by Gwynn White
She landed on a ledge no wider than her foot. It was slick with river spray. Feet tingling at the thought of slipping into the torrent just a few feet below her, she leaned back against the wall and loosened her cord.
When Clay had first brought her to terrain like this to learn to shoot in, she had protested. These caverns and impossibly narrow ledges could not be where the alliance fought the Chenayan guardsmen. Why didn’t he take her to the man-made tunnels like the one she had traveled on when she had first arrived here? That was the logical place to set up targets for her to aim at.
Clay had laughed at her.
She had quickly realized that those tunnels were not only rare survivors of Axel’s demolition efforts, but that Axel and Heron had trapped them with explosives and poison.
The result?
No one used them. All the fighting took place in hellish terrain like this. Learning to shoot a rifle was just half the battle for a soldier enlisted in Axel’s army. One evening, after counting her bruises, Axel had confided that the terrain was ninety percent of the reason why he still held the mines.
Lynx looked left and right into the river spray, trying to decide which way Anna and Axel would have gone. The ledges on both side of her looked equally unpromising. She looked out over the river. Only about twenty feet wide, it was hemmed by a rock wall.
Aware of the time slipping away, Lynx swept her light beam around, looking for clues. It was on her third sweep that she noticed that the light extended deeper into a small section of the opposite wall. The harder she looked at it, the clearer it became that it was an impossibly narrow passageway.
Clay joined her. Back hugging the rock behind him, he rolled up his cord. Although silent, she could sense his expectation.
She made a decision.
“I think they crossed the river.”
No reaction from Clay.
She sighed. At least she had shown emotion while he had raided his egg.
An irritated click of her tongue at her unrealistic expectations, and she focused on finding what they had used to cross the river.
No piton. No place to attach a rope.
And how would they have attached it on the other side? Lynx snapped at herself.
That left a bridge of some kind.
Aware that she could be failing her test dismally, Lynx turned her attention to looking for a bridge—
A plank.
Her eyes dropped to the ledge she stood on. She creaked down carefully and felt under the stone. A laugh escaped her as her hand touched a few sheets of wet steel. She chanced a glance at Clay.
The corner of his mouth twitched.
Fighting for balance on the treacherous surface, she prized out a narrow but rigid strip of steel. But as she swung it over the river, the momentum almost tumbled her into the water. She cried out before she could stop herself and dropped her bridge into the swirling foam.
She swore, suddenly conscious she was dripping wet—from fear-induced sweat, not just river water. She tried again, fighting to concentrate despite the ticking clock, Clay’s silence, Axel’s expectations of success—and her own.
This time, she was ready for the downward pull of the bridge. Moving cautiously, she edged it onto a tiny lip on the wall facing her. It settled with a satisfying metallic click that she heard over the river.
A full smile from Clay.
Aware that swagger could be her downfall, Lynx edged carefully across the bridge. Her heart rapped a staccato beat; the steel was as slippery as an icy path. She almost collapsed with relief when she reached the other side. A brush of her hand, and she felt the opening her flashlight had hinted at. Her first instinct was to push through it to begin tracking Anna and Axel before their boot prints on the rocks dried, but she remembered Clay.
He would expect her to stow the bridge after he had crossed. Sure-footed, her little brother seemed to saunter with indulgent ease across it.
“Are we going to be here all day?” she hissed, quoting him.
He smiled as he hopped off and squeezed past her in the narrow opening. “Hide the bridge. But remember, I can overlook you losing one because this is your first time, but two—”
He made a cutting gesture across his throat that she took to mean failure.
It wasn’t necessary. She had the measure of the weight of the steel now. Quickly, she swung it around, but when she couldn’t find a ledge to hide it under, she plunked it against the wall in the little cave.
A frown from Clay.
She looked around more carefully and noticed a long fold in the rock. Her hand revealed a perfect hiding place, already stashed with metal sheets. She added hers to the pile.
“Let’s go hunting,” Clay said, gesturing for her to lead the way.
