Exile

by Anne Osterlund

  The young woman in front of Robert looked as though she had no intention whatsoever of living with it.

  “It’s against the law,” she said, reaching for Horizon’s bridle.

  Robert clutched the reins with his right hand and grabbed her wrist with his other. “Not here.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Aurelia—”

  “I’ll go all the way back to the palace if I have to.”

  “So the guards can kill you in cold blood?” It was rough, his response, and if she hated him for it, that was fine.

  She relinquished the bridle. He could see the moment when the truth hit her: that no amount of yelling or denial would save that boy’s life.

  But she was not like Robert’s father. She did not absorb that reality and allow it to harden her.

  Instead her body began to shake, as though physically rejecting the idea. “No,” she whispered. Robert knew she was not answering his question. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  He reached for her, but she held him back.

  For a moment he doubted whether he should have told her, whether he should have brought her north, whether he knew her at all. Then her empty fingers clenched into a fist, the knuckles of her hand white as she pressed it to her forehead. “I can’t ...,” she finally said. “I can’t allow slavery to exist in Tyralt. I won’t.”

  It was what he had needed to hear, not enough, but a statement of faith: that one day she would change things.

  Her shaking turned to a shudder, and Robert wrapped her in his arms as she cried.

  They rode north, breaking free of the Asyan Forest and entering the Fallchutes River Valley, here a wide, grassy plain in both directions; but this, Robert knew, was seduction. The valley was a wide mouth leading into a shrinking ravine known as the Crevice, until ultimately only the steep mountain rock of the Quartian Shelf would line the dramatic plunge of the Fallchutes River into the frontier.

  At first, wary of followers, he kept her to the less-traveled eastern side of the river. Then when he had no other choice, he spent his seventh gold piece, an exorbitant fee, hiring a ferry. He and Aurelia joined the flow of other travelers headed north, those fortunate enough to have escaped the claws of the Lion. This did not, however, ensure anonymity.

  Her Royal Highness seemed driven to strike up as many conversations as she could. He was stunned by the revelations she obtained from people she had barely met, people running from debt and poverty, loss and oppression. Robert found himself torn. He admired her skill and desire to learn, but he had hoped the would-be settlers would provide her with sufficient camouflage.

  She betrayed that hope at every stop. At Fort Laiz, she exposed a trader for trying to sell a lame horse. This was followed by a heated discussion on water rights at the Fyonna Trading Post. And then a conflict at Kezlar Township concerning the practice of selling flawed materials to travelers.

  Robert valued her need to fight injustice. But her failure to blend in terrified him.

  By the time they rode up to Fort Jenkins, he longed to detour around and head straight for the Gate. However, darkness had fallen. And the high, rapid sound of a set of pipes and the spirited romp of fiddles skirled through the warm summer air, joined by the joyous shouts, stomps, and whistles of a dance in high swing.

  Before Robert had even finished hitching the stallion, Aurelia had been whirled away into the festivities. She was laughing, her head thrown back, excitement rampant on her face. A far cry from the elegant, fuming princess he had witnessed less than three months ago at her sister’s coming-out party.

  The thought set Robert stumbling, and he seated himself on a rare open seat, the unoccupied half of a hay bale. She was so alive. Kicking her heels. Twirling. Not at all concerned with how people would view her.

  Though here, just as everywhere else, people were drawn to her. Not just the men, who had begun to form a line to dance with her, but the women and children as well, pulled in by the sheer joy on Aurelia’s face.

  She was a stunning revelation in contrasts. One day fighting mad, the next spinning in glory. It was right, he thought, that she could see both the beauty and the starkness of this region. So many people shuttered themselves from one or the other, letting the darkness embitter them or the light blind them to the flaws. Somehow she saw both.

  She isn’t a Falcon anymore, he realized. For years he had called her that, a nickname only he had used. And cherished. But not once on this entire journey had he felt compelled to refer to her by the old moniker. There was something royal in the name and strong, but not ... free.

