Remembrance

“Callie, you must behave yourself. I am only a man.”

She laughed at his tone of weakness. “And I am glad you have at last seen that I am a woman,” she said softly.

“Yes,” he said, his voice heavy with regret. There were almost tears in his voice, as though he were in great pain. “Yes, I have seen that you are a woman.”

With his hands on her shoulders, he turned her toward him and looked into her eyes. He did not have to say that things had now changed between them. It wasn’t just that they had moved away from the farm, but tonight they had continued what had started that day they had met John Hadley. And this week they had learned how separation affected both of them.

“Come and sit with me,” he said as he climbed onto the battlements, his back to one crenelation, his long legs extending to the opposite one and past it. Holding out his arms, he welcomed her to sit on his lap, her legs on his, her back against his chest.

Callie didn’t hesitate as she climbed onto him and leaned back against him.

“Be still!” Talis commanded in a way that made Callie giggle.

“Tell me everything,” he said when she was still. “Tell me everything big and small that you have done and seen and thought since I saw you last. Have you made up any stories and told them to someone else?”

With her head leaning back against his shoulder, she delighted in the jealousy in his voice. Maybe she should taunt him, tell him she had been so happy without him, but she couldn’t do it. On the other hand, she didn’t want him to think she was miserable. That would worry him.

“You are sad,” he said, sensing what she was feeling.

“No, no, of course not. It is all wonderful. It’s so nice to have such lovely women around me. They are like sisters, so kind, teaching me many things.”

Talis buried his nose in her hair, smelling it. In the past he had often thought that Callie’s hair was a nuisance. If she didn’t keep it braided, it caught on tree branches, in briars, even on his hands. When had it become so beautiful? “You are lying,” he said easily. “Tell me the truth.?

??

She was silent.

“Come now, have you forgotten me?” he said coaxingly. “Do you know that you cannot lie to me?”

When she spoke there were tears in her voice. “You have forgotten me.”

He moved away from her to look at her profile. “How can you say this to me? There has not been a moment when I have not thought of you. Everything I looked at, every person I talked to made me think of you. I was—”

He cut himself off, not wanting to tell her more. After all, he had to preserve his manliness. It wasn’t good to tell her all of the truth.

Callie was smiling. He didn’t have to tell her more. “You were miserable without me and you wanted to impress me.”

“Ha!” he said. “Impress you! Impressing you takes nothing. Look at you. You are so tiny I could break you.” With that he clasped his arms around her waist and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe, then he relaxed his grasp.

Laughing, she leaned back against him.

After a while he said, tentatively, “I should like you to be proud of me. I’d like to show you my skill with a sword.”

Never would she tell him that she would have loved him whether he had any skill with a sword or a horse, or no skills at all for that matter. She just loved him. She loved him with or without skills, even, as Dorothy said, with or without arms and legs.

“Have you learned much?” she asked, not because she cared but because it was important to him and he was all to her.

When he was silent she knew that something was bothering him. But then she had known that for some time. She just had to find out what it was and mend it. It didn’t matter that she was bored out of her mind living with a bunch of bland women who had nothing in their heads. What mattered to her was whether Talis was happy or not.

“What is wrong?” she asked.

Talis hated to admit weakness, hated to admit that he needed her. But with each passing moment of every day, he knew he needed her more than he had ever thought possible. A triumph meant nothing, a thing learned meant nothing if she was not there to share it with him. No, more than share. If she was not there to do it for. Why bother to train to be a knight if Callie was not there to tie her sleeve about his armor?

But none of the other men seemed to need pretty girls in order to want to do anything. Other men seemed content to accomplish deeds for themselves. True, they liked having a girl watch them, but they didn’t seem to need one as Talis needed Callie.

In the past Will was sometimes annoyed at them for incomplete chores he’d assigned them separately. “You are each only half a person. It takes both of you to make one complete person,” he’d once said in exasperation.

Is that what was wrong with him? He was only half a person and Callie was the other half? Even to him it sounded ludicrous. Such a thing was not possible.