“Defend or outrun?” Stran asked.
Kreya scanned the clumps of bushes, aimed for the least dense, and drove the wagon through them. She ducked beneath branches. “Wait for it.”
Ahead was the rush of the river. She heard it, calculated the distance, and angled the wagon so it burst out between the trees alongside the water. Vines stretched from bank to bank, knittedinto weblike patterns, and Kreya saw the croco-raptors racing along the opposite side.
The attack would come from their side of the river.
“Two behind us!” Stran called.
Four on the opposite side of the rushing water.
“Now!” Kreya shouted.
Stran launched himself off the back of the wagon as one of the previously hidden croco-raptors attacked from the bushes on the side. He shouted, “Ozri!” to activate a strength talisman as he swung feetfirst to plow into one of the raptors.
“Ready for extraction!” Kreya called to Jentt.
“On it!” He leaped from the wagon, grabbed a vine, and swung to land on the riverbank. Zera tossed him a speed talisman, and Jentt activated it. He sped into a blur. In seconds, he was back, with Stran and the severed head of a croco-raptor.
“Stran, deliver it!” Kreya called.
Stran hefted the croco-raptor head up and threw it hard, fueled by a strength talisman. It soared over the water. Kreya heard shrieks from the croco-raptors as it impacted. Drawn by the fresh meal, the croco-raptors slowed to attack the head.
“Two still back there,” Stran reported. “Keeping their distance.”
“You got blood on your shirt,” Zera informed him.
He ignored her. “By the bones, that was the most fun I’ve had in ages.”
Kreya agreed. It felt like the old days.
“Strongly recommend not telling your wife that,” Jentt said to Stran. He had his arm around Marso, cushioning him from the rattle of the wagon as they flew over rocks and fallen trees.
“I tell her everything,” Stran said. “That’s how our marriage works. No lies between us.”
“Adorable,” Zera said. “Absurd, but adorable. If she asked you whether you thought she was the most brilliant person you’d ever met, what would you tell her?”
“She wouldn’t—”
“You’d lie and say she was as brilliant as the sun.”
Kreya smiled at the thought of Zera’s dispensing relationship advice. She hoped Stran was too sensible to listen. He was lucky to have Amurra, and vice versa.And I’m lucky to have my team here with me,she thought.Together again.
“And if she asked whether she had any habits that annoyed you, you’d tell her what?”
“She snores,” Stran said. “She knows that. A marriage is a union—that means the two of you, united against whatever life throws at you. You share everything.”
“You’re not sharing this.” Zera waved at the wagon, the wildness, the river, and the bloodstains on his shirt. She narrowly avoided whacking Kreya’s arm.
“I’ll share the story of this, when we return,” Stran said, as if that were obvious. “And doing so will make us stronger.”
Kreya thought of all the things she hadn’t shared with Jentt, all the days that there hadn’t been time to tell him about, all the hours she’d spent alone. She thought too of her greatest omission: the truth about the cost of the resurrection spell.
I’ll share that with him someday,she promised herself.After Eklor.
Or... maybe she’d just wait until they were both on their deathbeds. He’d understand then and wouldn’t blame her for choices she’d made when they were apart.
Right now, they had the future to share together. Who cared about the past?
