He told her about it on an evening in early summer when the citadel had a different quality to it, the specific aliveness of the long northern days where the sun stayed late and the light had the warm horizontal angle of something that had traveled far to reach here and intended to stay as long as it could.
They were in the garden, which had become, without being declared as such, one of their places. She tended things. He sometimes sat on the wall and sometimes, increasingly, came to help, learning the work with the same focused competence he brought to everything, asking when he did not know and listening to the answer and applying it.
He had been quiet for most of the evening in the specific way of someone carrying something they are deciding whether to say.
She waited.
She had beco
