he might find Lizzan in her furs with someone else. Someone who would know the sweetness of her kiss and the heat of her touch.
He only wished her happy. He only wished her love.
Yet he could not bear seeing her with another.
But nowhere did Aerax find her, and despite the full moon, the shadows beneath the trees made the ground too dark to search for her tracks. Instead he made his way back along the camps, drawn by the sound of a familiar, booming laugh. He had heard it often since leaving Krimathe—it was from Riasa, and that laugh was one she deployed often.
She sat with two others at a fire near the end of the caravan. At Aerax’s approach, she was in conversation with one, and so it was the third who stood and invited Aerax to sit with them—Tyzen, the Syssian prince who led the southerners. Like Aerax, the prince was marked by his ancestry. Not with snow-white hair, but with eyes that were almost as pale, like moonstones set against the bronze of his face.
Tyzen was also all that Kothans likely wished that Aerax was. A prince with manners fair and who had been taught his role from a young age, instead of a bastard suddenly thrust into a cage and who had lashed out at everyone around him.
And the boy was so cursed young. Only a hint of a whisker had grown on Aerax’s chin when the weight of every life in Koth was placed on his shoulders—and barely had Aerax held up beneath it. Tyzen had only just reached the age that Aerax had been then, and he bore the weight not of one realm, but every realm west of Temra’s Ocean.
With the prince and Riasa was one of the two companions who were often at his side. The young monk was missing, but the Parsathean warrior was here. She was hardly more than a girl—and except for the blackness of her hair, she was nothing like Lizzan at the same age. Around everyone but Aerax, Lizzan had been regimented in her appearance and precise in her behavior, and this girl seemed only a few steps away from possessing claws and fangs. More like Aerax had been.
Yet it was Lizzan’s daring manner and bold amusement he saw in this warrior’s dark gaze as she asked the Krimathean captain, “What would it take to lure Shim away from Queen Mala?”
Riasa scoffed. “That horse will never abandon the queen.”
The girl was not thwarted. “How did she first persuade Shim to let her ride him?”
“She never asked it of him,” Riasa said. “It was he who first urged her onto his back to save her life. She’d been stung by a river serpent, and he could carry her to a healer faster than her own mount could.”
When the Parsathean warrior’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, Tyzen grinned. “Now Seri considers poisoning herself.”
Riasa’s deep laugh rolled out. “I advise against it, young one. Shim would leave you to die.”
The young warrior scowled.
The captain raised dark eyebrows at Aerax, who had not taken the invitation to sit but still stood across the fire from her. “Have you escaped your minders, then?”
The other Kothans, who hovered around Aerax whenever he approached anyone not from their realm. Most outsiders saw their constant attention as protection for a royal, or assumed that he surrounded himself with courtiers who were always prepared to serve him. Instead Lady Junica and Degg made certain his vulgar manner did not offend those whose alliance they would rely upon. They would not risk putting Koth’s fate in the hands of a savage bastard who had no one to love but a cat.
Since the Syssian prince sat at this fire, Aerax would not remain unattended for long. So he couldn’t be subtle. “Does Lizzan protect the caravan?”
Riasa’s brows drew together. “Lizzan?”
Of course she would not say her name. “A woman with black hair and of this height.” Aerax measured on level with his chin. “One of the finest warriors ever seen, fierce when protecting anyone weaker than she. You might know her by the way she never fully smiles without beginning to laugh, or how she will say so much with her eyes that are the blue of a mountain lake, or that she favors her left hand when she uses her sword.”
Recognition lit the captain’s expression. “And a scar?”
“Likely a scar,” Aerax confirmed. From an injury he had never seen healed.
“She was here,” Riasa said, stirring the fire with a