"Not those," Rakhal said. He crouched beside her, the bulk of him a wall against the damp. He held out his hand. "These."
His palm covered hers as he adjusted her grip. The wood he gave her was gray and feather-light; it sounded different when she let it fall, a bird-bone click rather than a thud. He didn't move his hand for a long heartbeat. The warmth of him burned through the wet chill, through the ache in her knuckles, through the part of her that still remembered stone and rope and the taste of copper.
She caught herself leaning toward his heat without meaning to, drawn to him like a compass finding north. His pupils dilated when she shifted closer, the black nearly swallowing the iris before he looked away.
"Better," she said, and the word came out on a breath that steamed between them.
Shazi watched without watching, knife turning slow circles in her fingers. Approval flickered across her face and vanished. Eliza fed the careful flame until it became a low, steady tongue, not bright enough to offend the trees but sufficient to press back the damp.
After the fire, after the first hot mouthful of broth that tasted of something bitter and clean, Rakhal said, "Come," and led her deeper into the ring of thorns.
It revealed itself like a secret whose keeping had cost something. The place was no more than a hut made of stone and root, with a low arched mouth and a roof that seemed to have grown itself between bough and earth. Inside, it was spare to the point of austere: a rack of weapons, their edges oiled and wrapped; a trunk; two pelts laid on the packed-earth floor; a niche with a bowl carved from black stone. The air carried a faint metallic scent, mixed with something like pine sap.
"You built this?" she asked.
"Azfar made me build it," he said. His hand traveled the curve of the doorway, a habit, a ritual. "Said there would be a day when I couldn't show my back to the sun. Said I'd need a place that remembers me and answers when the rest forgets."
Eliza touched the wall. The stone was warmer than it should have been. Beneath her fingertips, the slightest rhythm—like a pulse in a wrist, shy but certain.
"It... breathes," she said.
"It listens," he corrected gently. "Not to everything. Enough."
She thought of Maidan's dungeons—the voices pressed cold and spiteful against the walls of her mind. This was different. The dark here did not scrape. It did not beg. It watched, yes, but with the unblinking patience of an old tree across a drought. She exhaled and something in her spine unlocked.
He reached across her for the water skin, his arm brushing against hers. They both froze at the contact, neither pulling away for a heartbeat too long. When he finally moved, the air between them felt charged, electric.
He brought her food—strips of dried meat that rewarmed into sweetness near the fire, handbread that cracked and dissolved on her tongue, a cup of water steeped with leaves that tasted like smoke and mint. She ate sitting cross-legged with the pelt pooled under her, hands cradled around the cup for heat. He never ate first. When she asked why, he said, "Because I can go longer without it," and that was the end of that.
"Where does the river run?" she asked after, the cup empty and her fingers no longer dumb with cold.
He nodded toward the trees. "There," he said. "You'll hear it when the night grows less loud."
"Does the night..." She felt foolish and said it anyway. "Does the night speak to you?"
He considered, not as if the question were absurd, but as if it deserved care. "I hear what lives in it," he said finally. "And sometimes what died in it. Here, less than I feared." His mouth made the shape of a smile without quite arriving. "You make it quieter."
Heat rose along her throat that had nothing to do with the fire. She looked down at her hands to keep from staring like a girl.
Their eyes met over the flames, and something unspoken passed between them—hunger barely contained by the circumstances that surrounded them.
Shazi came and went, the perimeter her circuit. She moved like shadow, cutting a sign with a glance and making it vanish. Twice she stopped near the doorway to speak in undertones with Rakhal—numbers, a map sketched with a knife point in the dirt, a brief, sharp laugh at some old, unshared story. When she wasgone, the closeness of the place grew again, not oppressive but exact, like a garment fitted to the bone.
Eliza tried to pull her hair back. It had dried in snarled ropes, tangling her fingers. She wrenched the thong too tight and hissed as it snapped.
"Sit," Rakhal said, and the word was not command so much as invitation.
She sat on the pelt near the door. He came to sit behind her, one knee on either side of her hips, the heat of him a palpable thing, the shadow of him falling around her like a second cloak. From a leather kit he drew a comb of ironwood, dark and worn smooth.
"Brenna used to scold me for tearing it," Eliza said, forcing her voice to keep to the lightness she chose. "She'd say I pulled it like a fisher drags a net."
"You fish?" he asked, amused, and the sound of it loosened something low in her chest.
"For trouble, often."
He began patiently to work the comb through the ends, easing out knots with his fingers when the teeth caught. He was surprisingly deft, inexorable without pain. Each pass of the comb drew the sting from her scalp, replaced it with the drag of wood and a warmth that gathered under her skin.
His fingers occasionally brushed the sensitive skin at her nape, each touch sending a ripple of heat down her spine. His breath grew shallower as he worked, the heat between them building with each careful movement. She felt his control like a physical thing, taut and straining, as he kept his touch purely functional when they both knew it could be something else entirely.
