carry a sword.” Abruptly her brows drew together again. “Though you lied to him to save yourself? So he is your enemy? But you seem as friends. Why would Vela ask you to protect an enemy?”
Throat tight, Lizzan shook her head. “He is no enemy.”
“And you are no friend, if you lie to him,” scoffed Seri before looking to Ardyl. “No hope do I have that this great alliance can ever stand against the Destroyer. Not when these realms are full of people who treat their friends as enemies by always lying to them. Not when they live in fear that the people who are closest to them will be the ones who harm them. If they cannot even believe that the people they love will not hurt them, how can they possibly believe that the warrior they have just met will fight beside them? What trust could there be in such an alliance? And without trust, how can it hold strong?”
“Perhaps fear will be enough,” said Ardyl quietly.
“Only until they fear something more. Then the alliance will fall apart. So while they are ruled by their fear, there can be no hope.” The girl’s despairing and angry gaze settled on Lizzan again. “And you are a drunk and a liar.”
With a sharp stone lodged in her chest, Lizzan nodded. “That is true.”
Seri huffed out a disgusted breath and stalked ahead.
Following more slowly, Lizzan said to Ardyl, “Perhaps I shouldn’t have given her the vine to hold.”
“Perhaps.” Both steel and sympathy lay in the other woman’s gaze. “And perhaps you should drink less, so you need never fear what truth is said.”
The short laugh that burst from Lizzan rattled in her aching head. All day she’d been drinking from her wineskin. For all the good it had done. “So I have been told by Vela, too. But I do not recommend it. It only makes you hurt more.”
“Only because it makes you care more.”
“I could not care more. Already I care too much.”
Ardyl nodded, but her gaze was distant, head cocked. “Do you hear . . . ?”
Lizzan rushed with Ardyl to the edge of the clearing, where they stopped. With dismay, Ardyl said, “Perhaps we shouldn’t have let her hold the vine.”
For Seri was already back at the camp . . . and yelling to her brother that Lizzan was a drunk and a liar. If anyone had fallen asleep before, they were not then, and Lizzan saw her lie settle in stone on some of the Parsathean warriors’ faces when they looked to her—and heard the outright laughter from the Kothan soldiers.
But at least Aerax was not there to witness it, so Lizzan did not care what was said of her, or what anyone thought.
She did not care at all.
CHAPTER 18
AERAX
By the time Aerax returned from the hunt, the campfires were burned to coals that were only kept alive for ease in making the morning meal. The waning moon was still near full, and high enough to flood the clearing with silver light. All was as quiet as the jungle ever seemed to be, as if the entire camp had made use of Lizzan’s vine, though he could feel the gazes of the two Parsatheans on watch as he walked to where Lizzan had made her bed earlier. Behind him came Caeb, dragging a minstrel boar’s haunch that was so large it would keep him busy chewing until dawn.
Only the faintest glow of moonlight reached the shadows beneath the trees at the edge of the clearing. There Lizzan’s bedroll was gone. But no trouble did he have finding her, following Caeb a few paces to where she sat wrapped in her cloak, her back braced against a tree trunk.
He dropped the minstrel boar’s snout and jaw near Lizzan’s feet, with the long and bloodied tusks still attached. The entire head had been so big that he couldn’t easily carry it, but Aerax thought she would be amused by the gift.
“It was not a dappled roe,” he said, crouching before her with a grin. “And it also had a mother. So I was fortunate you gave me this.”
He lifted her father’s medallion over his head and ignored her reaching hand, moving nearer until she let him place it back around her neck.
“A minstrel boar?” Shadows shifted over her face as she looked up at him. “Were you hurt?”
Frowning, he studied her through the dark. Her voice sounded nearly as hoarse as it had many winters past, when for seven