She sat up at last, dragging the sleeping bag with her to the entrance of the tent. There was no light but the eerie glow of the waning moon, it was just enough for her to make out Luke’s form as he moved about the fire, extinguishing the last stubborn embers. When he had finished, he settled back into a crouch, head dropped between his shoulders, as still as if he intended to spend the entire night in that lonely place.
“Aren’t you cold?” Joey heard herself call out across the clearing. She shivered, pulling the edges of the sleeping bag up around her chest. “I am.”
Luke started, he tilted his head without turning, and Joey knew he had heard.
He did not move for an endless moment, Joey strained for some tiny change, some indication of his intentions. At last she dropped back into the tent, closing her eyes with a defeated sigh. The sleeping bag was all that she needed, more than enough to get her through the night.
It was some extra sense that warned her when he entered the tent, blocking the scant moonlight as he sealed the flap behind him Only the faintest rustle of fabric attended his movements, as he unrolled his own sleeping bag and stretched out beside her, the soft sigh of his breathing mingling with her own. Her eyes saw only a shadow in darkness, but she didn’t need sight. She closed her eyes again and smiled.
“Good night, Luke,” she whispered.
Chapter Nine
“Look there, Joey.” Luke gestured across the gentle bowl of the valley that encompassed his lands. “Tonight we’ll camp a little way up the slope of that ridge, tomorrow we’ll be over it.”
Joey squinted and reached for her binoculars, focusing them where Luke had indicated. Between tonight’s campsite and the one they had just left, forest stretched out almost unbroken, rising here and there in gentle swells. The ridge of mountains they would cross dropped down into the saddle of a pass, a place more easily crossed than the high peaks to either side. Even those forbidding sentinels were dwarfs compared to some of the ranges beyond them.
“It’ll take most of tomorrow to cross, and our stop after that will be on the other side.” He said no more, shifting under the weight of his pack and briefly checking hers before setting the pace.
Comfortably warmed by the morning’s breakfast and a good night’s sleep, Joey felt more than ready to tackle the day’s challenges. She listened with interest to Luke’s occasional comments on the route they followed and the animals and plants they encountered. They startled a shy, late-wandering red fox into flight across their path, a blur of rust amid the green and brown of forest undergrowth. Black bears gorged on autumn berries, fattening for the winter; Luke and Joey respectfully detoured around them. The animals here had little fear of man, even the mule deer paused to stare as they crossed the meadows before bounding away with their stiff-legged gait.
And Luke belonged here, as much as any of the creatures they had encountered. This was his world, not that other domain of mankind. Joey tried to imagine Luke amid the towering skyscrapers of home and failed.
It was late afternoon when they began the gradual ascent up the side of the ridge that marked the pass through the mountains. Joey felt her muscles strain against the pull of gravity, she was glad now that Luke had insisted on carrying the greater portion of the load.
When Luke called a halt at the night’s stop, she blew out a loud breath of relief and struggled free of her pack, flopping to the ground beside it. Luke looked as serene as if he’d taken a half-kilometer jaunt, his appearance not in the least worsened by two days on the trail.
Joey sighed and thought about her mirror. She was almost afraid what she might see in it—and more afraid of what Luke saw at that very moment. As if he’d read her thoughts, he turned to look down at her. There was no criticism in his eyes, they almost glittered, as if in amusement.