“We’ll see you in six days at Gillarine,” said Gram. He offered me his hand, feverishly hot, and steadied me as I got to my feet. “Unless…Perhaps the gods have sent you this opportunity. With your skills and the weather to hide you, you could take your own road at the end and stay free of the Bastard. Osriel treads perilous paths, Valen. No one knows his plans or the extent of his power.”
“I’ve given my oath not to run,” I said. “It was necessary; Gildas can tell you. But my soul has acquired stains enough all these years without my sitting on Magrog’s lap. So you can be sure the Bastard will have little good of me. Godspeed, Gram. Teneamus.”
“Teneamus. I’ll not forget this, my friend.” He turned his back and trudged slowly toward the gully, his shoulders racked with coughing. Wind and snow and failing light erased his footsteps as if by a sorcerer’s hand. I shivered and headed into the trackless wood.
Chapter 31
“Up with you, pureblood. The hounds are baying. No time for sleep.” The hand on my shoulder shook me so hard, the blanket slipped off my head. Bitter cold bit my cheeks and plumed my breath as I squinted into the night. Trees. Snow. Unending trees and snow.
“Leave off the bone rattling, Mardane,” I said, groaning. “As if a man could sleep with his blood frozen and his backside raw…”…and his hipbones throbbing from too long astride, and his stomach devouring his liver for want of a meal not eaten on the run, and his mind a roiling backwash of questions, mysteries, and anxieties that neither misery nor exhaustion could quiet. Not the least of which mysteries was how to shake the fiendish Harrowers, now the time had come to leave them behind. We just couldn’t seem to move fast enough.
When I had suggested this diversion scheme, I never expected it would mean six god-cursed days of lacerating briar tangles, ice-coated avalanche snarls, unending hours in the saddle, no fire, no sleep, no respite. We’d had to keep our pursuers close, but not too close. If we got so far ahead as to discourage them, or they realized too soon that we had split our party, they might double back on their tracks to escape the forest and hunt down the others. Gram. Elene. Stearc. Every hour I could give them was a boon. But next time I had such an idea, I would stuff a boot in my mouth.
“We can’t wait for Nestor.” Voushanti’s proffered hand hauled me to my feet. “The orange-heads are already coming up the gorge. Maggot-ridden halfwits must have legs like mountain goats. I’ve sent the last of the horses downslope, but that won’t confuse them long. So let’s make an end to this. Lead us out of this tangle and onto high ground, where these two and I can take them on, and you can run like hell’s own messenger to join the others.”
Voushanti’s temper sounded far more equitable than my own. The crash of brush, grunt of horses, and shouts of oncoming Harrowers bounced through the darkness from tree to tree from every direction at once, clawing at my already shredded nerves.
Philo, one of our three companions, snatched up my blanket and stowed it in a rucksack before I could wipe the sludge of unsleep from my eyes. The missing Nestor had gone in search of water to refill our depleted flasks, as we could not afford a fire to melt the snow. The third warrior, Melkire, stripped weapons and food packets from our abandoned saddlepacks and stuffed them in our belts, rucksacks, and pockets. We’d ridden our horses to frozen, quivering uselessness. Now we were afoot. I could only pray our pursuers fared no better. Deunor’s fire, there were so many of them.
I dropped to my knees and scraped away crusted snow until I could touch my palms to the forest floor and heed only the sounds of Mellune: the snap of frost-cracked limbs, the sough of overburdened pine fronds giving up their load of snow, the beating hearts of burrowers. Delving deep, I inhaled the faint aroma of the earth warmed by my hands, tasting pine resin and galled oak, dirt and mold on my tongue. As magic flowed from fingers through earth, my mind reached south and west through rotting trees and frozen soil, shearing through buried stone and dense thorn thickets, seeking a path to Gillarine’s valley and the wide River Kay that fed it. Tell me the way, I said as I examined the landscape unfolding in my head. Reveal your paths.
Perhaps it was the unaccustomed practice, or the fact that I no longer hoarded magic against the demands of the doulon, but my route finding had grown more assured over the past days. Or perhaps the need to accomplish something of worth in my life had at last forced me to fully accept the bent of my blood, no matter its connection to my parents. Or perhaps it was only that Mellune Forest and I had become intimate acquaintances.
The grim woodland straggled straight down the spine of Ardra, grown up in thin, sour land, broken by sills and ridges of limestone, its trails choked with briars and snake-vine since ill weather and disease had all but exterminated its game. Deadfalls, snarls, sinkholes, and gullies had diverted us constantly, making my carefully laid course of southward-spiraling circles resemble the route of a headless chicken. Our purpose was delay and confusion, but for our pursuers, not ourselves. I prayed I could get us out before we starved.
The route took shape in mind and body, a gray pattern of fading game trails, a dry watercourse, a logger’s track, long abandoned. High ground, Voushanti wanted. So I shifted the thread slightly here and there, searching for a more elevated way.
Beyond the southern boundaries of Mellune the land opened into the rocky pastures of upper Ardra. A single modest hill, crowned by a scarp, and a few scattered protrusions of dense black rock presented the only defensible positions. The mountain drainages—the upland valleys like the vale of the Kay where Gillarine lay—would give us much better cover, but the inexhaustible Harrowers would be stripping our bones before we made it so far afoot.
“Come on,” I said, scrambling to my feet.
Snapping branches and spitting snow, I broke through a wall of snow-laden bracken to find the narrow streambed that would lead us up a seamed ridge, heading the direction my gut named southwest. A chorus of terrified whinnies said the pursuit had discovered our blown horses.
The blizzard had abated on our third day in the forest, which worsened the cold, but lent us more light. Above the canopy of trees the stars shone clear and bitter, providing illumination enough to reflect on open snow and depositing inky shadows under trees and scrub.
An hour along the way, my purposeful spiral took us along the bank of a pond. There we found the signs of a Harrower camp and all that was left of Nestor. The thirsty fool must have walked right into their hands. The Harrowers had shredded his flesh and staked him to the earth as they had Boreas. I blessed all gods I had not eaten that night. Nestor’s mouth had been packed with dirt to silence his cries as he bled and died.
“We leave him lie,” said Voushanti harshly, snatching up Nestor’s waterskins that lay abandoned in a willow thicket. His boots and weapons were missing. “We’ve no strength to spare and no time. Move out, pureblood.”
Closing my eyes, I sought my guide thread, happy I did not need to touch the ground here. “This way,” I said and moved westerly.
Philo joined me, whispering the Karish prayers for the dead. Voushanti followed, mumbling curses with the passion of a lover scorned. But Melkire dropped to his knees beside the savaged body. I held up to wait for him, then blurted a malediction as the warrior dipped his thumb in Nestor’s blood and marked a spiraled circle on his own forehead.
“What the devil are you doing?” I said, anger and disgust raising my bile. The Harrowers had licked Boreas’s blood from their fingers.
“Nestor is a son of Evanore,” said Melkire, his eyes hard and fierce in the starlight. “The mark binds my memory, so that I can bring a full account of his deeds and his end to his family.”