Still staring at her, Jayce added, “I can go get my gear and—”

In an almost human-like walk, Sionnach went to a shadowed edge of the room. When he retrieved a rucksack and bedroll and dropped them on the ground in front of Rika and Jayce, they broke their locked gaze and looked at Sionnach instead.

“How? Where? . . . Never mind.” Jayce smiled wryly and shook his head. “I’m guessing you’re part of the I-can’t-answer-questions team.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Ask away.” Sionnach sounded somewhere between amused and malicious, and Rika wondered what game he was playing at.

After a tension-filled pause, Jayce asked, “Anything?”

With a speed too quick to truly appear human, Rika stood and snatched hold of Sionnach’s arm. “Move, Shy. Now.”

She pulled him away from Jayce, toward the door, so they could speak in relative privacy.

“Oh my . . . Are you asking me to keep secrets, princess?” He widened his eyes, but his tone was very serious, and Rika was reminded yet again that he had always been a faery. “Are you telling me that it’s okay to keep secrets from those we care about?”

There were layers of meanings under his words that she couldn’t begin to fathom. The tension had grown thick, but Rika couldn’t decide if it was anger or something else that was driving the fox faery. She released his arm. If she were any other faery in the desert, Sionnach would’ve reacted as if she’d just challenged his authority.

“Rika?” he prompted. His gaze told her there were more things hidden in his words than she knew. She wasn’t sure, though, what he was thinking as he waited for her reply—any more than she was sure what her reply was.

Do I think keeping secrets is okay? That was his question. She simply wasn’t sure why her answer mattered to Sionnach, but it was apparent that it did. To some degree she had to believe that it was okay to keep secrets. Elsewise, she would have to tell Jayce how often she’d watched him. She rolled the question over in her mind. There was no way the fox faery meant it to be purely a question about her and Jayce. She knew that much at least.

Behind her, she heard movement, and glanced back as Jayce stood and grabbed his things from where Sionnach had deposited them. He started toward the entrance to the cave. “You two obviously have something to sort out, so I can—”

“Please don’t go.” Stricken, Rika stepped farther away from Sionnach and shot a plaintive glance at him, wordlessly asking him to be less . . . him, less fey.

“She wants you here.” Sionnach stepped in front of Jayce. “I took care of what needed taken care of so you could be here with Rika. Don’t waste this chance.”

And then he left the cave.