“Mrs. Kine,” I said as soon as I arrived on the bench, “Would it be okay to kiss you?”

“What? I-” her face blossomed with red and she glanced around.

“I’m not sure I’m ready for that,” she said while glancing away.

The marriage contract was very specific about a lot of things I wouldn’t think people would normally put on paper. But on this world contract law was often stronger than anything else. Corporations ruled the other continent and they did it through contracts.

“Of course,” I said, my mood not dimming in the slightest.

“Would you remember a number for me please,” I waited until she looked at me before continuing, “one twenty-eight. Lucky, one twenty-eight. Hopefully”

I hopped off the wagon and waited for it to pass. I waved at Mr. John Tart, and his boy Melf who sat on the bench of the wagon traveling behind ours. His wife and daughter were on top of the wagon, behind a wall of luggage where it was more comfortable than the cramped hot space inside the wagon.

My smile faltered when I remembered the loop Beard made the boy watch what they did to his sister.

I was still walking, holding onto the ladder that was built into the back of the wagon, but I wasn’t here. Eventually I got free of the waking nightmares and climbed with unsteady limbs.

The case holding the gloves was up top.

I forgot to switch out the canteen for the hip pouch.

I considered trying to make Mr. Wellworth drink it again, but discarded the idea.

We were a month and six days out from Nightfyre. Here, with their eight day weeks, every month was thirty-two days long except the moth of the high summer festival. Which was six days long. Twenty months, six hundred and fourteen day, twenty hours to a day, and disturbingly sixty minutes to an hour and sixty seconds to a minute.

I mean I get the whole infinite monkeys with type writers conceptually, but some of the coincidences were crazy.

I get it. The fingers still had three bones a piece and each hand had four fingers and a thumb. With one hand, moving the tip of the thumb along the finger bones you could count to twelve. Then five fingers on the other hand made twelve times five, sixty. So I understood some things being base sixty.

But it was crazy to see the similarities.

Last loop, loop one twenty-seven, I made it way past the bandits. We were six days out from Nightfyre when I died. I never saw it coming. I thought the upset stomach was from dinner. Went to bed, and found myself on the bench.

Better that Mr. Wellworth did that before we arrived at Nightfyre while I could still loop than afterward. In truth as the loops stacked up I forgot that he had already successfully killed the previous owner of this body even if he didn’t know it.

I rented Wesley, collected herbs, and searched the road for others. When we reached the river I watched downstream until Bob appeared, confirmed we were real and not some animal breaking his wards, before he rode back to the bandit camp.

He was the one I tortured twice. Both times he gave the same answers, but if I killed him the bandits brought all forty-six, not just the sixteen, to attack the guards and then the wagons.

Once over the river I guided Wesley to Bob’s temporary camp before following Bob’s tracks back to the main camp.

It was a more direct route and gave me more time at the main camp than circling way around.

I had to rework the timings and the attack order a bit, but with two gloves I could paralyze everyone so much quicker and with less risk than trying to kill them. Including the woman.

If I let her live and turned her over to Gus he put her on trail. She only said she had no choice in anything, and would say no more. I tortured her once, justifying the horrid experience with the thought that once the truth was out it was over with.

She never spoke once. She screamed of course, but wouldn’t answer a single question.

Gus put the woman on trial, then hung her, no matter what arguments I made on her behalf.

If I let her go eight days later eleven more bandits showed up, and those guys were a lot more powerful. They didn’t fuck around. Three men in heavy armor charged in while waves of fire raced at the wagons and fire balls arched up into the sky only to fall down among us. The men in armor didn’t care about the weapons we had and seemed to shrug off the fire.

I considered, as I hid behind a tree. As much as I hated killed, and slitting the throats of the paralyzed was actually worse than killing someone who could kill me back, I think I was responsible for any deaths I could stop but didn’t.

When it came time to crawl into her tent and touch her face, I pressed my own face into her chest and belly as I dropped so that she couldn’t see who I was.

I made sure to close her eyes with my fingers as best I could before I backed out.

I still had to poison Wolverine in his tent. He just healed so fast that the paralytic didn’t keep him down for long enough. Likewise Werewolf had to go over the cliff, he healed too fast and was so quick I couldn’t get close enough without being injured.

One guard had to be shot with a crossbow, and that was it. Just three that needed killing right off. I even grabbed Sleepy by the ankle when he backed out of his tent as I whistled.

It saved me hours.

