BEKO LED NOMI across the stream, through a bank of heavy shrubs and down into the borders of a small forest at the bottom of the hill. It was cool beneath the trees, calming, the sound of the stream complimented by the gentle swish and sway of the canopy in the evening breeze. It felt as though they had entered nature rather than disturbed it; birds continued singing, and Nomi saw the shadows of three small deer nosing through the bracken deeper in the forest. She did not mention them to Beko.

That was another way Ramus mocked her. If you had to kill your own food, he would say, you'd live on root vegetables and berries. Well, now she was hunting with Beko. And if they were to eat as well as he promised this evening, something had to die.

But not the deer. She walked quickly ahead, stomping her feet and stepping on a fallen branch. The crack sounded like a whip. The deer shapes froze and then melted quickly away between the trees, almost as if they were shadows that could disperse rather than run.

“Don't worry,” said Beko. “It's not deer we're after.” He walked past her and unslung the bow from his back. He looked up into the tree canopy, down at the ground, shifted the leaves and twigs around with one foot. “We'll have to go deeper.”

“What are we hunting?”

“Green tree lizards.”

“They're poisonous!” Nomi said. When she was a young girl some of her friends had fed a green tree lizard to a farm wolf, and they had laughed and danced as it squirmed in agony and died. She could still hear its howls, and she could still hear her own hesitant laughter as she tried to join in.

“Don't worry so much, Nomi,” Beko said. He stepped close, grinned and touched her on the shoulder.

A touch, she thought. Not a squeeze or a clap. He touched me. And as she realized that he was closer than he should have been, he turned and walked away.

Nomi put her hand to her neck as she followed the Serian, as though she would feel something different there. On their previous voyage they had grown close, but neither of them had let romance grow between them. Nomi because she had still been involved with Timal at the time . . . and Beko? Why had he held back? For a while she had assumed that it was in deference to her own wishes, but as time passed and Timal left, she had believed that less and less.

Perhaps it was this new voyage, and where they were going, and the feeling that this was something different. She smiled at Beko's back and followed him into a bank of high bushes.

“Slow,” he whispered, crouching down and walking slower. He held the bow at his side so that it did not snag on undergrowth.