Dreamer's Pool by Juliet Marillier Page A

with a busy stream gushing past not far away. There was a cave of sorts, a place where we’d be able to keep a fire burning. We had a routine now, as folk do who travel long paths together. I built a hearth from stones while Grim gathered fallen branches and sticks. I kindled the fire; Grim filled the water skins and got out the makings of a meal. Supplies were low. It was some time since we’d visited a settlement or farm, and we were down to a few dried-up mushrooms and the remains of a bag of oatmeal Grim had earned by helping move a particularly difficult bull from one farm to another without anyone being hurt. While he boiled the oatmeal in water over the fire, I foraged for wild onions near the stream; going further afield in such bad light would have been foolish.
    Wet clothing was always a problem. No matter that we’d lived opposite each other in the lockup for a whole year, and seen such horrors that a naked body had no more power to shock either of us. The fact was, we weren’t in there now, and some things didn’t feel right. After that first night, when I’d called Grim up to the campfire and made him strip so he wouldn’t perish from cold, he’d never taken his clothes off in front of me. He’d always go and do it somewhere out of sight, and if there was nothing dry to put on he’d make sure he was well covered with blankets. As for me, if I had to change I’d simply ask him to turn his back. It was a small enough thing, and I wondered sometimes why we bothered, after everything. Shyness? Shame? Could have been a bit of both, or something else. It went along with not using those names for each other, Slut, Bonehead, when everyone else had. Back then, it had marked out a kind of alliance. It had said that even when you’d seen a person scorned and beaten and degraded, you could still show them courtesy.
    I didn’t say any of this to Grim, of course. He understood it in his own way, without needing my words to complicate things. There was an enforced closeness about travelling together, one of the reasons I’d have rather been on my own. Courtesy and respect, and a bunch of other things, kept us on opposite sides of the fire even when we were shivering under our blankets. It stopped us from asking each other about the time before that place, and what had led us there. Family, friends, home: none of those. A lot of the time we said nothing at all.
    We ate our meal hunched over the fire. The wettest items of clothing we draped over sticks and bushes. The rest we wore, along with the blankets. My joints ached. I longed for a hot bath. But, fey as he was, Conmael wasn’t the kind of being who could be summoned when you wanted him and asked for three wishes. More likely he’d be the one doing the summoning.
    About the meal, the less said the better.
    ‘It’s hot,’ I said, curling my fingers around the cup. ‘That’s something.’
    ‘Mm-hm.’ Grim had almost finished his share. He was a big man, and always hungry. It made me wonder how he’d managed in that place, where we’d learned to be grateful for watery gruel. How he’d stayed so strong. Strong enough to get three of us out, and then himself.
    ‘Be good if we don’t need to stop too much from here on,’ I said. ‘We must have enough coppers now to buy our food if we can’t catch it along the way.’
    ‘Mm-hm.’ A silence. Then, ‘We’d be wanting to keep some set by,’ Grim said, staring into the fire.
    This statement bothered me for several reasons. ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.
    ‘We’ll be needing things when we get there. You’ll want healers’ supplies. And a lot more, if this cottage is in a bad state of repair. Enough to get us on our feet.’
    That this made good sense didn’t make it any less troubling. It wasn’t just his easy use of ‘we’. It was the assumption that the two of us might have some kind of life together after we reached Winterfalls. The implication that, in some capacity, Grim would be