AN: Here's the next little piece to this one!

I hope you enjoy, if you're reading. Please don't forget to let me know what you think!

111

Daryl ate his breakfast and drank his coffee early. He smoked a cigarette while he put out his fire and packed the satchel that he would carry with him. He cleaned his camp the way that Jim had always taught him to do, and he left before the sun was high enough in the sky to push away the darkness around him.

Daryl told himself that he had really meant to head toward the town first. He meant to take the meat he had for trade directly to the town and, if he didn't find someone there willing to barter for it in the store, he meant to find those that would be putting up living quarters just near the town—the type that looked like they needed fresh meat but lacked the patience or the ability to get it for themselves—and barter with them for money or goods.

He hadn't headed that way, though, and what he'd learned was that he could easily follow his trail back to the little shanty that he'd left the night before.

He approached carefully and quietly. He stopped, crouched low, and watched the shanty. It was poorly and hastily built. It would hardly keep the water out when it rained, and the snow would likely fall through the cracks in the roof. Daryl was sure it was temporary—something to last only as long as a better shelter took to build. The loud man on the swayback sorrel who mated the pretty woman would have to build her something better than this—this was barely better than wintering hard and Daryl's own temporary shelter offered a great deal more protection than the shanty.

Daryl wanted desperately to see the pretty woman.

He had seen her in his dreams all night—he'd focused hard to not forget her, trying to hold onto what details of her that he could remember. He had remembered her, too, in the morning. He had coveted her when he woke yearning to rut.

She was someone else's mate, but Daryl wanted only to see her. He knew he couldn't touch her, but surely there was no rule, not even in Jim's old Bible, about seeing pretty things like that and liking to look at them. It was the same as men who looked at gold and all the other foolish things that Daryl had seen them coveting through the years. Though none, he was sure, had ever coveted anything half so much as he did the pretty woman.

When Daryl eased closer to the shanty—dim light inside suggesting a lamp of some sort was lit, since the building was small enough that nearly any light would be enough light inside it—he heard something that troubled his ears and his stomach. He heard the sounds of yelling—loudness that was out of place at this hour of the morning and this far from the saloon halls and bars in lively towns where men most often went about beating each other in the street for tricks down with cards and disagreements about the money they often valued more than their own lives.

The loud man was being loud and, though that was something that Daryl could accept as simply his nature, for all that he knew of him, what bothered Daryl the most was the fact that he could hear anger in his voice. For most emotions, after all, Daryl had learned, there were very specific ways that people's voices changed.

When he heard the woman's voice—a sound he'd longed all night to hear beyond his own imagination—Daryl didn't like what he heard. Instead of the soft, sweet sound that he'd imagined—like the doctor's wife telling him how smart he was when he was reading her words and doing her ciphering—he heard fear. He heard sadness. He knew those sounds. They were horrible sounds. They made his blood feel cold in his veins, and they made him shiver.

Daryl eased closer to the shanty. He had no fear or concern that the people inside would hear him. He was quiet. He was exceptionally quiet. Very few people ever heard him if he didn't mean for them to hear him. His only concern, really, was that one might come from inside the shanty, quickly, and see him while he was out in the open.

Still, he took the chance. He didn't need to lie to himself any longer. He'd always mean to come back to the shanty—he'd meant it since he'd broken the branches the night before. He'd meant to creep closer to get a better look at the pretty woman. He'd meant to hear her voice.

He'd meant to offer her the carefully wrapped bundle he extracted from the satchel—some of the best cuts of the deer he'd killed. He'd trade the rest, but that was for her. She was beautiful, but thin, and Daryl could only imagine that the loud man who clearly failed to provide enough for his livestock was failing at feeding his mate as well. Daryl couldn't stand to think of the pretty woman being hungry. Daryl had thought about it during the night, and it had angered him that the loud man had appeared to be larger than he had any right to be while his mate starved down to such thinness, but he'd told himself that he had no right to get involved in what happened between these people.

The pretty woman had chosen her mate, and the loud man had the right to her, that was the law of the land, right? Likely, he kept more for himself to keep his strength up to acquire what she needed, and he was simply a poor hunter and hadn't yet gotten goods from the town to keep her well-fed.

Daryl left the deer near the door where she would be sure to find it. She wouldn't starve, and she would never have to know who left it there.

And, maybe, with some good meat to eat, the loud man wouldn't yell quite so much and she wouldn't sound so sad.