I took the hatchet I’d used to kill them so many times I couldn’t guess at the number, and fireman-carried most of the bodies to the cliff where I chopped their head’s off and dropped them over the edge. By the forth or fifth one the slimes were so thick every new body splattered some of the slimes when they landed.

I had to get the hand cart for a few of the bodies.

I hooked up one of the onya to the cook wagon an the another to best of the remaining wagons. That one I emptied and then filled with everything of value I could fit into it. Including trunks, chests, tents, blankets, and weapons. There were a lot of weapons just laying around the camp. Likely once belonging to the guards of the wagon trains.

Henry actually sorted out the trick with the trapped chest. You put your left hand on the corner when you leaned down to insert a key.

With your left hand you pressed two hidden pieces in the worked metal and then pressed in on the key.

The key could be anything, so long as you didn’t turn it you didn’t trip the traps.

I won’t say anyone was disappointed when the chest was opened. There was after all a huge wealth in coins. I will say though that people were expecting more. Cards and enchanted condensate items, or at the very least, far more monster parts.

There was a sack that contained thirty-two essence pearls, fifty-five cysts, and nine monster cores.

It wasn’t hard to guess from the lack of resources and the amount of coin that they were trading one for the other.

Being attacked if I let the woman go seemed to prove there were more bandits out there.

One-twenty eight was not going to be the attempt that got me to the city. Instead it was going to be another scouting trip.

The ambush went better than expected.

I’m sure Hatless and a few of the others had valuable cards, but I didn’t know what they were.

I targeted the power players with the wands I got from the main camp and aimed the single crossbow I managed to bring along.

They were in position but hadn’t yet attacked the guards working on the massive trees.

I pulled the trigger on the crossbow as it was possible for me to miss that target if he moved. Then I triggered the wands. The traces were tied around the necks of their targets so it didn’t matter it they sprinted or dove behind something.

The fireballs weren’t slow, but they weren’t bullets.

“Retreat!” I screamed as I ducked behind cover.

“Retreat!” I called again.

That seemed to be the best way to sow confusion.

My position drew fire from the ambushers while the guards clearing the downed trees, forewarned by a friendly Alchemists, figured out it was an ambush and got behind cover.

Then I ran. If any of the guards saw movement in the woods they fired upon it. Hell Henry had killed me before when I stepped out afterward excited to see him because he reacted so quickly.

There were two people I didn’t target with fireballs that had six cards. They had to be trash but still, I made sure to find them and loot them if I could.

I killed Mr. Wellworth with a second crossbow. He was often sitting on the luggage on top of his wagon when we stopped and circled up.

He claimed he was reading but I assumed it was to avoid doing camp chores.

Then I went back and waited for the woman to wake alone in camp. The first time I’d let her go she searched the camp, panicked, then searched the surrounding woods.

Twenty minutes later she was racing on foot across a meadow half a kilometer away. She was too fast for me and I’d lost her there. So I waited there this time to follow again. I hope she didn’t roll dice or double back.

There were too many questions about Mr. Wellworth’s death if I killed him at the wagons. So on the following loops I simply walked up to his wagon from outside the circle. He spotted me but said nothing.

I was no longer drenched in blood after the fights so he was only curious when I asked if the coin I pretended to find was his. The glint of gold sped him down the ladder and a gloved hand under his when I put the coin in his hand ensured he dropped.

I had to wait for one of the guards to sprint back and start the panic. Then I got his body up and over Wesley’s saddle. The horses being larger here didn’t seem so bothered by carrying two people.

At the river I entered the woods.

When I reached the ambush site I stabbed him in the neck with a crossbow bolt and spread blood on his hands as if he had tried to stop it. More blood on his face and then I left him there with one of the crossbows.

Then I circled back around to rejoin the guards who had taken cover after the ambush’s fighting cooled down.

I made my way to Henry, and told him about the main bandit camp and using the wands on the ambushers.

When he was ready we hunted down the other that had ran away, though it was just us two so there wasn’t friendly fire.

Once or twice someone got away, but Henry was very good and very dedicated. I told him there were seventeen men and he was diligent about counting seventeen bodies.

I could loot the cards and coins so long as I did so quickly under the guise of checking the body to see if it was dead. Again, when you knew where the loot was located you didn’t have to search. Quick hands were my friend and only one of the men had their card in their boot. I left him until the group looting happened afterward and asked if I could have his boots.

