“No,” he sneered. “Are you?”
She laughed as she gained her feet, her absurd pet taking up post on her shoulder while Alys shook out her outrageously costly blue skirts. Simply looking at the monkey seemed to make Piers’s fingers throb all the worse. And now that she was standing, and Piers could see the swell of her small bust, he no longer thought of her as eight years old. His mood went from sour to black, and what little patience he had vanished.
“We would be in dire straits indeed were the food gathering left up to me. I’m fast, and I can be quite stealthy, but alas, I have no weapon save Layla.” She reached up to scratch the beast’s hairy head and the monkey leaned toward her adoringly. “Perhaps you could be my hound, eh, girl? Could you scare up a deer for us? You’ve already cornered a boar.” She looked at Piers with a mischievous grin.
He turned his back to her to add some slender sticks to the fire. To Piers’s dismay, she came to stand beside him.
“If you’re not going hunting, what shall we eat? I’m famished.”
“I’m certain there is no want for food at Fallstowe,” Piers said. “It shall motivate you to walk faster.”
“Back to that again, are we?”
Did nothing faze this silly child?
“We are. If you leave now, you will have some daylight for the whole of your journey.”
“You want me to leave now?” she asked, as if doubting she had understood him properly.
“Yes.”
“Right now?Immediately?”
“Start walking.”
Alys Foxe sat down near the fire. “Piers, I’ve been thinking …”
Piers closed his eyes and sighed. “No, don’t think.And don’t sit!Sitting moves you no closer to Fallstowe and no farther from me!”
“Do you truly find me so annoying?”
“Yes!”
“Well, I’m quite sorry to hear that. But, as I was saying, I’ve been thinking, and—”
He gained his feet and strode into the trees.
“Wait!” He heard her scramble to her feet. “Where are you going? Why did you walk away from me?”
“In part to look for more wood for the fire,” he said, his eyes scanning the forest floor. He leaned down and snatched limbs from the ground as he walked. “And also to keep from strangling you.”
“That’s rude,” she said, from not very far behind him.
“I’m certainly not forcing you to put up with me.”
“True,” she conceded. “Any matter, I know you wish for me to leave you alone with your miserable and quite secretive plans, but there is a problem.”
Piers came to an abrupt halt, so quickly that Alys ran into his back. The monkey chattered and bounded to the leaves underfoot.
He did not turn. “What problem?”
“I … I don’t know the way back to Fallstowe.”
Piers whipped around to face her, darkly pleased when she took a step back. “What do you mean, you don’t know the way back? You’ve lived there the whole of your life, have you not?”
“Indeed, I have.” She nodded agreeably.
“And yet you cannot find your way home little more than an hour from your own keep?”
