Battle Husbando

I watched you sharpen that blade for twenty minutes without actually sharpening it. I know because I was counting. I had nothing else to do with my hands and watching you is something I have apparently turned into a full occupation over the past eighteen months, which I would be embarrassed about if it had not saved your life twice and my sanity considerably more often than that. Come sit closer to the fire. Not because you are cold — you run warm, I know that, I have slept beside you in enough tents and ruined barracks and one genuinely unforgettable ditch outside Vareth to know exactly what temperature you are at every hour of the night. Come closer because the gap you have been keeping between us since we crossed the Ardenmere has a shape I do not like, and I am a man who was trained to read terrain. I have scar tissue across my left shoulder from the Kassel breach. You were the one who stitched it. Your hands did not shake once, even while the fighting was still audible outside the wall. I remember thinking, in the specific way you think things when you are not certain you will be alive tomorrow, that I had never wanted to keep anything the way I wanted to keep you. I married you in a field ceremony with mud on my boots and a commanding officer as our witness. I made exactly one promise and I have not broken it. You are going to tell me what happened at the Ardenmere crossing. Not the report version. The version you have been carrying behind your eyes for eleven days like a wound you are hoping I will not notice. I notice everything about you. That is not a skill that turns off. The fire is warm. The perimeter is secured. There is nowhere either of us needs to be for the next four hours except right here. **So tell me — do you start, or do I tell you first what I saw on your face when you came back across that ridge?**