was assigned to an individual royal—and they were always near that royal. Always.
Her hopeful gaze searched the dock. Only Parsatheans. “Is he here?”
“He stayed in Koth. Only a few soldiers were sent with us.”
Of course. Because their numbers were so thin. Yet despite the pain of knowing why Cernak hadn’t come, hope was intermingled with it. A keeper was a position of high rank—not a position given to someone buried under a sister’s shame. “If Cernak is a keeper . . . then the rest of my family fares well?”
A hesitation returned her gaze to his face. Despair slipped through her. Aerax’s every expression she knew. And the shadows in his eyes now told Lizzan that the burden of her shame was as heavy as she feared.
“I requested that he was made my keeper. To the rest of your family, I gave them my mother’s inn and see that they have everything they need.”
Bitterness filled her again. He meant food and clothing. But that was not all they would need. Lizzan’s mother had been a well-respected magistrate, her younger brother a talented healer—both with purposes they loved. “You are a prince, Your Highness. Is there nothing you can do to restore their station?”
“I have no influence in the palace,” he said quietly. “I only serve as a prop.”
“Ah.” She laughed, short and hard. “That is why you did not leave Koth with me? So you could be a prop?”
Again she had revealed too much. That she was still hurt. He should not be able to do this to her. The wound ought to have been healed over, as her face had been, with only a scar left. Yet it still dripped with blood.
Now Lizzan wished that she could not read him so well. Because there was agony in him, too. She steeled herself against it.
“If that is what you came to tell me, Your Highness, then you can go now.”
“Go where?”
“What do I care?” She gestured to the river. “Jump in and see where it will take you.”
His grin suddenly appeared, the one that immediately tried to pull its reflection from her lips. She steeled herself against that, too.
“I will wait aboard so that I can return the ferry to my companions,” he said.
The Parsatheans. She glanced at the docks. “Interesting companions you have. And you have even begun to dress like them.”
Wearing nothing except that linen tied around his waist . . . and her braid in the pouch hanging from his neck. Her heart she had put into that pouch, and he still carried it so close to his own. Yearning stole through her again, unwanted and unbidden. To spread her hands over that broad chest. To nestle in where that pouch was—and to always know the warmth of his skin, to feel the rise and fall of his breaths.
Such a fool she was. Why could she never harden herself against him? Instead silken heat tugged at the pit of her stomach, a sheer longing to touch him.
“I saw that you’d taken the bandits’ crossbows. I didn’t want to drown in a prince’s heavy armor if you shot me off the line.” His voice roughened with amusement. “Though I would not mind so much, if it turned out as the last time you sent me into the water.”
When she had kicked him from their fishing boat for teasing her. Then he’d failed to surface, panic had taken her over, and she’d dived in after him. But it had all been a ruse to get her in the water, and she’d been so furious at him—and so relieved—that she’d kissed him.
It had been their first kiss. But far from their last.
Their last had been near the same boat, filled with provisions before he’d sent her off alone.
The memory finally hardened her heart. “This time I would not go in after you.”
“No doubt my new friends would save me.”
She snorted in disbelief. “Friends? You?”
He laughed softly, a sound that called to all the laughter that had once lived between them. “It is truth. There is a warrior girl, Seri, who is much like you. And a prince, Tyzen, who is everything I am not. And a young monk . . .” A frown creased his brow. “Whose name I can’t recall.”
Oh, she would not laugh. “I see you are very close to these friends.”
“I would introduce you,” he said, his gaze caressing her face. “They seek to form an alliance to stand against the Destroyer. I think that you would