more trees, though smaller than near the baths, and their broad trunks looked as if a dense clusters of ropes had been twisted together and drawn up toward the canopy. In the flickering torchlight, their exposed roots and the shadowed burrows beneath resembled enormous hands digging gnarled fingers into the soil, desperately anchoring themselves to the ground.
“What made these tracks?” Aerax asked.
Distractedly, Lizzan paused to lower the torch nearer to the ground. Two-toed hooves, short stride.
“A dappled roe, I think,” she said. A small deer that didn’t live farther north, so he would not recognize their prints.
“Good eating for Caeb?”
“And better hunting. I have only seen them dart across the road. It will be a chase for him.”
He crouched to study the hoofprints for a moment, and desperately Lizzan tried to see him as a stranger—not easy to do, when there was so much of him to see. After she’d given him the medallion, he’d removed his brocs and boots, since nothing could cut his feet. Only an underlinen was tied around his waist.
She could not deny how practical it was to wear little on the hunt. Blood and dirt could be easier cleaned from skin and linen than from leather and fur. Yet not for a moment did she believe that was Aerax’s only purpose. Curse him, he must know how her gaze roamed over his body now, lingering on the broad mountains of his shoulders, then traveling helplessly down the rugged plains of his back on a trail that led to the tightest of all asses.
But no good would this do her—or him.
Abruptly averting her eyes, she started off again. “We fall behind.”
Not that it mattered. The trail ahead was easy to follow. But an ache took up residence in her heart to match the ache in her head, and Lizzan didn’t trust herself alone with him. Didn’t trust that she wouldn’t turn to him and dull every serrated thought in her brain with the hot pleasure of his kiss. Did not trust that those jagged thoughts wouldn’t lead to a full and painful confession—but she was not treating him as a babe. Vela had charged her with his protection. And Lizzan knew all too well how hearts needed protection, too. So she must continue in this way. As strangers.
They caught up to Seri and Ardyl, who’d stopped to wait . . . because Caeb had, turning to face the trail and impatiently flicking his tail as if they were two wayward children. With a grin, Aerax scratched beneath the cat’s chin before sending him forward again.
Swinging her glaive, Ardyl sliced through a tangle of vines that Caeb had slinked his way under. “How did you come to befriend a long-toothed cat?”
Instantly Lizzan and Aerax were no longer strangers, but united as one. So many times they had told this story.
Never would they tell all of it.
“The eastern outlands of Koth rise up into the base of the Fallen Mountains,” Lizzan told them. “There we went hunting and came across Caeb’s mother already dead.”
Aerax nodded, and as Seri and Ardyl were walking ahead, they did not see how his face darkened. “She had been caught in a hunter’s snare.”
“And we could see that she had been nursing, so Aerax followed her tracks to the den. There we found Caeb,” Lizzan said. “His eyes had not even opened.”
“I would have left him to die, for it would be one less snow cat to fear while I hunted.” Aerax’s gaze caught hers, the torchlight revealing the softening in his expression. “But Lizzan shed a lake of tears and demanded that I take the kitten home and care for him. So I spent two full years as his nursemaid, until he could hunt alongside me.”
Lizzan playfully narrowed her eyes at him. “You say that as if I did not help you. I did.”
“You would come to pet him and kiss him, and fly away when it came time for a bath.”
“Because I did not like baths.” She had not liked them until she’d discovered how lovely it was to share a bath with Aerax. As he well knew. Heat curled through her lower belly as his gaze continued to hold hers.
“I do not like baths, either,” said Seri, and blithely ignored Ardyl’s laughing reply that everyone who came too near her was well aware. “I’d rather be a cat and lick myself clean.”
“You stepped in horse shit while making camp,” Ardyl reminded her.