Daryl resisted the urge that almost overwhelmed him to peek into the rough-cut cloth-covered window of the shanty to see if he could catch a glimpse of her. Instead, he kept low to the ground and crept back to where he'd found cover before, only daring to stand when he was sure that he wouldn't be seen.

He felt heavy as he headed toward town, even though the weight of his satchel was lessened by the loss of the large hunk of meat he'd left behind. As he walked, he reminded himself that, though it wasn't possible to change his nature of coveting—because he was very much coveting, despite it being bad—as was the nature of coveting, he had no claim on the pretty thing that he desired.

It was better, really, to just forget about her entirely.

111

Daryl managed to stay away from the shanty for the rest of the day after he left the deer. He went into town, he traded his meat easily enough with two families he found on the outskirts of town before he even got there, and the last of it was swapped to the wife of the man who owned mercantile. She liked the look and the smell of the meat, even if she didn't appear to be too fond of either when it came to Daryl, and she'd told her husband to make the deal.

Daryl told the man he had a regular supply of trade goods to make deals—hides, fresh meat, fish, and even beaver pelts that would sell best when the big wagons came through that headed back east and bought things like beaver pelts and rocks they were fond of in faraway places.

By the time he left, Daryl had a small supply of the things he wanted most and the promise of more with the delivery of more things to trade that the man at the mercantile thought he could make use of with the people in town.

Against his greater desires, Daryl had steered himself far away from the shanty, and he'd made his way back to camp by a long path that kept his distance from the pretty woman and her loud mate. There was no need to tempt and torture himself with coveting what he couldn't ever have. That's what he decided on his way back to camp.

His resolve faltered a little, though, as he waded in the water and ran traps for the beaver that he hoped to catch not far from his camp.

The deer meat might not last that long. Maybe they were hard up enough that the loud man had taken the deer to trade in town much the way that Daryl had done. Maybe the man ate the deer and didn't allow the pretty woman enough for her share. Maybe he was even one of those kind of men that was too given over to drink and, therefore, had bartered the meat in exchange for whiskey.

Daryl did like whiskey and other spirits—and he always had a bottle tucked somewhere in his provisions because it was good for drinking, for chasing away nightmares, and for washing out wounds—among other things—but he wasn't given to drinking to drunkenness with any regularity. A sloppy-drunk man was a dead man—that's what Jim had said. A man who couldn't move for drink was likely to end up being supper for something hungrier and less given to over-drinking than he was.

Daryl didn't mind when others drank. He didn't mind, really, even when they drank to a stupor. It didn't make no never-mind to him what others did with their goods or their money.

But something got under his craw when he imagined the fat, loud man taking the pretty woman's deer away and bartering it for drink so that he could drink to a stupor. Daryl had to remind himself, as he set beaver traps, that he didn't know for sure that the man did such a thing—he'd only allowed himself to tell himself stories of such things.

Still—his concern over whether the woman had been allowed her fair share of meat hung with him. It kept Daryl up nearly all night long, and it forced him to get a slightly late start to the morning because he dozed off when he had meant to be waking. When he did wake and wash the sleep away with the strong coffee that he tended to brew, Daryl had reached a decision. Daryl couldn't very well tell the loud, fat man that he had to give his mate what she was due to eat, but he could, at the very least, try to leave her something more to eat and—with any luck—when her hunger left her, the sadness in her voice would leave her, too.

Daryl used his bow and picked off two relatively thin jackrabbits with clean shots. He cleaned the rabbits and carefully wrapped them in ripped-up pieces of cloth that he kept for trading meat in town—it wasn't too hard to come by the rags in town, and he didn't mind washing them to make his offer something someone might desire to trade for when he showed it to them.

It was later in the day than he would have wanted it to be, and the sun was sitting high. He didn't want to be seen by the pretty woman, sure that she would reject his offerings or try to pay him—too kind to take charity. He didn't want her to feel burdened. On the way to the shanty, he thought about the various ways he might go about leaving the rabbits that he carried without her knowing it was him who had done it.

When Daryl reached his safe spot for watching the shanty, the swayback sorrel was nowhere in sight. In the day since he'd been there, there were no signs that the loud man had done any work to make the shanty better—nor that he'd done a single thing to better the lot of his mate or their livestock.

