Kiran was the first to drag himself to his knees. The tunic he wore clung to his chest like it was part of him, and the jacket he wore over that was logged with water too. He still had the satchel, thank the skies. She had completely forgotten it in the madness of the current. He did a quick check, and he did not mention any issues, so she assumed they’d made it with everything intact.

Then he looked at her and his mouth lifted in a halfhearted grin. “Enough adventure for you yet, Princess?”

Slowly, she climbed to her feet, feeling sore and stiff all over. “That? Child’s play.”

He laughed. “Come on. We need to find shelter and get out of these wet clothes, and hopefully start a fire.”

For once, Aurora did not argue. The wind was biting, and the temperatures were no more kind outside the city than they had been inside. She knew they risked illness the longer they stayed like this.

Using the skyfire storm in her chest as a lantern, they wandered into the nearest copse of trees and began gathering kindling and wood for a fire. Aurora held it out from her, not wanting her wet clothes to dampen the wood and make the fire harder to start. They were lucky to stumble upon a rocky area in the woods. It was not quite a cave, but it provided flat ground on which to sleep, and just enough of an overhang to block the wind and any rain that might start in the night.

They fell into an easy rhythm, laying out their materials for a fire, pausing occasionally to shuck off the wet outer layers of their clothes to make things simpler. Aurora was down to her pants and a light undershirt when she heard Kiran curse under his breath as he tried to start the fire.

She stopped to peer over his shoulder and saw his hands were shaking so badly that he was having trouble striking the flint with enough force to create a spark. She laid a hand on his already bare back. He jumped at the touch of her frigid hand, but did not move away. “Let me.”

Before, he likely would have argued, would have insisted that he knew perfectly well how to light a fire, but whether it was the exhaustion or simply the long journey they had been through together in recent months, this time he said nothing, only stood and made room for her to work.