  Not as free as the young woman dancing before him.

  “H’llo there.” A man in a blue vest and cocked hat interrupted Robert’s thoughts, blocking his view. “Would ya be willin’ to give up yer seat fer a grandmother?” He pointed toward a slender woman with a long white braid down her back and a catacomb of laugh lines on her face. Her foot was tapping, and her arms were swinging to the music.

  “I told ya that’s not needed,” she said.

  But Robert stood at once, and the man disappeared.

  The woman did not sit down. “Sorry ’bout my grandson. He’s off his head at the moment for a piece of gold petticoat.”

  Robert slipped into his frontier dialect. “That’s all right, ma’am.”

  “Lad like you, what’er you doin’ sittin’ over here on a hay bale?” she chuckled. “Find yer own shade of petticoat.”

  Robert’s eyes went right to Aurelia.

  “Ah, she’s a red one in a brown facade, isn’t she, boy? Line’s a mite long, though.”

  Robert sighed.

  “Course there’s a fine blue one over there”—the woman pointed at a girl with a sapphire skirt swirling up around her coffee-dark legs—“and a yellow charmer over there.” She motioned toward a petite, dimpled figure spinning with her arms over her head.

  Aurelia’s laugh sailed out from the dance floor, and Robert’s eyes instinctively returned.

  “Mm-hmm,” the woman chortled. “Course you could jus’ join the line. Or then maybe you could try dancin’ by with one those other petticoats on yer arm and see if the color yer lookin’ for don’t bend in yer direction.”

  “Might at that.” Robert grinned and asked the woman her name.

  “Well now, most folks refer to me these days as Grandma, but was a time when I was Stella May and a fine shade of petticoat myself.”

  Robert held out his palm. “May I have yer hand fer a dance, Stella May?”

  She burst into her own special ring of laughter and accepted his offer, then led him straight out into the center of the fray. “And where are ya from, lad, and which way are ya headed?”

  He dropped into a quick, well-rehearsed response, saying he had been a courier for a wealthy man and was intent on making his own way on the frontier. A new life.

  “So this is yer first trip north then, lad?” Her eyebrows quirked at him.

  He nodded.

  Aurelia swirled past without glancing his way.

  “Myself now,” said the older woman, “I’ve been across the Gate four times. Spent almost a decade on the frontier.”

  The song stirred itself up to a high finale, then broke, but the woman’s feet were still tapping, so Robert twirled her into the next tune.

  Aurelia had moved on to her fourth partner.

  “Ya know, lad,” the woman said, “there’s lots of folks as head to the frontier to start new lives. When I first went over the Gate, the talk was we’d all starve and end up trapped over there on our lonesomes, but every year there’s more folks. Even talk ’bout a princess.”

  Robert almost ran into the man playing the pipes, an act which elicited a slur of notes and a rude shout from the musician, but the woman just laughed and continued, “’Twas all the twitter two months ago when folks were sayin’ she’d run off with that boy from the palace. But then, when they started sayin’ he wasn’t from the palace a’tall but from the frontier, well, you know that made fer all
manner of speculation. Course most folks don’t think she’d have the wherewithal to make it north. They think she prob’ly run off with her frontier boy to some fancy court somewhere.”

  That was a good rumor. He should encourage it.

  Aurelia’s feet danced past once again, and Robert tried very hard not to look up. Partner number six.

  “Now me,” Stella continued, “I like to imagine, and I think there’s a chance Her Royal Highness might head across the Gate fer the same reason as every other gal. Jus’ wantin’ to make a new life.”

  Aurelia’s laughter sailed again, and Robert gave in to the compulsion to seek her out.

  She was spinning on what was now the opposite side of the dance floor, just in front of the fiddlers.

  Then a large man wearing a fur belt with a chain strung through it grabbed her by the arm.

  Robert’s spine stiffened at the forceful contact.

