«I see no reason why you should not do this,» said the king. «But perhaps Prince Blade would care to speak. He was put in the greatest danger and a comrade of his lies desperately wounded.»
«The Kaireens certainly have every right to punish their own traitors,» said Blade. «What happened to the other stalkers?»
«Both are dead,» said Embor. «But so are four of my guards. Six more will bear scars to the end of their lives.»
«And Queen Sanaya?»
«She has fled into the forest,» said Neena. «It hardly seems worth the trouble to hunt her down. She has no skill or swiftness in the woods, and death will overtake her without our help.»
Blade frowned. «I am not so sure of that. Terror can give skill and speed to anyone. Even if she does die, she may live long enough to reach those who ought not to hear of what she has seen today.»
He looked at King Embor, the High Kaireen, and Neena. All three of them nodded.
Chapter 24
Queen Sanaya ran through the forest. She didn't know where she was running, and didn't care. She knew that she ran from King Embor and also from Neena and from Blade. She ran from death because those three people knew everything she had tried to do. They would kill her if she didn't run. She didn't care how little she knew about the forests or the Mountains of Hoga and how to live in them. She didn't know or care how long her strength would last. She only knew that it would last somehow until she was far, away from the arena, even if she dropped down dead the moment after that.
She almost hoped she would. It would be a quicker death than dying of hunger or snake bite. That death in turn would be quicker than what Embor and Blade would give her if they caught her. And as for Princess Neena-Sanaya sobbed aloud in fear at the thought of the princess going to work on her. A lingering remnant of sanity told her she should not waste her breath weeping. She ran on in silence.
She ran on until she had to slow down. Now she moved at a painful trot, then a walk, then a lurching stagger. She gasped for breath at each step. At each gasp it felt as if molten metal was rising up in her throat. Her head throbbed until it seemed that it would split open and let her brains ooze out. Her eyes watered, then streamed; she felt the salt of tears on her lips, mixing with blood. Somewhere at some moment she had bitten deep into her lower lip.
She felt cold, damp earth and slickly wet leaves against her feet and looked down. Her boots were soft leather, designed for show, not for hard walking and still less for running in the forest. Both boots were ripped and worn through. The skin of her feet already showed darkening bruises made by stones and roots and thin red lines left by thorns.
She was afraid that if she stopped she would never start up again. She did not know how far she had come from the arena and her enemies. She only knew in her pounding heart and fear-ridden mind that she hadn't come far enough. The knowledge gave her the strength to stumble onward.
Some impossibly long time later, a jutting branch caught one boot and jerked it right off. Sanaya staggered and fell painfully forward on her hands and knees. She slumped down on her face and lay gasping for breath, as mindless as a wounded animal.
After a while strength returned to the muscles she needed for sitting up and stripping off the other boot. She noticed also that her fur cloak was gone, fallen from her shoulders somewhere now miles behind her. Below her knees her skirt was shredded by thorns and branches and dark with grass stains, mud, and dampness.
If she was strong enough to see clearly, she must be strong enough to move on again. She reached for a bush and held onto its branches, using them to pull herself to her feet. She swayed and staggered, but did not fall again. Her hands were dotted with oozing red punctures, from thorns she hadn't even felt.
The sunlight no longer sparkled down golden from high above. It was turning red and slanting in from the west. The day was dying; in another couple of hours it would be dead. But the day would live again, the next time the sun rose. If Blade or Neena caught her, she would die, and for her death would be final. She would go on.
She did, although a child just learning to walk could have gone as fast. Before long the skirt of her gown grew so heavy and wet that she stopped again to rip it off up to the knees.
The breeze now blew chill against her bare legs and bruised and swollen feet.
Before long the insects came to her. They whined in her ears, they made a cloud in front of her eves, they bit furiously at every bit of exposed skin. Some of the bites left red and yellow blotches, others drew blood which drew more insects. She began to wonder if the dizziness and the blurred vision were still just fatigue. Or were poison and the loss of blood from insect bites beginning to take their toll? She did not know, she would never find out, and she could not afford to care.
How much longer Sanaya stumbled on through the gathering twilight, she never knew. When she finally felt her strength beginning to leave her for good, it was nearly dark. When she looked down at her feet, she now saw blood oozing up between the toes, and bloody footprints on the ground behind her. The insects swarmed more thickly. She groaned, and kept moving.
Suddenly the ground was dropping away in front of her. She staggered, and tried to throw herself backward. Legs where every joint and muscle flamed with a separate agony would not respond. She felt herself lurching forward, flailed wildly at the air, screamed, and, fell.
She did not plunge down into a bottomless depth and smash herself to pieces. Instead she fell only a few feet, hit a steep slope overgrown with thorn bushes, and rolled. The thorns clawed and stabbed at her as she rolled.
Then she reached the bottom of the slope. Her head grazed a massive tree root, and pain even fiercer and sharper than before exploded behind her eyes. For a moment she saw nothing but darkness. For another moment she had the horrible feeling that she'd gone blind.
Through that darkness stabbed a man's loud, harsh voice. Then came the sound of footsteps, and a chittering sound Sanaya had never heard herself but heard described far too often. Blindly she tried to roll away from the approaching stolof. She did not worry about how it had come here. She only knew that she had to get away from it and from the man who must be its master.
A new pain burned as a whip slashed down across her bare legs, wrapping itself around them. She was dragged to a stop, and somehow the pain seemed to clear her vision. She twisted her head to look at the man standing over her.
He was tall and burly, with the unmistakable mark of a warrior noble of Trawn in the way he carried himself. He wore a tunic reinforced with copper bands, and across his broad back was slung a long curved two-handed sword. A long, ugly red scar ran down the right side of his face, from forehead to chin and just missing the eve. The eyes that glared down out of that face glittered with both an animal's mindless cruelty and a wise man's ability to think and scheme.
Panic roared and howled in Sanaya's mind again, drowning out everything else she could feel. She clawed at the ground, drooled, tried to jerk herself to her feet. The man let her rise to her knees. Then his fist smashed down like a thunderbolt, taking her on the side of the jaw. Sanaya sprawled backward on the ground, and this time the darkness did not go away for a long time.