She had believed it when they’d reached the small cave, and she’d seen how he’d already filled the boat with provisions. She’d believed it as he kissed her again, so long and sweet and slow, as if he would never let her go.
She’d believed it until Aerax told her to continue on—alone.
And even then, even then, it had not been the end. Because she’d been such a fool.
“I asked him to come with me,” she told the fisherwoman. Begged him, in truth, though she’d only asked the once. But the plea had been in her voice, in her eyes, in her heart. She knew Aerax had seen it.
And she would never forgive herself for giving him so much in that moment. Because by the time she got into the boat, she’d had nothing left.
“Temra have mercy on the young in love,” the woman breathed on a heavy sigh. “As your prince is not here with you, I need not ask his reply.”
That it was his duty to stay. Though Lizzan couldn’t imagine what duty still kept him there. Never would she have asked him to go if he was still needed at the palace, just as he had not asked her to leave Koth when her dream had been to protect it.
Before the red fever, he had wanted her enough to stay. But after her exile, he had not wanted her enough to go.
Or he’d wanted something else more than he’d wanted her. If so, he’d never shared with her what it was. Just as he hadn’t shared anything with her in the years following the red fever. If she had been less of a softhearted fool when he’d swept her onto his horse, she’d have realized that Aerax had exiled her from his life long before she’d been exiled from Koth.
“So that was the end,” Lizzan said. Aside from memories that never let her be. Memories of sweet kisses, of screeching wraiths, of agonized screams. But there was enough drink in the world to drown those. All the rest had reached a finish that she was determined would remain finished. But it could not if she met Aerax again. “And is still not a tale worth repeating.”
But it had been a fine thing to tell it. So often Lizzan tried not to think of all that had happened. Only pain lingered in those memories. And it had hurt to speak of them. Yet it was also as if a great pressure within her had released.
Until sudden tension tightened the back of her neck. As if nudged by instinct, she and the fisherwoman went utterly still, listening over the burbling rush of the river. So different the sounds were in the jungle. In the north, everything howled and creaked and cracked. Here it buzzed and chittered and dripped.
Yet that was all she heard. Nothing that was unexpected . . . except that there was less noise than there’d been before. The jungle was falling silent in one direction. Lizzan’s gaze fixed in the same direction.
There. The barest flash of white fur, the briefest glimpse of a prowling stride before the shadows between the ferns swallowed it from sight.
Lizzan had not yet seen anything white in the jungle. But people were not the only things desperately fleeing the places they’d once lived, and mountains lay both to the south and to the east. A long-toothed snow cat or an ice walker might be migrating across the valley to reach the eastern range.
Again, a hint of white . . . and the gleam of silver. Lizzan’s stomach lurched up into her chest. Heart thundering, she unsteadily rose to her feet and called out, “Caeb?”
The ferns rustled. A big feline head poked out from the leaves, daggerlike fangs gleaming. Oh, she knew that face and the regally disdainful expression that he seemed to wear, even when at his most playful.
Laughing, she started forward. “If I had a bow and arrow, you might have got yourself killed, you fool.”
An enormous fool. Though Caeb seemed nearly wasted away as he prowled onto the road, powerful muscles rippling beneath white fur. Around his broad chest he wore a leather harness studded with silver beads to alert anyone who saw him that he was a tamed predator—and that harness hung from his frame, when always before the thickness of his fur often concealed the leather and silver.
Though it was only the fur that made him appear so thin, she realized. Even during the warmest summers on Koth,