Because he knew her too well. Yet she needed no help from him. “I will find my own way toward it.”
“So you will.”
She would. Lifting her chin, she told him, “If you must recruit, speak to the woman on the dock. She followed the Destroyer around the world in search of her son—and says she saw nothing but bodies and blood, but can likely tell the alliance more about the Destroyer than anyone else.”
“And you listened to her story?” His voice deepened. “Little have you changed since leaving Koth.”
She scoffed. “I have.”
“Then little has my admiration for you changed. Always you would stop to listen to those who were alone, for you knew that is what they often needed the most—for someone to see them, to listen to them. And I have always loved that about you.” Closer he came, until her heart thundered. His callused thumb skimmed the line of her jaw. “Just as I have always loved this stubborn jut of your chin.”
Pain and pleasure swept through her. He said such to her now? When her only hope of surviving him was to finish this?
“Do you know what I have always loved about you?” she asked quietly, turning toward him, tilting her face up to his.
Such a fire lit his dark eyes as his gaze fell to her mouth. “Tell me.”
Lizzan always preferred action to words. In a swift movement, she stepped back and kicked him square in the chest, sent him toppling unbalanced over the side.
She heard the splash. Saw him surface—sputtering with laughter, wearing the grin she loved so much. But though that grin drew her own, just as it always had, that was not the reason she gave.
“I have always loved how well you swim!” she called out instead. “So strike for the shore, Your Highness!”
He laughed again—and did as she’d told him, the water gleaming over his bare skin. Lizzan watched as the current carried him downstream, watched as he reached the riverbank at such a distance from the ferry docking that she would be gone long before he could walk his way back upstream. When he was safely out of the river, she stopped watching and turned away.
She did not look back again.
CHAPTER 10
AERAX
By the time Aerax reached the ferry boat and guided it back across the river, the caravan had caught up to them again. Kelir waited on the dock and caught the mooring rope Aerax tossed to him.
“She would not sell the horses?” the Parsathean asked, securing the boat.
Curse it all. “I forgot to ask.”
The big man grunted with amusement. “No surprise that is. I saw what other important matters were on your mind. When she sent you into the water, you only needed to float on your back and you could have sailed across the river instead of swimming.”
Aerax could not stop his laugh, for it was true. It mattered not that she’d been wearing bandits’ blood, disheveled and stained from traveling and sleeping in the jungle. Lizzan would always be the most alluring of all women to him, and his cock had hardened to full mast the moment he’d stood near her.
“Ten years I have known our prince.” Degg approached the dock, regarding Aerax with sly amusement. “Never have I heard him laugh before. Or seen him smile.”
Because the last full happiness Aerax had felt was before he’d gone to the palace. Afterward, only fleeting joy had he known—only with Caeb, or the few times Lizzan had visited him.
“And now his laugh has fled again, Degg,” Lady Junica observed with a sharp smile. “Perhaps there is a common reason that you never see him laugh when you are near him.”
Degg was not the reason. The councilor was nothing to Aerax. Only his purpose mattered. His purpose . . . and Lizzan.
His gaze fell on the fishing woman. And that was where his laughter had gone. Not because Lizzan had named him a villain, but because she had told her story to this woman . . . and had likely told it for the same reason that she listened to so many others.
Because she was alone. Because she needed someone to hear her.
But she did not want that person to be Aerax.
So he had a new purpose—to see that this alliance was as strong as it could be. Because Lizzan would find her way toward it, and among these warriors who resembled her so fiercely, she would not be alone. She would find