“How can I not?” she replied smoothly. “Think on it. You have a reasonably good mind when you choose to use it. I am certain it will come to you eventually.” She arched and stretched, lifting her arms straight overhead. Tavi found his left hand resting on the small of her back, left bare by the gown. He couldn’t seem to stop himself from stroking that soft skin in a slow circle, barely touching. “Mmmm. That pleases me. And this gown pleases me. And the jewels, too—though I couldn’t wear them on a nighttime hunt. Still, they are beautiful.”

“And expensive,” Tavi said. “You wouldn’t believe.”

Kitai rolled her eyes. “Money.”

“Not everyone uses obsidian arrowheads as the basic standard of trade,” he told her, smiling.

“No,” she replied tartly. “Though if it cost an Aleran money every time he wanted to kill something, it might have helped make your people’s history much less interesting reading.” She looked down at him for a moment, smiling, then asked, “Do you think the jewels are beautiful, Aleran?”

Tavi touched her cheek. “I’d like to see you in nothing else.”

Her smile widened. “That,” she said, “would be wholly inappropriate, my lord Octavian.” But her hands very slowly rose to the nape of her neck, and the clasp of the gown. Tavi let out another low, growling sound, and felt his hand curling possessively on the line of her waist.

Hoofbeats came rapidly thudding toward the isolated pavilion. The guards, who were stationed in a loose line forty yards down the hill at Magnus’s insistence, against the possibility of further vord infiltrators, began exchanging passwords with the messenger, whose voice was pitched high with excitement.

Tavi groaned and rested his forehead against Kitai’s... gown for a moment. “Of course. Something happens now.”

Kitai let out a low, wicked laugh, and said, “We could just keep going, if you like.”

“Bloody crows, no,” Tavi said, flushing again. He rose, lifting her as he did, and set her gently down on her feet. “Do I look all right?”

She leaned up and licked the corner of his mouth, eyes dancing, then wiped it with a napkin. She straightened the lines of his dress tunic slightly, and said, “You look most proper, my lord Octavian.”

He growled beneath his breath, something about remembering not to kill the messenger, and walked to draw aside one of the cloths that veiled the pavilion’s interior. A Legion valet was hurrying up the slope beside a messenger in the armor of an Antillan militiaman. The Antillan strode up the hill in the precisely spaced stride of an experienced legionare, stopped before Tavi, and saluted crisply. “Your Highness.”

Tavi returned the salute. The messenger was a senior centurion of the force defending the city, come out of retirement for the task, and was closer to fifty than forty. “Centurion... Ramus, isn’t it?”

The man smiled and nodded. “Aye, sir.”

“Report.”