I claimed the two onya and the two wagons from the main camp as spoils of war. Gus argued, but in the end Henry told the truth when I asked if his men would have survived the ambush had I not used the wands on the bandits or poisoned the main bandit camp’s stew.

Gus was happy enough when they got the chest open to find some monster parts, random weapons, and a large bag of copper and silver coins. The fact that Henry had take four hours to figure out how to open it allayed any fears that it had ever held gold coins that had already been looted.

No one checked the tray for ash under the stove in the cook wagon I’d claimed. Even when I let other people help me unload the wagon’s non-kitchen cargo for anyone to claim.

I kept the hatchet, after all I’d killed hundred of men with the thing, but let all of the other weapons go to Gus and the guards.

Some were enchanted apparently, but I couldn’t tell, and didn’t care. There was something as too greedy.

The woman had never double backed, but she did get lost a few times before finding her way to another bandit camp.

There were eleven bandits there. They listened to whatever it was she said and then began packing up immediately. I followed when they left.

Eventually they made camp and began unpacking. The woman, who had cooperated the whole time, was brought to the center of camp. She undressed after they spoke to her and turned to allow one of the men to gag her. Then they drove stakes into the ground with a massive wooden mallet while she watched.

She was gagged, naked, and tied spread eagle in the center of their camp. I never saw them touch her in a sexual way, but she was red with welts and blue-black with bruises only a day later.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

No one rolled dice here, so coming up with a pattern that worked was little more than trail and error.

I was captured once. And it took me seven to ten cycles just to get the willpower back to fight the first bandits.

And I was making mistakes.

I lost track of the cycle count at some point and restarted the numbers at a hundred and fifty when I felt I was back to normal, though I was taking the precaution of taking Mr. Wellworth’s poison, before attacking the eleven men. It had saved me twice. Well, not saved me, but killed me when I’d been captured and faced torture.

The trick to the second ambush turned out to be getting Gus to keep the wagon train at the camp on the hill and riding Wesley cross country to their camp.

Convincing them was easy, even if I wouldn’t tell them how I knew.

The bandits had some sort of ward magic set up on the road to alert them when we were coming in much the same way Bob had.

Until that was tripped they were relaxed and stayed together.

The woman was staked out no matter when I arrived. She was beaten in the morning, then fed and watered. In the evening they took a thin whip to her and watered her again.

It didn’t make sense. Beard was a broken man and had clearly taken pleasure from the pain of others. These men actively argued over who had to do the punishment. It seemed like it was a chore more than anything else, though I couldn’t understand what purpose it solved.

They had two boxy wagons, two onya, and twenty-one horses.

Three of the eleven men were in full plate mail almost all the time and everyone else wore a variation of a robe.

There was no way to get all three men in armor down, or I hadn’t found one.

What I did find was a way to get two with the paralytic, and leave the other until last.

Most of the mages were arrogant beyond belief. I walked up to six of them and they never turned away from the books they were reading until I’d touched them. The rest were more difficult, but not by much.

It took five wands all triggered at once to overwhelm the last man in armor.

I never saw him die, I always had to sprint, then dive over a fallen tree. Even cooking in his armor he always got a fireball of his own off.

I died more taking the wagons apart looking for hidden treasure than I had trying to kill everyone.

By the time I figured out how to get the trapped floor of the wagon open I was an old hand at clearing the camp.

The wagon’s trapped compartment held six clearly magical arrows, eight scrolls, fourteen wands, a small sword with a see-through blade, a long metal hammer whose head was covered in frost, and a dagger that looked completely normal.

The other wagon had coins, monster parts, and clearly enchanted weapons, though these were less obvious.

It too was trapped but that was easily bypassed by finding the hidden switches and the bits of wood you needed to slid around to deactivate the traps.

The wagon with the hidden compartment in the floor, must need magic to deactivate its traps because the way I ended up getting around it was not by bypassing the traps, but by making the traps less effective.

Since the treasures were sandwiched between the wood of the floor I had an onya haul the wagon into the stream, I chopped at the wheels until they gave out and the bottom sat in the water.

Then I filled the wagon up with water, using clay to plug the gaps in the back where the fold out steps were folded up. When the stairs were up, I only had to seal the gaps between the stairs and the walls.

With two feet of water inside and water below I triggered the traps from a distance.

The wagon burst into the same huge ball of fire as it had before. This time though there was a lot of water to heat, much of it flowing.

The floor survived so well I had to take the hatchet to it.

