They finally paused to rest, and Kith-Kanan sat on a log to catch his breath. He looked at Anaya as she stood poised, one foot atop the fallen log. She wasn’t even breathing heavily. She was a muscular, brown-skinned, painted Kagonesti—quite savage by Silvanesti standards—but she was also practical and wise in the ways of the forest. Their worlds were so different as to be hostile to each other, but he felt at that moment a sense of security. He was not so alone as he had believed.
“Why do you look at me that way?” Anaya asked, frowning.
“I was just thinking how much better it would be for us to be friends, instead of enemies,” said Kith-Kanan sincerely.
It was her turn to give him a strange look. He laughed and asked, “Now why are you looking at me like that?”
“I know the word, but I’ve never had a friend before,” Anaya said.
Kith-Kanan would not have believed it, but the place Anaya led him through was even thicker with trees than any part of the forest he’d seen so far. They were not the giants of the old forest where she lived, but of a size he was more accustomed to seeing. They grew so close together, however, that it soon became impossible for him to walk at all.
Anaya grasped an oak tree trunk with her bare hands and feet and started up it like a squirrel. Kith-Kanan gaped at the ease with which she scaled the tree. The leaves closed around her.
“Are you coming?” she called down,
“I can’t climb like that!” he protested.
“Wait then.” He saw a flash of her red leg paint as she sprang from an oak branch to a nearby elm. The gap between branches was more than six feet, yet Anaya launched herself without a moment’s hesitation. A few seconds later she was back, flitting from tree to tree with the ease of a bird. A twined strand of creeper, as thick as the prince’s two thumbs, fell from the oak leaves and landed at his feet. This was more to his liking. Kith-Kanan spat on his palms and hauled himself up, hand over hand. He braced his feet against the tree trunk and soon found himself perched on an oak limb thirty feet from the forest floor.
“Whew!” he said, grinning. “A good climb!” Anaya was patently not impressed. After all, she had made the same climb with no vine at all. Kith-Kanan hauled up the creeper, coiling it carefully around his waist.
“It will be faster to stay in the treetops from now on,” Anaya advised.
“How can you tell this is the way Mackeli went?”
She gathered herself to leap. “I smell him. This way.”
Anaya sprang across to the elm. Kith-Kanan went more slowly, slipping a good deal on the round surface of the tree limb. Anaya waited for him to catch up, which he did by grasping an overhead branch and swinging over the gap. A dizzy glimpse of the ground flashed beneath his feet, and then Kith-Kanan’s leg hooked around the elm. He let go of the oak branch, swung upside-down by one leg, and gradually worked his way onto the elm.
“This is going to take a long time,” he admitted, panting for breath.
They continued on high in the treetops for most of the day. Though his hands were by no means soft, accustomed as they were to swordplay and his griffon’s reins, Kith-Kanan’s palms became scraped and sore from grasping and swinging on the rough-barked branches. His feet slipped so often that he finally removed his thick-strapped sandals and went barefoot like Anaya. His feet were soon as tender as his hands, but he didn’t slip again.
Even at the slow pace Kith-Kanan set, they covered many miles on their lofty road. Well past noon, Anaya called for a rest. They wedged themselves high in a carpeen tree. She showed him how to find the elusive fruit of the carpeen, yellow and pearlike, hidden by a tightly growing roll of leaves. The soft white meat of the carpeen not only sated their hunger, it was thirst-quenching, too.
“Do you think Mackeli is all right?” Kith-Kanan asked, the worry clear in his voice.
Anaya finished her fruit and dropped the core to the ground. “He is alive.” she stated flatly.
Kith-Kanan dropped his own fruit core and asked, “How can you be certain?”
Shifting around the prince with careless ease, Anaya slid from her perch and came down astride the limb where he sat. She took his scraped hand and held his fingertips to her throat.
“Do you feel the beat of my heart?” she asked him.
“Yes.” It was strong and slow.
She pushed his hand away. “And now?”
“Of course not. I’m no longer touching you,” he replied.
“Yet you see me and hear me, without touching me.”
“That’s different.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Is it? If I tell you I can feel Mackeli’s heart beating from far off, do you believe me?”
“I do,” said Kith-Kanan. “I’ve seen that you have many wonderful talents.”
“No!” Anaya swept a hand through the empty air. “I am nothing but what the forest has made me. As I am, so you could be!”
She took his hand again, holding his fingertips against the softly pulsing vein in her neck. Anaya looked directly in his eyes. “Show me the rhythm of my heart,” she said.
Kith-Kanan tapped a finger of his other hand against his leg. “Yes,” she coaxed. “You have it. Continue.”
Her gaze held his. It was true—between them he felt a connection. Not a physical bond, like the grasp of a hand, but a more subtle connection—like the bond he knew stretched between himself and Sithas. Even when they were not touching and were many miles apart he could sense the life force of Sithas.
And now, between Anaya’s eyes and his, Kith-Kanan felt the steady surge of her pulse, beating, beating…
“Look at your hands,” urged Anaya.
His left was still tapping out the rhythm on his leg. His right lay palm up on the tree limb. He wasn’t touching her throat any longer.
“Do you still feel the pulse?” she asked.
He nodded. Even as he felt the surging of his own heart, he could feel hers, too. It was slower, steadier. Kith-Kanan looked with shock at his idle hand. “That’s impossible!” he exclaimed. No sooner had he said this than the sensation of her heartbeat left his fingertips.
Anaya shook her head. “You don’t want to learn,” she said in disgust. She stood up and stepped from the carpeen tree to the neighboring oak. “It’s time to move on. It will be dark before long, and you aren’t skilled enough to treewalk by night.”
This was certainly true, so Kith-Kanan did not protest. He watched the wiry Anaya wend her way through the web of branches, but the meaning of her lesson was still sinking in. What did it mean that he had been able to keep Anaya’s pulse? He still felt the pain of his separation from Hermathya, a hard, cold lump in his chest, but when he closed his eyes and thought of Hermathya for a moment—a tall, flame-haired elf woman with eyes of deepest blue—he only frowned in concentration, for there was nothing, no bond, however slight, that connected him with his lost love. He could not know if she was alive or dead. Sadness touched Kith-Kanan’s heart, but there was no time for self-pity now. He opened his eyes and moved quickly to where Anaya had stopped up ahead.
She was staring at a large crow perched on a limb near her head. When the crow spied Kith-Kanan, it abruptly flew away. Anaya’s shoulders drooped.
“The corvae have not seen Mackeli since four days past,” she explained. “But they have seen something else—humans.”
“Humans? In the wildwood?”
Anaya nodded. She lowered herself to a spindly limb and furrowed her brow in thought. “I did not smell them sooner because the metal you carry stinks in my nose too much. The corvae say there’s a small band of humans farther to the west. They’re cutting down the trees, and they have some sort of flying beast, of a kind the corvae have never seen.”