  Stella May followed his gaze. “Reckon that was inevitable,” she said, shaking her head.

  “What?” Robert’s steps slowed.

  “Jenkins.” She nodded at Aurelia’s new partner. “Founder of this here fort. And used to gettin’ what he wants without waitin’ his turn.”

  Fort Jenkins. Well, that made sense.

  “Don’t know as how I’d let him take my petticoat out for a spin,” said the woman. She elbowed Robert. “Ya might want to make this a good time t’interduce yerself.”

  He took a step in Aurelia’s direction, then turned back. “’Twas a real pleasure, Stella May.”

  “And a real pleasure bein’ Stella May again,” she said, “’specially talkin’ to a courier like yerself from central Tyralt, with such a fine frontier accent.”

  Curse it!

  She held onto his arm for a moment. “And jus’ so ya know, lad, ya shouldn’t think nothin’ of my imagination. Mos’ folks don’t listen to the meanderin’s of an old lady’s mind anyhow.”

  No use for regret.

  And no time. Jenkins had removed his hat and was holding it lower than appropriate on Aurelia’s backside.

  Robert plunged into a gap in the dance space and hurried through the romping figures. He had to pull up behind the wild capers of a man dancing with a jug of frontier whiskey.

  Just behind Aurelia. “I don’t care how many walls you’ve built with those hands,” she was saying. “You will remove them from mine.”

  Jenkins chuckled. “I’m thinkin’ a pretty gal like you don’t have any walls. Course I’m willin’ to check.” His left hand reached for her skirt.

  Robert grabbed the hilt of his sword.

  But Aurelia spun, wrenching herself out of the man’s grasp.

  Jenkins tried to follow. And crashed head-on into the capering man’s whiskey jug.

  Glass shattered, shouts rose on all sides, and wild applause erupted from the crowd.

  We will not, Robert thought, be passing the night at Fort Jenkins.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE GATE

  THE SWORD IN ROBERT’S SCABBARD BURNED AGAINST his hip the next morning. He had reached for the hilt. Last night. And there had been no check within his brain. Nothing holding him back. A fact that haunted. Oozed. Penetrated his skin and seeped into his mind, mingling with the blood of former actions. He needed to go home, to return that weapon to his father and rid himself permanently of the option of ever using it again. He had known this, somewhere in the back of his mind, since Chris’s death, but never before had the need felt so urgent.

  “I don’t see why you’re in such a foul mood,” Aurelia said, dragging her riding partner out of his memories and into the final stretch of what had once been the Transcontina Valley, now only a narrow strip between the steep slope of the Quartian Shelf and the churning waters of the Fallchutes. A chilly wind gusted down the Crevice, and her hands were cold where they clasped his chest as she rode behind him on Horizon.

  They had left the roan behind. The old horse had little chance of making it over the Gate, so Robert had passed the mare into the hands of Stella May. His failure to return the roan to Thomas needled in Robert’s gut, but the risks in sending the mare back to Transcontina with a written note were too high.

  “We are almost to the Gate,” Aurelia pointed out. “I would have thought you would be thrilled.”

  Thrilled. Her naïveté pierced through him. True, they had presented their passes to the riders blocking the trail a mile back. And done so without hindrance. But even if he could have dismissed the threat from behind—let himself forget the old woman’s comments from the night before—nothing would allow him to trivialize the danger ahead.

  He knew people who talked, even bragged, about the number of times they had been through the Gate. But far more swore they would never set foot on it again. Nothing he said could prepare Aurelia for the treacherous climb. Still, he should attempt to explain. “We will walk most of the way,” he said. “It’s steep, and the path is rough. I won’t risk Horizon’s soundness.”

  She nodded, waiting to hear more.

  “The wagons only travel north,” he continued. “There’s no room for them to pass.”

  “Then what about goods coming south from the frontier?” She leaned up against his shoulder.

  “Everything goes down the river and is shipped out at the Port of Darzai. Only people, and sometimes news, come south through the Gate.”