Daryl's eyes immediately fell on the pretty woman. Instead of looking deep in thought, this time, she looked deep in sadness as she busied herself with what appeared to be more washing, even though Daryl could hardly figure how someone poor enough to not be able to afford to feed his mate decently could afford to have so much that required washing. Her head was somewhat turned from Daryl, so that he could only see her profile, but she was no less beautiful than he remembered.

For a moment, he watched her hands as she scrubbed items in the metal tub. He let his eyes scan over her thin body—the dress she wore hung over her bones like it was draped over tree branches. Daryl memorized the curve of her shoulders and the bit of skin that showed between her shoulder and her neck where the over-sized dress hung poorly on her thin frame.

His eyes jumped when she moved. He watched her lift a hand and paw at her face with the back of it. It was only then that he was drawn from his coveting long enough to realize that she was wiping away tears. Daryl carefully cracked a twig near him—just enough noise to sound like something was moving, but not enough to give away that it wasn't just a deer, or some other animal, stepping wrong. Her head turned quickly in his direction. She searched for the source of the sound. He eyes glided right past him. He knew how to be invisible.

She was beautiful. She was so beautiful that he found it hard to breathe when she looked at him straight on like that and, for just a half a moment, he could pretend that she saw him—that she was looking at him.

Even from this distance, he could see that her eyes were light. They were blue. Like clear river water. Like the pretty stones he sometimes saw people trading. Like the beads that the natives were so fond of when the wagons brought them.

Her hair was rusty brown. It shone in the sun like polished red copper that he'd seen before. It glittered with shows of silver like the veins of gold that ran through some of the mountains that Daryl had passed by before.

Daryl moved only enough to breathe and to blink. She couldn't see him.

But he could see the one thing about her that made his insides quiver with a sensation that he was sure wasn't coveting at all. He could see the one thing that made his beathing catch and his mind go dizzy, like with too much drink—but this didn't have to do with his feelings of wanting to hold her, beautiful as she was.

On her cheek, there was a large purple bruise and, lower, her lip was swollen and purple. Daryl had seen the same injuries on his mother's face so often that he remembered her face no other way. He had seen Merle wear those injuries after getting caught playing his tricks with cards.

Except the pretty woman, Daryl was sure, hadn't gotten her marks playing cards. She had gotten her marks, Daryl was sure, from her fat, loud mate.

And Merle had told Daryl that people who beat their children merciless were savages, but it was also true that men like his Papa had been—men who beat their mates merciless—were savages of the same, worst kind. Maybe, Daryl thought, they were even the same kind of savages that killed people for their goods and burned them in their homes.

Daryl felt heavy, and his chest ached. When she had dismissed his sound and turned back to her work, Daryl slipped some distance down the way and found a rock about the size he wanted. He took careful aim and threw it hard at the back of the shanty. As soon as it left his hand, he trusted his instincts about the behaviors of humans and slipped quickly and quietly back to where he'd left his satchel. Just as he expected she would, she went to explore the sound she'd heard, and Daryl scrambled down to the shanty as fast as he could and right back up to his hiding place—his gift left in practically an instant.

He had left tracks, though not a terribly obvious amount of tells. An experienced tracker would know right where he'd passed, about how much he weighed, and what position he'd been maintaining while he moved. She wasn't an experienced tracker and Daryl sincerely doubted her savage mate—for Daryl could think of him as no less at this point—was either.

Daryl stayed long enough to see her find the rabbits and look around in confusion. He watched her walk this direction and then that—looking around. Then, he saw her hug the wrapped rabbits to her chest like something far more precious than the skinny little jackrabbits really were—they wouldn't have even brought a decent trade in town, really—before she carried them inside the shanty.

Satisfied that, maybe, she could at least get something to eat off of one of the animals before the loud, fat savage who mated her took them, Daryl turned and went back the way he came—back toward his camp.

It hurt Daryl that the savage that Daryl could hardly think of as a man had marked her pretty face like he had. Daryl did covet her—and he coveted her hard—and if she were his to hold, he wouldn't ever treat her in such a way, because Daryl knew that if you don't care for the things you love, then they'll just be gone—like the men who too often neglect their animals, weapons, or goods, and soon find themselves separated from their things. And, really, Daryl thought that it was easy to say that they deserved the loss since didn't care for their things enough to deserve them anyway.

The loud, savage man didn't deserve such a pretty mate if he meant to deprive her of things she needed and to mark her besides. Daryl knew that much.

He wasn't sure, yet, what exactly that meant, but he knew that much.