Finally, not able to wait a minute more, she threw off the light bedcovers and pulled on her shoes. With the blade she kept beneath her pillow, she nicked her hand, just enough to make it bleed. With the tip of her finger she drew a tiny half-moon on her palm, its tip and tail touching two sides of a triangle, its back brushing the third. She smeared a final drop across its surface, smudging the image, like clouds hiding a night sky. Then, before her rune could dry, she left her room. She glided past the guard who stood at the base of the stairs leading to the tower. He didn’t even blink in her direction. She scurried past a maid in the corridor and a porter dousing candles near the door to the gardens. Neither turned their heads. She slipped out into the darkness, breathing a faint sigh of relief. The blood often dried too quickly, and there had been times in the past when she’d been spotted before making it to her destination.
She found the door to the tunnel in the queen’s garden that burrowed beneath the wall and out onto the hillside. She and Bayr had discovered the door long ago, when she wasn’t quite so tall. She’d used it more times than she could count. She winced at the moldering smell of the tunnel, but didn’t slow, though she had to stoop the slightest bit. She should have drawn a rune for light, but she’d been in too great a hurry.
In minutes the air became sweet, the darkness not so absolute, and Alba realized the hatch at the other end had been propped open. Bayr was waiting for her, stretched out beside the opening, his long legs crossed as though he had enjoyed the wait, his enormous arms folded over his heart. He was asleep. But he was there, just like he’d said he would be.
She perched beside him, not making a sound. She wouldn’t wake him. Not yet. It was enough in that moment to sit beside him and celebrate his return. She tried to study the stars, to appreciate the escape from the heat of the day. It had been unseasonably warm, and though the harvest was ending, the days felt more like summer than autumn. But she’d seen the stars plenty of times, and Bayr was a whole new universe. She could not pull her gaze from his face, from the straight line of his nose, the swell of lips softened by sleep, the peaked line of his dark hair that he wore braided, like all warriors of Saylok. The constancy of her stare must have tickled his senses, because he opened his eyes minutes later.
“You owe me an hour,” she whispered as his lids fluttered, awareness hardening his jaw and the hue of his ice-blue eyes. He gazed up at her as though he wasn’t certain whether he was dreaming.
“No matter. I haven’t begun counting yet,” she murmured. Seventeen hours could last a long time if they never began.
His eyebrow quirked, a question without a sound. It made her laugh, the way he communicated, and her heart quickened in fondness even as it thundered in sudden desperation. He was going to leave again. She couldn’t bear it. She felt it like a threatening storm. Her father had plans for her, plans that would separate them forever, and the seconds rushed toward a final parting.
He unfolded his hands from his chest and pressed a thumb to the groove between her brows. She leaned into the pressure, her eyes closing and her breath gusting through parted lips.
“You are sad.”
“No. I’ve simply begun counting.”
“What can I do?” he whispered.
“We are going to swim and fly,” she said, pulling air and denial into her lungs. She rose to her feet with a swish of her skirts and extended her hand to Bayr. He scoffed at her attempt to pull him to his feet and bounded up with the ease of a cat.
“Will you w-walk or will you ride, Princess?” he asked, bowing, a smirk on his lips. For a moment she was seven again, perched on his shoulders as he loped across the fields and climbed the hills. She’d ridden more than she’d walked in those days.
“Those days have long since passed, Bayr,” she said quietly. He straightened, his smirk fading.
“So they have, Alba. So they have.”
They descended westward for two hours, talking softly, eyes on their surroundings, thoughts on each other, winding their way through meadows and wooded groves, until they reached the waterfalls tucked into the final slope of the temple mount. There, all the water from storm and stream converged, pooled, and then tumbled again. The highest fall split into two separate cascades, one emptying into the river below, one spilling over into an inlet, cold and deep and tucked back from the main body of the river. It was the place where Bayr had learned—and subsequently taught Alba—to swim. A grassy overhang, thirty feet above the inlet, marked the point where the trail zigzagged down to a pebbled beach below.
“It hasn’t changed,” Bayr marveled, peering over the ledge into the water, the tumbling falls misting the air and cooling their skin. Alba yanked at the ties of her gown, loosening them even as she stepped out of her shoes. While Bayr’s back was to her, she pulled her outer sheath over her head, leaving only a thin shift that wouldn’t weigh her down.
Laughing, she sprinted to the edge of the overhang, her arms and legs pumping, her hair streaming, and Bayr roared, demanding she stop.
She didn’t.
She sprang into the abyss and disappeared beyond his sight.
Moments later he followed, jumping into the space where she’d disappeared.
She came up laughing, he came up sputtering. Furious. And she ducked beneath the water again, disappearing before he could grab her by the hair and drag her from the water. Rocks rimmed the crystalline water like a crown and he swam toward them, his arms windmilling in angry strokes.
“Wh-why d-did you d-do th-that?” he bellowed, his tongue tripping over his outrage. He climbed onto the rocks, great sheets of water slewing from his shoulders, and shivered violently. She’d abandoned her gown and her shoes, but he was fully clothed, his sword across his back, boots on his feet, a dirk strapped to each leg.
“Why didn’t you remove your boots? I’ve jumped before, and you know I can swim. You taught me!”
“S-sometimes you can’t see what’s beneath the surface. I c-can’t protect y-you from d-dangers I can’t see.”
“And who protected me when you were gone? I can protect myself,” she shot back. There was no accusation in her voice, but Bayr still flinched.
“You should have w-warned me,” he muttered, turning toward her. “My h-heart is still up there with your gown.”
She pulled herself up onto a smooth, flat rock that rose at the water’s edge and flopped onto it the way she’d done as a child, turning her face up to the sky and wringing out her hair. But she wasn’t a child, and the thin, wet shift she wore was translucent. The darkness provided a little cover, but she heard his gasp, and warmth pooled in her belly the same way the water from her shift pooled on the rocks. He yanked his boots from his feet and wrung the wet from his clothes. The cove was quiet, save the lapping of the water and the muted crashing of the falls. It was a steep climb back to the top, back to her gown. Bayr turned toward the trail, clearly not wanting her to traipse to the top wet, half-naked, and missing her shoes.
“I don’t want to leave yet,” she protested.
“I will go alone.”
“I don’t want you to leave yet.”
“What if a hungry g-goat happens along and eats your g-gown?”
She snickered, and Bayr relaxed. He never could stay angry with her, though she knew she had often deserved a good dose of his wrath.