Free My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas

a woman who spoke as little as he did. Even worse, he
wanted
her to talk. Everything about her fascinated him. She could speak of herself for a fortnight without stop, and he would listen raptly.
    But she felt no such need to unburden herself. From time to time, he would try a question.
Will you return to the bosomof your family to celebrate Eid? Where did you acquire this fine horse of yours? Are you meeting anyone in Kashgar?
    Her answers were always short, sometimes to the point of brusqueness.
I’ll think about it when it’s almost Eid. It was a gift. No.
    He was beginning to despair of ever learning anything about her when they stopped that afternoon. When she wanted to travel fast, she used the caravan route; to rest and water the horses, she preferred to find meadows and valleys where there was fresh water—and groves of poplar for her privacy.
    When she returned from this particular grove of poplar he already had a fire going and water nearly at a boil. She made herself a cup of her snow chrysanthemum infusion. He spared a pinch of his own tea leaves—there was hardly any left—and set it to steep, while he knelt down facing the direction of Mecca and pretend-prayed like a good pretend-Muslim.
    “Is that tea from Darjeeling?” she asked as soon as he finished, her expression oddly intense.
    “Yes,” he said, surprised, as much for her quick identification of the tea as from being spoken to at all. He extended toward her his dwindling supply of sultana raisins. “You know of it?”
    She declined his offer—she did not accept any food or drink from him the preparation of which she had not witnessed—but she did answer his question. “I once had a friend who drank this tea. Black, without milk or sugar.”
    He, too, once had such a friend, the friend for whom he had made the long trek to China. “A very dear friend?”
    After a moment, she said, almost as if to herself, “Yes, a very dear friend. Although when he was alive, I had thought of him more as a teacher, because he was much older than me. It was only after he passed away . . .”
    Her face had gone blank, but it was there, a grief that had not yet lost its anguish.
    He remembered his own disbelief when he’d been informedof Herb’s death.
No, it cannot be
, he had said numbly.
I saw him only yesterday. He told me he was coming back today. With firecrackers for Chinese New Year. And when I get well we are to go to a teahouse theater—and eat candied haws in the street.
    That night he had wept, for Herb, for Father, for the ten thousand miles that he had journeyed in vain. With the passage of the years he had come to see that he had been fortunate to have met Herb again at all, even if it was only for half an hour. But her pain, just beneath the surface, called to the sorrow he would always carry.
    “Did you often take tea together?” he heard himself ask, his voice quiet.
    “Yes, quite frequently in those days.”
    “And what did you talk about?”
    It was never the tea, but the conversation.
    Her eyes took on a faraway look. “We talked about the outside world. The places he would like to see again. The places I would like to see for the first time.”
    He remembered the wistfulness in her voice, when they spoke of Kashmir. “Was he the one who told you that Kashmir was a nice place?”
    “Yes. He had visited Kashmir in his youth—and a great many other places in India. The white marble palace that a king built for his beloved, the holy river in which tens of thousands of people seek blessings, and hill stations like Darjeeling, where the British go to escape the heat of the plains of India.”
    Leighton felt a little light-headed. Herb had toured India many years ago. And before his exile, during those years when he visited Starling Manor regularly, sometimes he, too, had spoken to Leighton of those places he had loved best.
    How marvelous would it be—
    He stopped his wishful thinking. No, the world was full of people who had traveled