deliberate purpose, with shoulders back and head high, with a look of utter confidence always in her gaze . . . that was Lizzan, too.
Every time he saw her in them, so quickly she vanished again. As if she haunted him. Yet she was no ghost.
Instead she was flesh and blood—and she had run from him.
Seri poked Aerax’s armored ribs. “What has Caeb caught scent of?”
The big cat had been prowling ahead of them at a leisurely, meandering pace, investigating the jungle on either side of the road. Now his head was up, and he loped down the road in a direct path. Not hunting, for he was not moving stealthily enough for that, but with clear purpose.
The red-cloaked Krimathean watched him, too, her brow furrowed. She glanced over at Aerax when Riasa said, “Bandits plague this stretch of road.”
Aerax frowned. “Caeb!”
The cat ignored him. Idiot beast. When Caeb hunted within the jungle, the foliage offered him cover and protection. Yet on the road he had neither, and Aerax did not know what would be more valuable to bandits—the silver of his harness or the white of his fur.
But Aerax knew exactly what the cat was after. He didn’t know if Caeb would catch her, but if the cat did, Aerax would be right behind. Because if anyone traveling this road was in danger from bandits, then Lizzan was, too.
“I must follow him. Do you stay or do you ride with me?” he asked the girl, who looked over at Tyzen and back at the other Parsatheans before answering.
“We ride with you,” she said.
CHAPTER 7
LIZZAN
How had her story with Aerax begun? Of late, Lizzan had not thought of the beginning much. Only of how it had ended.
Suddenly she was desperate for a drink. Anything to dull the razor’s edge of remembering all that was lost as she told the fisherwoman, “It began with the two of us becoming the finest of friends—though we wanted to be more than friends. Wanted so badly. But my parents warned us it would only end in hurt.”
“Because of his rank?” the fisherwoman asked.
“Because he had no rank. Nor even a name. He was a bastard born without acknowledgment—and he hated Koth.” He hated everything his father was, and how the law allowed a person to be treated as nothing, for no other reason than by accident of his birth. “He stayed only for his mother. But always he planned to leave. And me . . . for as long as I could remember, my only wish was to become a soldier and protect the people of the realm. So when he asked me to go with him, I told him it was my duty to stay—and then I tried, so very hard, not to love him as anything more than a friend. And he tried the same. So that when the time came for him to leave, it would not hurt so much.”
“But it did?”
“Oh, it did.” Lizzan laughed at the memory of how tormented she’d been . . . and how young she’d been. “So much. And even as I was packing my things to leave with him, he decided to stay—though it would still not be easy. His name was not written in the books. If it was discovered how close we were, I would have been expelled from the army. But there was talk among the nobles and councilors of doing away with the books, so we thought . . . maybe soon, all would be fine. So we pledged ourselves to each other. Yet not even a tennight passed before the red fever came and killed near to half of those living on the island.”
“You lost him?” the fisherwoman asked gently.
“Not to the fever.” Though Aerax had lost his mother. And Lizzan had lost her mother’s parents, healers who’d tended to those stricken with the disease and succumbed to it themselves. “Nearly every member of the royal house was dead—the king and all his heirs, and so many others. All that remained were the king’s brother, the brother’s young daughter . . . and Aerax. You have heard of Koth’s snow-haired kings?”
The woman nodded. “That they are descendants of the man-god, Varrin.”
“They are. And legend is that Koth will sink if none of his heirs stands on the island. So the king never leaves Koth until he takes the King’s Walk at the end of his life. And always, always, there is someone of at least a queen’s age ready