Heart beating with excitement, Lynx studied the broken ground. Her flashlight caught the gleam of water on stone. She followed it down a natural seam in the rock, little wider than her body. The spoor quickly dried, but it didn’t matter. The tunnel had narrowed so sharply that Lynx had to lie on her stomach and crawl to move through it. Axel had brought her to a claustrophobic nightmare.
A surge of panic rushed her, and she couldn’t help stuttering, “I—I’m not ready for this yet, Clay.”
“Then you are not ready to fight in the Pathfinder Alliance army.” Clay sounded disappointed. “Test’s over.”
“The hell it is.” Lynx took a breath, gritted her teeth and dragged herself forward with her elbows.
Clay said nothing, and as he was behind her, she couldn’t guess what he was thinking.
Needing to really prove herself to him—and to Axel for devising this horror—she flicked off her headlamp, plunging them into obsidian darkness. A deep, calming breath, and she forced her elbows and hips to keep shuffling her along. After what seemed like forever, but was probably only a few minutes, a light flared ahead of her. The beam filled a space much broader than the confines of the tunnel.
It had to be Anna. But where was Axel? He wouldn’t reveal his presence so easily.
Lynx crept forward, making no sound. Without warning, the rock walls and floor hugging her dipped, becoming a chute. In the light from Anna’s headlamp, she saw that if she didn’t dig in quickly, she would tumble out.
Seemingly unaware of Lynx’s presence, the girl strode confidently toward a blue flag snagged on the tip of a crystal stalagmite—Clay’s target.
Intense with concentration, Lynx edged forward to give herself space to heft her rifle. With the barrel protruding a couple of inches from the chute, she sighted the weapon. When Anna was perfectly aligned in the cross hairs, she eased back the trigger.
The weapon was ripped from her hands.
Before she could stop herself, she cried out in surprise—and looked up the barrel of her gun at Axel’s hard face.
“Dead on your first outing. You are going to have to do better than that, Lynxie.” Axel sighted the rifle, and if he wanted to, he could kill her.
Trapped in her chute, there would be nothing she could do to defend herself. Lynx sighed with frustration. “I should not have poked the rifle barrel out before checking, should I?”
“No. You should not.” Axel lowered the weapon, but he didn’t move.
With Clay behind her and Axel in front, there was nowhere for her to go. She hadn’t felt so trapped in years.
Or so desolate at her own stupidity.
How could the Winds protect her if she took no care to protect herself by using the most basic of weapon-handling skills? Skills that, as a raider, had once come to her as naturally as breathing?
She sighed back her anguish. “I guess it’s back to school for me.”
Axel pillaged her face with his eyes. She shifted, uncomfortable, wishing she knew what he was thinking.
Finally, his expression softened. He whispered, “No, my Lynxie. It’s not back to school. At least, not for you. But tell me, if a raider with as many years of experience as you got caught like this, how would our boy have coped?”
Our boy?
Talon.
She frowned, suddenly aware of what Axel had done. “It’s not the same,” she gritted out, conscious of Clay behind her and Anna at the stalagmite. “We would give him a lot more training.”
“You are thirty-six, Lynx. That’s how long you have been training in war and survival. We don’t have that long to wait to overthrow Lukan.”
Lynx wanted to snap that it wasn’t the same thing at all, but she stopped herself, because as much as Axel’s tactics annoyed her, he did make sense in an irritating way. Talon was skilled in the forest, but in a situation like this, he would not have survived. More than anyone, Lynx wanted Lukan dead, but not if it risked her son’s life. And with monarchs beating on their door, they didn’t really have the luxury of time.
“I concede,” she said, giving him an icy stare.
Axel brushed her hair, damp with sweat, off her face. “Good. Heron will assign you to your platoon tomorrow as planned. I hope your tenure there is very short.” He offered her his hand, which she took, and then pulled her out of the chute.
Clay tumbled out after her.
Lynx sidled up to Axel. “I lost. That means I didn’t win. I appreciate you changing the rules for me, but it smacks of nepotism.”
