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She let her feet guide her to the General’s headquarters, and walked up to the guards at the entrance.

“Is the Commander in there with the general?”

“Yes.” The guard who answered had been on duty the night Luc had come to the Venyatux column, and she had come with him to speak with the general. He knew why she was asking.

“Tell him I asked after him, but I’m going to bed now.”

He flashed her a grin. “I will.”

She smiled back her thanks and walked away.

She wished she could lie down in his arms, like they had the night before, but there was more than just his friends between them now.

Her own magic sat in the way like an ungainly yakkuna.

And she didn’t have the concentration, or the strength, to argue about it now.

* * *

“Ava.”

The hissed whisper woke her, and then the exclamation of surprise as someone blundered into her tent.

Not someone.

Luc.

She dragged herself to the opening, found him clutching his shin. “You all right?”

He glared at her, then shook his head. “Can I come in?”

She nodded, holding the tent flap open for him so he could see where it was.

He crawled past her, and as there was only room to lie down in her small traveling tent, he stretched out, with his head on the blanket she rolled up to serve as a pillow.

With a sigh, she crawled after him, fitting herself against him in the darkness.

“You’re hard to find.” His murmur in her ear made her shiver.

“That’s the point.” She couldn’t resist nuzzling him back. “I know there’s someone here looking to hurt or abduct me. I couldn’t risk them catching me while I slept, but I needed to be able to actually sleep without fear. So I stitched an invisibility working into my tent.”

“The same thing you did this morning, on your cloak?”

She hesitated. This was the issue between them. But he was here. Talking to her about it. She needed to trust that.

She made herself relax. “Yes. Doing it for the tent helped me work it quickly and with confidence this morning. It worked better than I thought it would.”

“You don’t know how well something will work until you try it?” He seemed surprised.

She shrugged. “No one taught me, I’ve learned as I’ve gone along. This morning, I thought I’d have to cover myself completely in the cloak to be invisible, like I am in the tent. But neither you nor the Kassian scouts could see me, even when I was looking right at you, with my face exposed.”

Luc held himself still. “A Grimwaldian had that same working in their cloak when I was in the camps. They would watch us. I could sense them.”

She was silent, lifting a hand to run it down his arm in sympathy. “It wasn’t necessarily a Grimwaldian. It could have been a Kassian, or anyone. All they would need was the cloak.”

He sucked in a breath. “Something like that could be commissioned?”

She lifted her shoulders. “All I know is my mother was kidnapped twice in her life. Both times her abductor intended to force her to work spells into garments. The first time was before I was born, before she married my father, and the experience traumatised her for life. She refused to teach me the skills she’d learned from my grandmother, because she wanted to keep me safe by making me a poor target. And then I was abducted anyway. So she and my father came to rescue me, and she was taken again. And I think, to keep me alive, she did what she had spent her life dreading—working spells into fabric for an evil man.”