Still there. Helviana had not removed it. The thin, cheap, honest ring of a woman who had married young and had not thought about the ring since the day it went on because it was simply there, simply part of the architecture of her hand.
She looked at it now.
The complicated expression moving across her face.
She did not take it off.
She looked back at Dara.
"My current master," she said, "is not like any man I have met before."
"In what way," Dara said. Cautious. The caution of a woman who had heard this sentence in various forms and had learned to audit it.
Helviana thought about how to answer this.
She thought about the carriage. About the pond. About the forest. About the inn room upstairs where she was expected to return and what that return would look like and the particular, honest, completely involuntary flutter in her lower body that thinking about that return produced.
She was aware of her body.