“Commander Lynx Avanov, welcome to my army.” Axel wrapped his arm around her, pressed a kiss onto her forehead, and then whispered, “You’re an Avanov. Nepotism comes with the name.”
It was first time she had heard herself referred to as an Avanov. Coming from Axel, it sounded good.
She wished the idea of using Talon as a figurehead sounded as fine, but what choice did she have? She had failed herself and her son. And Axel had proved his point.
At least she could concede graciously, instead of arguing for a second run to earn her commission by merit. She cupped his cheek in her hand. “I will be at your side. Set up the meeting with the monarchs.”
Chapter 29
Lukan rubbed his scar, only just managing to resist slumping in his gold throne. There had been precious little good news in today’s High Council meeting, but every problem presented today could have been avoided if he hadn’t been cheated of his Burning. And now, he had to address all the High Council’s quibbles without giving away any inkling of his postponed terminal solution. Forcing a serene expression he didn’t feel, he stared down the narrow, high-vaulted chamber at his Lord of the Granary, Count Pavel.
Dark hair slicked back against his head, the hawk-eyed man was wrapping up his report. “So, in conclusion, sire, thanks to the unseasonal summer floods, the potato and wheat crops have rotted in the fields. The continuing wet autumn has frustrated all efforts to harvest what crops could have been salvaged. We have six weeks’ worth of supplies stockpiled from last season. If we are to stave off hunger amongst the low-born in the Heartland, we will need to look at importing food from the southern satrapies. This will require an investment of twenty-seven million mycek in freight charges. We will also require help from the military with food distribution.”
A flick of Pavel’s thumb killed the graphics summing up the situation floating above his informa. The count bowed and took his seat.
The floods had swept away entire villages, killing thousands, before going on to buckle the road, rail, and bridge network in the Heartland. Travel was now almost impossible. Neither those people nor that network mattered to Lukan; it would take years and vast sums of money to restore order for a world that he planned to leave desolate.
If that wasn’t a big enough waste of money, the funds Pavel asked for had to come out of Lukan’s war budget. He would also have to deflect precious troops and equipment from the Treven campaign to help with mopping up operations at home. And that at a time when his troops were finally having some success in breaching the mines. With Axel still alive and Lynx gone, the last thing he wanted was to reduce pressure in Treven.
Lynx had to be recaptured. Nothing else was more important.
Since the failure of his last Burning, he had mulled the possibility of a targeted gassing to flush Axel. With Axel dead, the Pathfinder Alliance would collapse, and with it, the resistance in the mines. Recapturing Lynx would then be a simple matter.
His first thought had been to hit Norin, but he had rejected it in favor of a more hostile, more frustrating target: Oldfort, King Jerawin’s hideout in the mountains of Lapis.
For years, Lukan had lived daily with the humiliation of King Jerawin’s continued presence in Lapis. Since invading Lapis, Lukan had deployed a vast contingent of priestesses armed with moonstone shockers to control the population and to force obedience to the Dragon.
It hadn’t helped. Thousands of Lapisians had fled to the mines to join the alliance. At his citadel in Oldfort, the deposed King Jerawin maintained a court of as many as the barren mountains could support, a few thousand people, more symbolic of resistance than anything else.
Until that den of vipers was eradicated, Lukan could never vindicate his failure in that theater of war. In each instance, Axel was his true adversary. It was his military brain that kept both Jerawin and Chad in power, albeit on a reduced scale.
In theory, it was simple enough to shower the town with Dragon’s Fire, but doing so would alert the world to his secret weapon. He wasn’t yet ready to tip his hand, even though a mass gassing was the best way he could think of winning the round.
Count Pavel cleared his throat, the sound loud in the silence. “Sire, the money for food? Do I have your approval?”
Lukan forced his mind back to the council room.
He sat up in his chair and did a quick calculation in his head to compare the figure Pavel asked for against his own estimate. After the wettest summer in living memory and the Burning postponed, he had anticipated the problem. A grunt of approval when the two figures correlated.
