“What? Oh!” Forcing her muscles to relax, she dropped the few inches she had risen, landing with a soft thump on her feet. One of her borrowed house boots had almost dangled free, forcing her to squirm her toes and heel back into proper place. “Um, yes. I sort of tensed up from nervousness, and I’m so used to tensing up when I want to fly, I guess I just subconsciously . . . I’m babbling, aren’t I?” she added, arresting herself. “Let’s just, um . . . go upstairs and get this over with—I mean, let’s go and check what we’ll have to deal with in the way of bedding and the like, that’s what I meant.”
“I know what you meant,” he reassured her. He felt a little too tense himself to chuckle freely, though he did smile. He defused some of the tension by pressing his palm to his stomach with a rueful look. “I’m far more starved for food right now, so you’ve nothing to fear from me at the moment. Unless you suddenly turned into a ration of bacon, of course.”
“Hardly,” she snorted, relieved the moment hadn’t been ruined.
Lamp in hand, she walked—not floated—up the last of the stairs. The glow from the broad wick wasn’t overly bright, but it did light up a pair of wardrobe cupboards, a couple of chests, some shelving built into the half-high walls to either side, and the broad bed centered on the balcony. The very large bed.
She stopped on the next-to-top step just so she could stare at it. “Light and Life, that thing’s almost big enough for four people to sleep in it, never mind our host!”
The opening to the stairwell had been boxed in by solid planks, which meant he couldn’t see what she meant just yet. Nudging her forward by a pat on her rump—which made her squeak—Kiers mounted the last few steps in her wake and studied it for himself.
She was right. It was broad and long, mounded high with what looked like a feather-stuffed quilt patched together in colorful blocks of fabric, with a veritable hill of fat feather pillows piled against the headboard. Even if the bedsheets looked to be plain bleached muslin and the quilting material mere scraps of fabric salvaged from here and there, Kiers suspected it was the most decadent thing he would ever see outside of a genuine palace.
“Light and Life indeed,” he agreed, studying it in awe. “That is a huge bed. I think you could hold an entire . . . Er, never mind,” he stated quickly, slamming down on the chain of thoughts that included a mental image of bodies sprawled before him, naked and entwined, using every available inch of that sybaritic bed. He very carefully blocked that thought out, because he was supposed to remain hungry for food right now, not that. He was a prince and a gentleman, and he had to remain that way.
Thankfully, Vee only gave him a mildly curious look, followed by a faint blush. She didn’t ask for a clarification on his halted thought. He turned away, seeking a distraction.
What little warmth there was from the fire had already started to gather up here, though the difference was slight, and palpably different over the distance between his head and his slipper-clad feet. Shivering a little, he turned to face the other way, and spotted a door. Moving over to it gave him something to focus on other than the bed, which his erstwhile partner was still studying. Opening it up, he discovered it was nothing more than a large storage room, lined with shelves of rolled-up hides, sticks of sinew, antlers, horns, bones, and yet more tricks and tools of their host’s trade.
“I think I’ve found where he stores the nonfood bits he gets from his kills,” Kiers stated, closing the door again. “I don’t think we’ll need anything from in there, so we’ll just leave that alone. It does look like the room goes all the way back against the mountain, though.”
“The eaves do, too. It’s a good design if you think about it,” Vee agreed, dragging her gaze away from the bed. Looking at him didn’t help, though, since both views only reminded her of the offer she’d delicately made, downstairs. Needing something to do—like cook them a meal with her limited skills—she headed for the stairs. “Extend the roof all the way back to the mountain, and just as we’ve seen, an avalanche at this point on the mountainside flows right over this place without dislodging it. I knew the Gullwing Mountains got a fair bit of snow in the winter, particularly up in the northern arc, but I’d never seen an actual avalanche, just heard of them. It looks like he’s used to this kind of threat.”
Grateful for the distraction, Kiers followed her downstairs. Not that he had much choice, since it was either stay up here in the near-dark, or follow the woman carrying the nearest lamp. “Indeed. Which means the avalanche must have been nigh-impossible to cross on foot, if a man used to wintering up here found it too difficult to navigate.”
“It did look rather rumpled from the air,” she agreed, reaching the ground floor. “I don’t know much about such things, but the other slope of the valley mouth didn’t look too stable, either. He might’ve been afraid of triggering a slide from that side as well . . . and if it can bury a cabin so that it’s difficult to recognize from the air, then it could bury a man alive, and no one would ever know.” Hearing her stomach grumble, Vee blushed. “Let’s have you check on that cauldron of water while I see what I can scrounge out of our host’s larder, yes?”
“I shall pray fervently that you’ll find enough bacon rations for yourself as well, because I’ve already claimed the first share,” Kiers dared to tease her. “I’ll join you in the larder as soon as I’ve stoked the fire a bit more.”
Supper was an awkward affair. The meal itself wasn’t too special, consisting of a fry-up of diced venison, root vegetables, a bit of bacon for greasing the skillet, and some herbs from the jars which Vee sniffed at and pronounced vaguely suitable. Plus they had a bit of pan-fried flatbread, which Kiers didn’t burn too badly after the first undercooked try. It was the conversation that was awful.
Or rather, the lack of it. First Kiers attempted to discuss the thonite gizmo, which was the main reason they were on the run, but Vee bounced up from the swiveling stool he had dragged in from the workbench nook to the kitchen and grabbed the portable aetherometer. She insisted on cranking it up so they could listen for any possible pursuit, since it was now near sunset. That only produced static, which was reassuring to a degree, but rather monotonous as a background noise.
Then she tried to discuss the legends of antiquity they had researched during their week at the Trionan king’s palace, but that only made him bound up and fetch his backpack, where the sheafs of papers had been hastily stuffed in their sudden need to flee. The resulting mess had to be sorted, which left them with the realization a good seven pages of his notes and five of hers were missing, and not all of them from the same chunk. Having to flee in a hurry while His Majesty delayed the guards from Jade Mountain hadn’t allowed them the luxury of making sure they had snatched everything.
All throughout the awkward meal, both preparing and eating it, their eyes occasionally met. When they did, both of them blushed a little. Each knew that supper would eventually end, leaving them with just the washing up, and then however long it might take the two of them to decide they were tired . . . which meant each of those little shared glances added an extra layer of tension to the intimacy of sharing the cabin.
The quiet hiss and spit of static from the aetherometer started to die down when they were nearly done scrubbing the dishes. It wasn’t until Kiers handed her the last of the scrubbed dishes for drying that Vee realized the noises it made were now fading. The boxy device sat on the kitchen table, no bigger than one of their heads, with the tuning dial still set to the previous frequency they had overheard the guards from Jade Mountain using to coordinate their search efforts.