cook well," she said, and the admission cost her something — a piece of the wall she had built between us.
