“So this is where you sneaked off to,” a voice said, startling him from behind. He’d been so focused on the cabin, and the bit of smoke now curling from its chimney, that he’d completely missed the approach of one from behind. He turned now to find his Guardian partner, a woman named Sinna Marin, close at hand, peering past the edge of his shoulder. Her white hair was tethered behind her in a single, intricately formed braid. Her silver eyes narrowed, accentuating her long, dark lashes. Her pink, bow-tie lips formed a small smile, as though everything she saw amused and delighted her. “Well I’ll be damned. That definitely wasn’t there last month. And yet it doesn’t look new, which means…”

“The forest grew around it,” Cainan said, which was the conclusion he’d also come to several days back. Guilt swirled inside him, as he knew he should’ve reported this finding to Cintra con Narcissi and the rest of the Sightless as soon as he’d discovered it, but something had held him back. Or someone. “And I didn’t sneak off. I just went for a walk and stumbled across this place.”

“Hmm, is that so?” Sinna said, shifting even nearer, until she was very much in his personal space, close enough that he could feel her warmth and the brush of her breath on his neck. She loved doing that, and he was beginning to suspect it was because she enjoyed seeing his obvious discomfort. “So it’s not her that drew your interest like a moth to a flame?” Right on cue, the rabbit-healing woman appeared in the front window, her lovely face highlighted by a bit of sun in profile.

“What? Her? She’s just a woman. A rather normal one at that.” He didn’t look at his partner for fear that his downplaying of the situation would be revealed all over his face.

“Of course she is,” Sinna mused. “But beautiful, in a mortal sort of way.”

“We were mortals, too, once,” Cainan pointed out.

“Yes. Once. But I don’t feel particularly mortal anymore, do you?”

Sometimes during the endless march of days and quiet solitude of nights, Cainan wished he did feel mortal. But that wasn’t his life now, and it hadn’t been for a long time. “No. Not anymore,” he admitted.

“We’ll need to get her to leave,” Sinna said, tapping her teeth as though the sound helped her to think. “Burn the cabin to the ground. Carefully, of course, without damaging the forest around it. If only there was a Guardian with such an Ability to draw upon…”

Cainan cringed at the thought of using his fires on this woman’s home while she was out searching for injured bunnies and other woodland creatures to help. “She’s not hurting anyone. She’s no threat to the goddess.”