Elvenbane

the territory they had already crossed.

One party...two...

Fire and Rain. Three hunting parties behind them! What kind of hornet's nest had she stirred up?

Or maybe all this pursuit had nothing to do with the rescue of the children, and everything to do with their current company.

You'd think I'd be over this by now, Shana thought fretfully, doing her best not to stare at the chiseled perfection of Valyn's face, and completely unable to stop herself. It had been days since Valyn joined them. Weeks, even. And he still made her feel... funny. She didn't understand it. And she didn't like it. Except that she did like it. Fire and Rain, I'm so confused!

It wasn't just that Valyn was so infernally gorgeous. Shana had seen plenty of handsome elves; actually, all elves were handsome enough to make most humans envious. She knew any number of halfbloods, though, who were just as good-looking as an eleven lord. Zed, for one. Most of the halfbloods were fascinating enough to turn anyone's head...

In fact, since being captured, she had encountered no lack of attractive young men. Not one of them had affected her in the least.

So why did Valyn make her so... nervous?

Every time she looked at him, she felt self-conscious and oddly shy. Every time he looked at her, she knew he was doing so; she felt his eyes on her as surely as if they were tiny twin suns shining on her. She wanted, desperately, to please him, to make him proud of her. And it had been this way since that first night around their shared campfire.

When he watched her, she alternately flushed and chilled; when he spoke to her, she lost track of what she had been saying. Compared to him, his cousin Mero was little more than the shadow he was named for. She watched him at every opportunity by day, and dreamed of him at night.

The farther they went into the wilderness, the stronger her feelings became...and yet she was mortally afraid to tell him how she felt about him, as if telling him would unmake all the dreams she spun every night.

Maybe that was it. While he stayed aloof, she could dream as much as she wanted to. If she told him how she felt, he would have to respond in some way...and his response would mean that, one way or another, everything would change between them.

She didn't even know how to deal with what they had now... or even whether they had anything at all.

She brooded on his flawless profile across the camp-fire from her, as he talked with Keman and his cousin. His speech, like everything else about him, was gentle and courteous; his speaking voice was as musical as many humans' singing voices.

If she told him, he was either going to laugh at her, or else he was going to take her seriously. Either way, the dreams would be gone. She wanted to keep dreaming a while, to imagine all the possibilities between them...

What she didn't want to have to deal with was reality, after all, how likely was it that a gently reared elven lord would find her attractive? Surely what he really wanted was a full-elven lady, like the ones she had spied upon. Surely it was not autumn-leaf hair he dreamed of, but silk and sunlight. Her manners alone must be enough to drive him away in less desperate circumstances; she had none to speak of. She was rough and plain-spoken; tough enough to have crossed the desert on her own. A gentle elven maiden would likely have fainted away at the mere thought of such a trek...and an elven lady never spoke plainly about anything.

She should know; she'd been watching them through their own eyes long enough. They played games of innuendo and deception that differed from their lords' only in the amount of power involved.

But then again, why shouldn't he be attracted to her for her very differences? Might he not be weary of coy elven maidens, with their feigned innocence? Why shouldn't he be fascinated by her hardihood and her adventurousness? And he could very well be tired of elven women's perpetual ice-statue perfection. Those long looks he kept bestowing on her could easily be longing looks.

Was this love? All she had to go on was what she had occasionally read in the archives of the Citadel, or the books from which she and Keman had learned elven tongue. The latter had not spoken much of 'love'...that emotion played very little part in elven matings. It was a rare thing when elves admitted to love, and rarer still when they could act on it. The complexities of elven politics usually made love impossible.

And as for the archives...well, there had been romances and ballads galore in the archives, and for the most part she had ignored them all in favor of the histories. She had wanted fact, not fantasy; the means to power, not distraction.

Now she regretted not reading a few of them, at least. She could only watch Valyn as covertly as she could manage, and wonder, and daydream.

Not that she didn't have plenty to occupy her attention; Lord Cheynar and his cohorts were still out hunting for them...and when she and Keman weren't laying false trails and working themselves deeper and deeper into the wilderlands, she was teaching Shadow the use of some of his powers. Trying to teach him, anyway. Valyn was such a distraction...and Shadow, although he was nice enough, seemed to resent her admiration of his cousin.

Maybe he was just jealous. But she didn't know; he wanted her to teach him, but now there were times when he acted as if he didn't entirely believe what she told him.

Whatever the reason, every time she tried to show him something, he'd watch her as if he suspected her of hiding something from him. Then he'd bristle and get pathetically defensive when she tried to correct him. While she usually felt sorry for him because it wasn't easy to live in the background of someone as spectacular as Valyn, she was occasionally getting tired of his attitude, and increasingly distressed at the way things seemed to be bothering him.

She wished, very much, that he'd make up his mind about what he wanted. She felt uneasy when he kept watching her out from under that thatch of unruly dark hair. She was very tired of the way he kept watching her like a nervous hawk every time she said something nice to Valyn, or glanced at the elven lord out of the corner of her eye.

This association had started out well enough, but it had deteriorated rapidly. Between Valyn's aloofness, Shadow's nerves, the rotten rainy weather, and the constant presence of pursuit, she was on the verge of telling them both to go fend for themselves and leave her and Keman alone.

Except that would mean that she would likely never see Valyn again. Even if he survived the pursuit, there was nowhere he could go. He certainly couldn't try to gain entrance to the Citadel. Even if he could find it, he'd never get in; they'd probably kill him on sight.

There was just no answer, she thought, brooding into the flames of the fire. No answer at all,

Valyn stared into the glowing coals at the heart of the fire...the first they'd had in the past three days. Either there hadn't been any way to shelter the thing from sight, or there hadn't been enough dry fuel to keep it going without sending up a telltale stream of smoke. He could have used magic to keep them all warm, of course, but that would have been another kind of telltale, as certain to some 'eyes' as lighting a beacon. It was better to shiver than bring Lord Cheynar down on them.

But tonight they'd found a tumble of rocks that they could roof over with pine boughs, and nearby, a fallen tree with some dry wood sheltered under it, enough to start the fire and keep it going until after sunset. And once it was dark, the plume of smoke rising from the fire when they started mixing green wood with dry wouldn't matter.

A fire had meant a hot supper of cooked meat instead of the roots and raw fish they'd had for the past three evenings. That should have made them all well-content, but it didn't. All four of them huddled around the pocket of light, as if they were hungry for its warmth...and yet, they strained away from each other, trying too hard not to touch each other.

There were invisible currents tugging them this way and that, currents of emotion that were likely to split them apart before they even had much of a chance to see how well they could work together. For instance: Valyn knew very well how Shana felt about him. How could he not? Even without the ability to read minds, her infatuation was unmistakable. It wasn't the first time he had been the object of some young girl's desires, and not always just