dead, he returned to the first. Lizzan had not moved from where she’d been half lying against the woodstalker’s corpse, though Caeb had pushed in close to her and her arm was around his neck. No longer coughing, she stared up at the sky, rain pattering her muddied face.
Chest aching, Aerax crouched at her side. “You risked your life to slay the monsters that threaten a village, though all who live there would spit on you,” he said gently. “But what is it you do now?”
“I’m wishing it would snow,” she whispered, and Caeb made a wounded noise that Aerax felt through to his soul. “And I don’t mean to hurt you by saying so. Or to make you angry. You are right. I am selfish. I would do what’s best for myself now, Aerax. But this is all that I have left.”
Heart torn in two, he shook his head. “I am not angry.” And was ashamed he had been. What he’d thought was selfishness was Lizzan’s pain, and he’d raged at her for suffering. “And this quest cannot be all you have left.”
“It is,” she replied brokenly. “Everything I wanted to be, everything I wanted to do . . . it is all gone. There are no jobs for me along the plains road anymore. I tell them that my scars aren’t Vela’s curse, but still—whatever grief or pain befalls them while I am away, they blame me on my return. And now the same here. I have no other path ahead.”
Throat raw, he cupped her cheeks in his hands. “You have the alliance left. Tell me you do not wish to defeat the Destroyer.”
“I do. But I have been a soldier all my life. I know what fate awaits me there. I am a body that will be thrown at the Destroyer’s front lines—and that would be a fine and honorable death—but not a whisper in Koth would be said of it. I asked for the quest so that my death will be something more. So that I will not merely fall on a battlefield, but will help my family, too. And I’m just . . . so tired.” Her eyes squeezed shut and tears slipped over her lashes to join the rain on her cheeks. “I’m so tired, Aerax. Barely can I shut my eyes before the wraiths wake me again. I used to quiet them with ale or the corpse vine—or anything that would dull the knives in my head. But I can no longer. And I cannot sleep. So I am ready for all of this to be done.”
“I see you are,” he said thickly, and brushed his lips over her trembling mouth. “But I still will not let you.”
She gave a sobbing little laugh.
Pressing his face into her wet hair, Aerax gathered her against his chest and turned, so that she leaned against him and not the woodstalker’s filthy corpse. Cradling her in his arms, he tucked her tear-streaked face against his neck. “I never said to you why I became a hunter.”
“You did,” she said, her voice muffled against his skin. “To provide for your mother after your neighbors ravaged her garden during the Bitter Years.”
The two years without a summer. Only four years of age he’d been during the first year—and Lizzan had been three—yet they had not known each other then. And would not have. After Aerax had been born, no one would sell or trade with his mother. Yet she’d always had Hanan’s own touch in the garden, and she’d kept dally birds for eggs and goats for cheese long after others in the village had eaten their livestock.
Had those hungry people ever come to her inn, she would have fed them. Instead they stole everything she had and left her and Aerax with nothing. So Aerax had begun hunting for their meals . . . as he had told Lizzan.
“But I didn’t tell all of it.” He swallowed past the constriction in his throat. “After the snows came, we found nothing even when foraging all day. Already she’d taken me to the crystal palace, but my father wouldn’t acknowledge me and sent us away. I remember nights when it seemed all we had was warm water to drink—and when we did find something, always she gave me most of it.”
“You told me this,” she said softly.
So he had. “But not of the evening she put out the fire, though it was the bitterest night of the winter. Because she