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Jade followed my attention and stopped an arm's length away.

"Kelvarin."

The excitement reached her voice before she could hide it. A moment later caution pulled it flat again.

She did not move toward the tracks.

Instead, she examined the bank on both sides, searched the nearest roots and crouched far enough back that nothing hidden beneath the mud could reach her. Her gaze moved in a deliberate pattern. Ground. Branches. Water. Canopy. Then back to the prints.

I walked past her and pressed one paw into the mud beside the nearest track.

"I know you would smell a person," she said. "That doesn't mean there isn't another type of trap."

I glanced over my shoulder.

"And I know you have better senses in this form."

I waited.

She sighed. "Fine. I'm checking anyway."

I lowered my nose to the tracks. The scent beneath them was familiar, though the fear and burnt metal from six days ago were gone. Wet fur. River plants. The faint clean trace of skin Jade had healed. Three youngsters had followed the channel south sometime after the rain.

The same three.

Their adult's scent crossed above and around theirs, stronger near the water. She was with them, or had been when the tracks were made.

Jade watched me follow the bank for several paces. "Are they the kits we found?"

I turned my head toward her and dipped it once.

Her whole expression changed. It did not become a smile. Jade didn't give anything away that easily. The line between her brows softened first, then her mouth, and some of the tension she had carried since finding the traps slipped out of her shoulders.

"They're alright?"

I nodded again.

Her focus shifted toward the dense ferns hiding the channel ahead. I saw the moment she wanted to move, and the moment she stopped herself.

"We have a patrol route."

The tracks followed it.

Mostly.

I walked on.

"That isn't permission to abandon the route," she called after me.

I kept moving.

"Halver."

Hearing my name while I wore another creature's body always caught somewhere beneath the magic. Most people called the form by its species, as if shifting replaced the person inside it. Jade had done that during our first training exercise. She had known everything the Menagerie recorded about Cinderhounds and almost nothing about me, which was why I had refused to behave like the animal she expected.

Now she called me Halver without hesitation.

It had taken her weeks to get there. I planned on making sure she never had a reason to go back to calling me anything else, however long that took.