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years, Your Highness . Water is all you’ll have.”
    “Water?” There it was. The spoiled edge to his voice that she remembered all those years ago. She’d not liked it then, but she’d made so many excuses for it.
    She would not excuse it any longer. “It has been boiled to perfect safety, I assure you. I’ll fetch some, after we bind your wound.”
    His dark hair curled, sweat-damp, against his forehead. “It is but a scratch, lady.”
    Lady . He didn’t remember her, did not know the sound of her voice, though his haunted her dreams so that it seemed they had only just parted. The sting of tears infuriated her, and she blinked them away. “Don’t be a fool. There is an arrow sticking out of your shoulder. That is more than a scratch.”
    She lifted the huge shears from the chest and approached the bed, careful not to meet his eyes or show him her face more than she would have to. “Lift your arm.” When he hesitated, she snapped, “Do you value your fine shirt more than your life?”
    “I only feared you might cut the whole arm off, to spite me,” he said, dutifully complying with her order. “I do recognize you, Johanna.”
    It took only that. The way he said her name, the same after all these years, though now tinged with sorrow, as if he ached with regret, as well, and she could no longer bear her anger. She slid the bottom blade of the unwieldy scissors into his shirt sleeve, nicking his skin and turning the fabric crimson with a drop of his blood. The temptation to spill more of it, to cut him, to beat him, to hurt him until he felt the weight of those miserable fifteen years, was almost too great. She tore, more than cut, the sleeve free, and tossed the shears aside.
    “You look well,” he continued, as if he had not noticed her rough handling of him, as if he could talk the truth away.
    “This is no drawing room,” she snapped, laying the torn sleeve aside to view his wound. The arrow had entered deeply, and dried blood had turned his skin into a mass of glittering brown flakes that fell away beneath her fingertips. There was more muscle there than before, when he’d had the skinny arms of a boy. She pulled her hand back. “And I will not forget what passed between us to comfort you.”
    “I would never ask you to.” He hissed when her hand fell on the shaft of the arrow. “Careful. It met the bone. I could tell by the sound.”
    She feared he was right, and then wondered at that fear. It mattered not to her if he were maimed for life. “Bone or no, it must come out.”
    Going to the door, she called for Wilhelm. His footsteps sounded on the stair before his voice. With no fine tapestries on the walls or carpets on the floor, sound travelled well. “You called, Johanna?” he asked at the top of the stair, and when he entered she glared at him. He had known that she would try to conceal her identity from Philipe, and he had planned to spoil it.
    “We need to pull out the arrow.” She wrapped a strip of linen bandaging tight around his arm and knotted it. “You’ll have to hold him.”
    “That won’t be necessary.” Philipe took a deep breath and fixed his stare at the burned-out canopy above him. “When you’re ready.”
    Johanna rolled her eyes at Wilhelm, but he did not move. How like men, to work together in their asinine delusions. She gripped the fletched end and pulled, twisting.
    The sound Philipe made was not unlike the sound of a pig being butchered. He rose up from the bed with the arrow and grabbed her hand.
    It was like being burned all over again. That simple contact awoke long dead memories, the giddy feeling of his hand in hers all those summers ago. A thousand promises of love, none of which had proved worth the breath she’d wasted repeating them, tortured her. She let go of the arrow and let his wounded arm flop back to the bed. He swore, and she leaned over him, her veil scraping his chest.
    “Take this off, damn you!” Philipe’s cry was tinged with pain