I loaded down three horses with the loot I was keeping. It took two days to travel up the road and another day’s travel off road to a meadow surrounding a creek fed pond.

Gus’s cabin was there, the small single story building and the much larger half built stable. He brought the wagon train here anytime I gave him the horses.

I was standing in the field trying to remember exactly where everyone had set up.

We set up over there.

I put the small chest in the weeds, then filled it with slightly more than half the camp’s gold. I had more than enough and didn’t feel right keeping everything. Mostly because I didn’t think they’d believe a second camp with no gold coins.

I took all the monster parts and all six of the daggers I suspected were enchanted, including the one that looked normal. I didn’t have a desire to learn to knife fight. I took them because they were small and easy to transport.

The second chest was slightly larger and more of a traveling luggage than chest. It had been bone dry when I opened it and I suspected a bit of magic was involved.

That one contained all the books I had collected from around the camp. Most of those were about magic or monster hunting, often times both. One was a book of poems.

The two robes I’d take back and claim for myself. They were both magical enough that I couldn’t stab through the fabric or set it on fire.

The two saddles and saddlebags I put behind the chests.

The armor was the most awkward to move by far. Twice on the trip the ropes and sacks I’d used to transport it had come loose spilling the armor and spooking the horses. I stacked the armor pieces in a pile and covered it with the blankets I’d used as sacks.

I walked a few hundred yards into the woods and cut some bushes to bring back to pile over the chests and looked at the area from different angles.

The bushes would be brown by the time we got here, or at least withered, but I didn’t expect anyone to see anything.

Two of the horses had gotten loose and wandered off by the time I returned to the camp, and one was dead. I’d tied them all together thinking they could roam about but wouldn’t be able to get away because of all the trees.

It didn’t look to have died easy.

When I cut the rope the remaining horses all but sprinted to the water.

The onya were gone. If you fed them they stayed, if you didn’t they left. They weren’t so much domesticated as lazy.

I couldn’t get most of the horses to let me tie them back up with the rope.

I had six though and that ended up being enough for the rest of them to follow.

Henry was waiting off the road half a day from the camp.

He had three men with them and in no time at all they had the horses under control.

Mrs. Kine was more than happy to pick out a horse for herself.

I took a second horse, the one Henry recommended, and Wesley. I let Gus sort out the rest.

We stopped the wagons on the road when we reached the ambush point. Gus and Henry and I walked into their camp.

The traps on the second cart were triggered by removing the sword’s sheath from the wagon, opening the chest, or removing the long pole arm.

Henry could feel the magic, or something. He moved slowly around the wagon until he tied a rope to the polearm and we all backed away.

When he pulled, the wagon burst into flame.

The enchanted weapons were unharmed and though they were covered in soot and ash the gold coins were only hot.

There were two wands left over from the seven Gus had given me to us. He took that cost out from the gold and then we haggled over what remained.

I fought hard, claiming risk and loss of expensive poisons. When I didn’t haggle hard he was convinced I’d squirreled things away.

The trick there was to go talk to him the next night after we set up camp. I’d claim the deal we’d made was unfair. That I’d been thinking about it all day.

I’d get another horse out of him and fifteen gold coins instead of the suit of armor I demanded when I started.

The stop at his cabin was unscheduled and unplanned. Even Henry was surprised we were headed there, though he may have known about its existence before. We would stay here for five days while he and his men built a fence for the horses. Anyone else willing to work would be paid in gold.

I asked for permission to pull my wagon out of the circle, implying I wanted some alone time with my wife and didn’t want to be too close to everyone else.

We emptied the wagon once we parked it at the edge of the meadow, and in the middle of the night under the guise of having to pee, I moved the two chests, the saddles and saddlebags, and the sacks of armor into the pile of our belongings.

That first night was awkward. She was worried perhaps that I wouldn’t respect her wishes, but I truely didn’t care. I was tired. It felt like I’d been on the road for a thousand years.

I think perhaps she was disappointed I hadn’t fought or argued more after she told me she wasn’t ready.

I was snoring before she was undressed for bed.

I stripped down to my boxers and swam in the pond the next day. She was outraged that I would show so much skin in public.

Eventually I told her if she kept complaining I’d swim the next day with no clothes at all. Then I laughed when it looked like she might choke before she could breathe.

That ended up being a mistake. She wouldn’t speak to me and avoided me. So much so that the next day I made a game of it, waiting until she had found a place to read before approaching. Which would force her to scramble up and find another place.