  “What does it look like?”

  Horizon’s hooves curved around a jutting rock, and the resulting view spared Robert the effort of description. “There.”

  The southern entrance to the Gate rose up in front of them, a thin, gray, hideous path etched into the side of the Quartian Shelf. Rugged. Blunt. Built by weather, desire, gunpowder, and human intractability. A feat that paled against the path’s soaring, jagged backdrop: the cliff. And its mirror image.

  Between the two cliffs, at their base, was the powerful Fallchutes River, the only force strong enough to divide the heights of the Quartian Shelf. The river swept, not gracefully or patiently, but with waters roiling in preparation for the drop ahead. Eighteen times they would plunge downward over the course of fifty miles before emerging again, then flowing east, all the way to the ocean.

  Robert turned to see Aurelia’s reaction. Her teeth were clenched, the muscles in her jaw tight, her eyes locked on that trail of insanity.

  She didn’t gasp. Or cringe. Or shudder.

  Which only meant she did not yet know what she faced.

  Aurelia did not care for heights—a discovery that came at a most inopportune time, as they were less than a hundred feet up the narrow, winding path of the Gate, which, she could see, continued to climb for at least a hundred more.

  She closed her eyes and willed herself forward, but her legs refused to move. In fact, they desperately wanted to bend and lower her center of balance. The path seemed somehow to have shrunk from six feet wide to three.

  Robert had already moved ahead. If she didn’t call out, he was liable to keep traveling without her. She whispered his name, which didn’t work.

  I can’t do this. How am I going to tell him? “Robert!” she called and left it at that. He was bound to think something was wrong.

  Something was wrong. She was standing on a trail at the edge of a cliff that plunged in a sheer drop down to a series of crashing waterfalls, their roar riding the wind and assaulting her on her fragile perch. This was not frightening. This was harrowing. “Robert!” She called his name again and plastered her backside against the jagged wall, her eyes staring out at the almost identical rock face on the opposite side of the gap. The wide, empty gap with only the river below.

  “Yes?” His voice.

  She realized then that she should have invented a logical reason she could not continue and needed to go back down. But she hadn’t, and she could not think of one now because she could not think.

  Robert stepped in front of her, blocking out that awful empty space. His eyes, those calm blue eyes, met hers. And then he held out his h
and, as if waiting for her to take it.

  Could she? Was that even possible?

  She kept her left hand planted firmly on the cliff face and reached out with her right. Her fingers locked with his.

  His grip was firm. Like the rest of him. And she simply didn’t have the mental freedom at the moment to sort that out.

  Then it occurred to her that he had the wrong hand, the one that, if he was to stay on the outer side of the path, would require her to ascend.

  She tried to pull back, but Robert refused to give up his grip. “It gets better,” he said.

  Liar.

  “It does,” he continued, “once you get past the sense of climbing.”

  Well, that was nice of him to say, but this fear was immediate, and personal, and he could not possibly know how she would react when they went higher. She was not going higher.

  “I can walk on the outer side,” he said.

  Yes, well, that was the plan, but for going down.

  Though the trail was slightly less horrible with him standing in front of her, blocking her view of that gruesome drop. He tugged on the stallion’s reins and brought Horizon around so the horse was below her, a few feet from the cliff wall, which also helped block her view.

  “Now, Aurelia, you tell me when you’re ready,” Robert whispered. “It’s the only way,” he said as if he actually believed assassins might be insane enough to follow her here. “It will be all right.”

  Would it? Would that haunted, concerned look he kept sending over his shoulder disappear if they climbed higher?

  “Are you sure?” she whispered. It was very, very important that he was sure.

  “Positive.”

  She allowed herself to breathe.

  He took a step back, which struck her as insane, but it did allow her space. Maybe she could try this, as long as he let her return to the cliff if necessary. She stared at the ground, making certain it was there, where she wanted to place her foot. Then she eased forward.