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Isa nodded. “Then let’s pick up the pace.”
Chapter 12
“I can’t believe Faerie is this big.” Basil stopped and leaned against a tree.
Isa halted as well, and sat down on the trunk of a fallen fir. Her feet ached. Even though she was used to traveling long distances on foot when she was in pursuit of a fugitive, she still felt the toll of the day’s hiking keenly.
“We do sort of…expand the territory a little,” she admitted.
“What?” Basil stopped with his water bottle—made of some lightweight metal, from what she could tell—halfway to his mouth.
“Well, Faerie has the habit of…growing. But not outward. It’s more of a mirroring and folding of space, while nominally staying within the borders that were once set.”
“So…it’s like a TARDIS?”
“A what?”
“So many movies, so many shows…” he muttered to himself, rubbing a hand over his face. Focusing on her, he said, “It’s bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside.”
“Yes.” She grinned. “That’s a good way of putting it.”
He took a swig from his water and offered her some as well. “All right, how much longer until we reach that village?”
She drank a bit, calculated in her head. “I’d say probably another five hours.”
“Good gawds.” He banged his head against the tree.
Eyeing the rising moon, she said, “We could rest for the night. We’ve been hiking all day, but we still have quite some distance to cover. I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep going right now.”
He let out a heavy breath. “Yeah, I sure am beat. Sleep does sound good.”
“I saw what looked like a cave not too long ago. We can double back and see if we can camp there. It’ll be good to have a roof above us in case it rains.” The next settlement was too far away, but they did have enough gear with them to spend the night in the woods in relative comfort.
“Sure.” Basil fell into step beside her while she backtracked. “We’ll have—”
“Dinner, yes. For the second time.”
He bumped his shoulder against hers. “You know me so well, Isa of Stone.”
It occurred to her that, yes, she did. To bide their time, eager to distract herself from maudlin pondering, she’d asked Basil to tell her about himself during the long hours of their hike, and he’d obliged with the cheerful openness that was as much a part of him as the gold silk of his hair—which her fingers still remembered, a sensory memory she was constantly tempted to repeat. Over the course of the day, she had to physically restrain herself from reaching out and touching him again so many times, had to curl her fingers into her palm instead, hard enough to snap herself out of the wave of need riding her.
Every time Basil tried to shift the conversation to her, she managed to derail him by following up on something he said with another, more specific question about him, and he took the bait, seemed delighted that she showed such interest in him.
She would have felt bad about deceiving him…except she wasn’t. Not anymore. The more she learned about him, the more she wanted him to keep talking. She found herself entranced by his voice, by the calm yet serene way he spoke about his life, and she wanted to know even more about how he saw the world. She’d always been better at listening than talking anyway, and yet she’d never before met anyone she wanted to listen to for more than an hour.
Basil, however, could talk to her all day, and she didn’t mind it one bit. In fact, she soaked it all up, and relished the way listening to him calmed her thoughts.
Now, as they sat at the mouth of the cave in front of the crackling fire, her belly full of the stew Basil prepared—damn, but that male could cook up something delicious, even in such meager surroundings as a cave out in the woods—she was caught unawares when he leveled the full force of his quiet attention on her and asked, “When was the last time you laughed?”
Blinking, her mind slow in coming back from late-night idleness, she opened her mouth, closed it, glancing around the cave…anywhere except him.
Basil shook his head. “Too long ago, then.”
It was true. She couldn’t even remember the last time she laughed out loud.
He sat with one leg stretched out in front of him, the other cocked up, had his elbow on his raised knee and put his chin on his hand, looking at her with such disconcerting, thoughtful, caring focus, it rattled her.
“Tell me,” he said with a smile that set her nerves aflutter, “what makes you laugh?”