I didn’t even think to help with the fence. Not once.

I had literal piles of gold, a full suit of plate mail, enchanted weapons, cards, wands, scrolls, and monster parts, and though they weren’t magical, the books.

I’d looted sixty-four cards. It was the cards and her curiosity that made her speak to me again.

“I didn’t know you had so many,” she said staring at the cards.

“Spoils of war,” I said with a small smile.

When that killed the conversation I waited a bit then said, “I tried bonding them, but it won’t work. I can feel them reaching out, but when I try to reach out its like there is a pane of glass in the way.”

She stared at me.

Most loops I went with the dame lie I’d decided to eventually tell the priests when I asked them to awaken me.

“You’ve heard of memory fog?”

“From the deeps?” she asked.

I nodded.

She nodded in return.

“Sit please. This is important.”

Her eyes narrowed and it was if she suddenly realized the cards had been bait and this was a trap.

“Please. It affects our marriage contract.”

Her face lost a little bit of color but she sat.

“I must have had a vial of the memory fog in my things,” I said.

“My memory begins a few days before the ambush. I think I complained about an upset stomach, do you remember that?”

“You were very short tempered,” she said. There was no anger in her words, only an acknowledgment of the memory.

“I apologize for that,” I said, “but I don’t remember it. I only know I was sick because-” I paused about to say that she had told me, but it wasn’t likely she had in this loop.

“Mr. Wellworth told me about it. I don’t remember meeting you, or studying alchemy or enchanting. I don’t have skills, or a class. I don’t know if I have family nor remember them. I can’t ply my trade or support you with it. I don’t remember signing the marriage contract or- Please. Wait. Let me finish. I don’t remember anything. The marriage contract has a clause of disillusion.”

Her face drained of blood and her mouth opened. If one party wasn’t happy they could leave. Penalties were paid by the other party.

“I will-” she swallowed, “I will preform my wifely duties.”

I grinned and shook my head. She said the words like she was going to face a firing squad.

She took the grin the wrong way, because of course there way only one way to take it.

It took a while to make her understand I wasn’t trying to pressure her into sex, but give her a way out of the marriage with a sack full of gold accompanying her on the way back east.

Eventually I opened the chest, untied the sack and opened that to show her the gold.

She was staring at it. She reached down to touch it and then pulled her hand back as she leaned back.

She made herself busy straightening out her dress and her large brimmed hat, checking the hat pins.

“You may close it up,” she said formally.

I tied the bit of string around the sack and then closed the chest up.

We sat in silence for a while.

“I was to marry a banker,” she began, “A man who frequented brothers and apothecaries a few days later to clear up what he’d caught in the brother. I was told they gave him the girls with the diseases because the potion maker paid them coin, knowing he would once again darken his own door for a cure.”

She was picking her fingernails through her gloves.

“He was a cruel man, like my father. They thought lessons were best learned through violence. My father made me take off my gloves and show him-”

She looked up at me and I met her eyes, then glanced at her hands.

Had she always worn the elbow length gloves? Not those particular ones, but a set, yes.

“My hands are scarred,” she said without emotion, “My father would cuff us to the table, draw us out along it, and beat us with a thin wooden paddle until we were so hoarse from screaming we couldn’t speak. That was a common enough punishment for stolen candies. A trader’s son forced himself upon me- only a kiss, but I rushed to tell my father.

“The trader was inside with my father when I told Father what the young man had done. The trader asked my father if he was going to sit by while I lied about his boy’s honor.

“I was strapped to the table and beaten bloody. Then I was given a health potion and the trader beat me. I was given another potion and the young man was invited in to punish me as well.

“My father and the trader retired to the next room. I believe my father expected I would first be raped and then married off. He did not leave the room until the trader agreed to forgive a large portion of the interest the family owed him.

“The young man was more interested in pain than pleasure. He beat me for a while, but I was- It is hard to say,” she said spreading her hands for a moment.

“I was not connected to my body. Not invested in it, only hoping to die. I’m not sure if you can understand that?”

I didn’t say anything until she looked up at me and I swallowed.

“I- I- was tortured.” I realized I’d just told her all my memories were gone and I was already messing everything up.

“I have nightmares about it,” I said. That was truthful enough anyway.

“I’ve- I understand,” I said leaving it there.

“He wasn’t getting the results he wanted so he poured boiling water on my back. Those screams brought my father and more healing potions. No scars, but I kept the pain.

