The pale light of the morning filtered in through the mouth of the cavern. Nessalir awoke with her back against the mossy bed and goosebumps upon her bare flesh. She opened her golden eyes and sat up, cracked her neck, and rubbed her still-aching shoulder.

  "Good morning," she said to the Green Man, who knelt by the pool of spring water and drank from it. He stood, and pulled from the ceiling one of the roots and ate it as he turned to look at her. He was still naked, and Nessalir smirked as she watched him watching her.

  Gingerly, she traced her breast with her left hand, meeting his eyes just as her bck cws danced over her nipple. The Green Man began to rouse, and he looked away hurriedly, acting more like a bashful youth than an ancient eight-foot-tall guardian of the wild.

  "It was an enjoyable experience," said the Green Man. "But we have much to do."

  "Of course," Nessalir agreed. She stood and stretched, her tail flicking back and forth. The two of them dressed, and Nessalir drank from the pool and accepted the roots the Green Man offered. They were, to her surprise, both filling and nourishing, with a faint heat to their taste.

  "Have you any idea where the poachers are?" asked Nessalir.

  "Deeper within the woodnd," the Green Man told her. "We shall consult with the Heart Beasts, to learn if any more have been attacked."

  Nessalir nodded, and she followed the Green Man out of the cave.

  The two emerged into the meadow above, and Huunang gave a whinny at the sight of his mistress. Nessalir fed him his oats while the Green Man watched, his previous awkwardness now gone and repced with a stoicism she found more amusing than anything else. As though he had not spent the night filling her ear with grunts and moans, as though he had not been so shy afterward, when the moment of passion had passed.

  When Huunang was content, Nessalir turned to the Green Man, intending to signal to him that she was ready to depart, but she froze. There, on the edge of the clearing, stood a white horse with a golden horn jutting from its forehead.

  The horse regarded her with an intelligence that seemed wrong from such an animal, then seemingly dismissed her and turned its attention to the Green Man. It approached him, and he reached out his hand toward it, which the unicorn nuzzled. They stood there in silence for a moment, and then the unicorn turned away from the Green Man and vanished into the woodnds.

  "They attempted to capture her foal st night," the Green Man said, his voice deep and angry. "The child escaped, but not before seeing the poachers' camp. We must hurry, before they are gone."

  He did not look back at Nessalir to make sure she was following. Instead he simply strode forward into the forest, leaving the drakkowar to hurry after him.

  Just as he did the previous night, the Green Man moved with a grace that did not match his size. He nimbly avoided roots and branches, and his footfalls made not a sound. The Green Man walked as though he were the forest itself, and Nessalir supposed he might very well be.

  Her own movements were as graceful as she could manage, and by mortal standards she would certainly be considered a skilled woodswoman, but compared to the Green Man's supernatural connection to the wild, she felt clumsy and leadfooted.

  Still, she managed to keep up on her own, and that, she felt, was something to take pride in.

  She followed the Green Man for at least an hour, and in that time neither spoke a word. There were no words that needed to be said. There was only the forest, and the sounds it produced. Nessalir thought she could hear the Green Man in the way the wind caught the leaves, or in how the birds sang their songs. Or perhaps, it was that those sounds were expressed physically within the Green Man himself. For all her draconic heritage, Nessalir was still only mortal, and the ways of the forest and the Green Man, the how of their connection, were neither for her to know nor understand.

  At length, the two arrived at another clearing, though a less pristine one than the meadow beneath which they'd spent their night. The grass here was trampled down, and the dirt was upturned. A bck circle in the center of the clearing revealed the site of a firepit, and all around it Nessalir could see signs of a camp that had been recently broken.

  "They are moving," said the Green Man.

  "That is good," Nessalir told him. "If they have broken camp, then they mean to relocate. And if they are relocating, then they are not hunting."

  "You know the ways of poachers, Nessalir the Red?"

  "I have never hunted a unicorn, if that is what concerns you."

  The Green Man looked at her for the first time since they'd set out on their hunt that morning, and there was annoyance and distrust in his expression.

  "Is it not the nature of an animal to hunt?" asked Nessalir. "Am I not an animal as well?"

  "Often it seems that humans forget they too are animals," said the Green Man, looking away from her. Nessalir watched a little tension leave his shoulders.

  "But I am not human," said Nessalir with a smile. "Not fully."

  "Human enough," said the Green Man. "Human enough."

  She did not know what he meant, but he was already walking, following the trail the hunters had left deeper into the woodnds. Nessalir followed after him, and they did not speak again.