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Skye toed off his boots and dropped onto the bedroll beside her. “Against all odds,” he muttered. “Though it was touch and go there for a while.”

Taly snorted.

Skye stretched out beside her, sliding an arm around her waist as he leaned in to peer over her shoulder at the map. He’d already learned the hard way that Taly’s standards for cartography far exceeded his own. For a salvager, a map was more than just parchment and ink—it was a record of survival, scrawled in hard-won blood and sweat. And she’d made it very clear which areas his was deficient.

“Ten tears?”she’d scoffed, turning the paper over like there might be more written on the back. “That’s not a map. That’s a eulogy.”

Her old map, now lost, had boasted sixty-five, plus a detailed catalog of sinkholes, ruins, and every other half-buried hazard she’d encountered.

Now, she was recreating it from memory, scribbling notes furiously into the margins.

“The roads are a no-go,” she said.

“Why?”

Her quill paused. “I don’t know. Exactly.” She sighed, rubbing her eyes. “I had a dream last night, and I was standing on the road. I don’t remember what I saw, but when I woke up, I had thisreallybad feeling.”

Skye was still adjusting to it—the way Taly had gone from his fiercely stubbornhumanbest friend to someone who could bend time itself.

He didn’t understand how her visions worked—what the difference was between the ones that came when she was awake and the ones that came in dreams. What hedidknow wasthat she couldn’t just flip a switch and know everything. It was fragments, glimpses, pieces that didn’t always fit.

It killed him to see that edge of frustration when they didn’t.

“If you say the roads are no good, then I believe you.” His hand slid beneath her shirt, thumb grazing the soft line of her waist. A little lower and he’d be in holy territory—but Taly was still shy, still startled when touch came too casually, so he held the line. “You’re overthinking it. Go with your gut. It’s always been better than most people’s best plans.”

Some of the tension eased from her shoulders. “It’s not going to be easy with Kato’s leg,” she said, worrying her bottom lip. “The forest route is rocky and uneven. And riddled with wyvern nests. It’s their mating season.”

She tilted her head, and a lock of hair slipped aside, baring the soft curve just below her ear—skin thin enough to see her pulse flicker there.

“We might consider giving Kato’s leg another day to heal.”

“Hmm.” That was the best he had to offer as he brushed her hair aside, leaning in to follow the line of her throat with his nose. He stopped just beneath her ear, where her scent was strongest—jasmine, mint, and something wilder, like ozone after a lightning strike.

“Is that a yes?”

He pressed his lips to that spot, heat meeting heat.

“Em?”

He knew for a fact she’d said something, but his brain only registered the small hitch in her voice, the flush of want that suffused that already mouth-watering scent.

She tapped him with her quill.

He pulled back to glare, but that quill waved in his face again. “Give me five minutes for this,” she said, cheeks flushed. “Then we can do that.”

He was going to hold her to that. “What was the question?”

“How do we feel about staying another day?”

His first reaction?Not horribly.They’d spent most of their time since the palace trading kisses and not much else. One more day wrapped around each other didn’t sound bad at all.

But with the storm easing, they would lose the cover it provided.

“Kato’s leg is in perfect working order,” Skye said. “If he could stop whining about it for two minutes, he might not get so out of breath going to take a piss.”

“So, it’s still first thing in the morning then?” Her voice wavered, just slightly.

“Hey.” Skye nudged her to look at him. Her eyes—once a soft, human gray—now blazed like there was a light flickering just behind them. “What’s going on in there?” He tapped her forehead.