“Two years later, the same young man is sent to collect a payment my father owes his father. He and my father come to an arrangement. They strap my hands to the table and draw me tight. I fight but that only makes him more excited.

“He does it slowly. With water boiling in the tea kettle so that it pours better. Just a bit on my hands and then he brings his face close to watch my skin blister. Then he pours a bit more on my wrists and then later my forearms.

“He stares at the flesh for hours and hours afterward. He uses a knife to pop the blisters and promises to speak to his father on our behalf if only my father will allow him to burn my back.

“My father refuses. By the time I’m given a healing potion the scars remain. Three months later the young man is hung for the torture, rape, and murder of a different woman.

“I run away at first, until I’m brought home by rough men. My father punishes me in the only way he knows how. That night I hold a knife to his throat and promise him if he ever touches me again I will kill him.

“I run away again. Again I’m brought home. He does not punish me. The estate is barren, that which can be sold off, has been. Except me.

“The Banker wants our family name and my flesh. I was all but sold to him when you arrived. You were not-” she smiled and her hands stilled.

“You were not romantic. You explained to me that the madam at the brothel told you about me. That I was, how did you word it, ‘a valuable name at a reasonable price.’”

“I’m sorry that I-”

“I was overjoyed,” she said quickly cutting me off. “Any way out was- You were honest with me. You were looking for a wife before you headed west because you heard women were scarce. You wanted children to carry on your name and someone to care for you when you were older. I wanted out. The madam wanted the banker to marry one of the whores she controlled, and father wanted money.

“You never raised a hand to me, and beyond some mild words concerning my-” she paused, “incessant chattering, you have been nothing but a gentleman.

“I know not of your life except what you’ve told me and that was painted in broad strokes. I assume your apprentice will know much more than I do.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

She met my eyes for a moment and then shrugged.

“Shawn Thatch,” she said, “he seemed a nervous fellow the day I met him but that was the day he was leaving with several wagons of furniture and half a dozen slaves.”

I jerked up and she stared at me.

“What?” she asked.

“I just- there were other wagons that were attacked by the ambushers. I wonder-”

“No. They went first to Fort Redrock, then to some sort of lumber town, and then to Nightfyre.”

Silence stretched between us.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Nothing I guess.”

“Nothing?”

“I was just, I don’t know, existing. It feels like I’ve been on the road for years. I’ve had to kill a lot of people. I chose that. I’m not sure if we could have run, but I didn’t even try.”

“There are some things you cannot run from,” she said.

Time flowed around us.

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I said.

There were a lot more birds in this world. The sat on the wagon roof and the distant fence posts. Some hopped around on the backs of horses eating bugs caught in their hair.

“Do you wish to stay married?” she asked.

I knew as soon as I shrugged I should have given the answer much more thought.

“I don’t know,” I said, “I-”

I what? I never thought it would be possible with my crippling depression? I wouldn’t have considered bringing children into a dying planet? I couldn’t afford it?

Did I want children now? A wife? How did arranged marriages work on Earth? Did they date each other and try to build romantic feelings, or just fall into the roles of marriage and hope the feelings came later.

Of course those were rose colored glasses I was looking through. Likely most arranged marriages were like her and the banker; young woman sold off by her father to a man who-

“I’m not opposed to the idea of marriage,” I said slowly.

“And me?”

“What?”

“Are you opposed to me?”

“No. Not at all. I like that you read,” I said, “and that you seem to be- um, dedicated to this marriage, even when I asked you to- rather told you to be quiet. And just to be clear, I don’t remember doing that.”

“You don’t remember consummating the marriage?”

I shook my head, “no.”

“It was required,” she said, “my father waited outside our room. Neither of us enjoyed it. You apologized and promised that when I was ready, and we were well away from him it would-”

She smiled and her hands stilled again.

“You said it wouldn’t be so disagreeable. You were awkward and nervous but had a head for numbers and no skill at conversation. It is obvious now looking back when the change occurred. It is as if you were two different people in the same skin.”

Time once again moved around us as the sun slide across the sky.

“So what have you decided?” she asked, “am I to remain your wife or take your gold and leave. I will not be returning to my father under any conditions, and you should know, contract or not, there will never be money or cards from him. I’m to release my cards the day after our first anniversary. If not, men will be sent.”

“We have cards,” I said, “I don’t know what they do but we have some. And what’s mine is yours.”