He pointed to Count Taras, his Lord of the Treasury. “Open a credit line for Count Pavel with all the usual checks.”
Sadly, finding a financial man with Artyom Zarot’s skills had been almost impossible. Axel’s grand larceny, which had led to Zarot’s killing, had taught Lukan a lesson. For the last sixteen years, he had kept the treasury on a tight rein. Taras reported to him weekly on the financial affairs of the nation.
A glance at Stefan Zarot had his Lord of Conquest bowing. Zarot would be responsible for assigning the troops and equipment Pavel needed. “Balance the needs in the Heartland with your orders in Treven. I don’t want any subsidence in the campaign to break through into the mines.”
“Of course, sire. As you wish.” Tall, gray-haired, exuding his usual calm, Zarot nodded.
Count Pavel stirred in his seat and raised a finger, indicating that he wanted to speak.
As much as Lukan wanted the meeting over, he nodded at Pavel. “Go ahead.”
“Sire, perhaps, just for now, the needs of the Heartland need to take precedence over the war effort. Winter is coming, and with it great hardship for the low-born unless we have troops on the ground.” Pavel glanced around the room, catching eyes, no doubt looking for support.
A couple of the more senior councilmen nodded their agreement. Lukan knew, despite Pavel’s platitudes, that they cared nothing for the low-born. The true issue here was the war in Treven.
Lukan sighed.
It was an old grievance, muttered in dark corners by his councilmen, now finally aired. In the heady days of his reign when the low-born in the Heartland had been tagged, the council had been gung-ho for the war. But as the campaign mired and successes were few, support had waned. Tired of bolstering his councilmen’s flagging spirits for the war effort, Lukan had seen the Burning as a solution to the whole mess. After the Burning, he would have rewritten the history books, blotting out every reference to his failures on the battlefield.
“No one could dispute my support for the low-born, Count Pavel. If we find we need greater numbers of resources, then I will allocate them. Now, my lords, that concludes business for the day. Lunch convenes within the
hour.” Lukan was about to stand when Felix cleared his throat. He looked over at his Lord of the Household in surprise; Felix never spoke in these meetings. “You have something to add, Felix?”
Lukan wasn’t the only one who seemed startled.
A collective shifting of bodies, and fifteen of his sixteen councilmen leaned forward to better hear the usually silent Felix.
A hand wave from his uncle. Although Felix had lost two fingers, his right hand had recovered from the shooting. That didn’t stop him holding it like a wounded wing. Lukan thought Felix did it to garner endless commiseration from the high-born.
“Nothing I have to say, sire, but I know some of the High Council have questions about Crown Prince Grigor and his brother, Prince Meka.”
Lukan almost leaped out of his chair. Why was Felix, of all people, bringing them up? Had he forgotten their discussion on the threat Tao’s pernicious influence was on his heirs? That Tao hadn’t been back all through the autumn meant nothing. He could strike at any time.
Even though his heirs hadn’t spoken to each other for most of that time, with no other company, they tended to talk to themselves. Tao’s name had come up regularly in those whispered “conversations.” Not once had either of them mentioned Dmitri or Nicholas. Perhaps Tao hadn’t yet spilled those truths, but that could change in a heartbeat.
“What about them?” he snapped.
Felix looked over at Count Vasily, who oversaw Zakar Province, where the empire’s industries were hidden. “Care to explain your concerns to the emperor?”
Vasily’s florid face turned puce, and his fleshy jowls shook.
“Ah . . . Felix. Quite. My . . . ah . . . concerns.” A wave of a podgy hand made the gemstones on each of his ringed fingers glitter. Fat rolls quivering, he lumbered to his feet and bowed. “Sire, I—I speak not only on my own behalf.”
Vasily’s cunning eyes shot around the room, alighting on one councilman after another. Only when he had implicated everyone in the hall did he point to the empty chairs below Lukan’s throne, where the crown prince and his brothers traditionally sat at council meeting.
