by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Thirty-One
Death, carried on the wind, filled Allara’s nostrils. The horses crested a final ridge, and beneath them, the Glockamon Moors unfurled.
On the first night, they had fled through the confusion in the Koraudian lines, then made camp in between the headwaters of the Goraudian and Northfall Rivers. They had followed the river northeast, ever closer to Koraud. Chris had taken the lead, almost without seeming to realize that’s what he was doing. He would consult with Quinnon or Canard Yemas or another Guardsman, but it was always Chris who made the decisions.
Here, on the far banks of the Northfall, the rich farmland in the river deltas gave way to the barrens of peat harvesting. Thunderclouds obliterated the sky and shut out the distant Ballion hills. The scrubby, purple-heathed fields lay empty today, as they’d lain empty perhaps for weeks. The peat harvesters had left to huddle in their homes or evacuated to avoid the ravages of the war or maybe even headed south to join the army. Their sharp-edged black rows of earthen rectangles cut order into the tangled land. The peat they’d left behind would have heated a hundred homes. Now it sheltered the bodies of the dead.
Amidst the peat mounds, dark shapes littered the ground. From this distance, they weren’t obviously bodies. But they weren’t rocks either.
Her heart had leapt when Chris told her of his resolve to rescue Eroll, but deep down, she had known this was a fool’s errand. Even if Eroll had somehow survived the attack, what he couldn’t have survived was the exposure and blood loss. After all this risk, they would find him dead, if they found him at all. It was time for her to face that.
At her side, Quinnon rumbled. “I don’t like this. We’ve had Koraudians on our trail since dawn. If we get off our horses to start hunting amongst the dead, we’re prime targets.”
Chris lowered his spyglass. “We came this far. I’m not stopping now.”
Quinnon grunted. “Never said we should stop. All I said was I didn’t like it.”
A rancid taste filled the back of her throat. “I don’t like it either.” She looked over her shoulder. The Northfall stretched out behind them, its tree-lined banks unruly in the wind. The ghost of a wail floated to her ears, and she stiffened. “Did you hear that?”
Both men looked at her.
“Hear what?” Chris asked.
She tilted her head away from the wind and listened. “Sounded like a . . . horse, perhaps.”
Behind her, Canard Yemas said, “Could be anybody. Farmer, or a traveling merchant.”
She nodded. She wasn’t certain how he’d ended up in this detail. After the laxness Yemas had displayed during their audience with Crofton Steadman back in Réon Couteau, they had investigated his Nateros sympathies without finding anything conclusive. He had been shipped down to the Aiden weeks ago, and that’s where she had intended him to stay. But she had never gotten around to telling Quinnon to transfer him from her personal guard.
Chris snapped his glass shut. “I don’t see anything threatening down there. Just bodies. But let’s get this done as fast as we can.” He glanced at her. “You want to stay here?”
If he had known her a little better, he probably wouldn’t have bothered to ask, just as Quinnon hadn’t bothered. But something inside warmed at his attempt to protect her.
She filled her lungs. “I’ve seen death before.”
“But never Eroll.”
“No.” She raised one shoulder the tiniest bit.
“All right, then.” He gestured to the men. “Let’s go.”
They trotted down the hillside into the bluster of the wind. She followed Quinnon and deliberately forced her eyes to register, then pass over the blood-blackened corpses of what had been the most elite soldiers in Thyrian livery.
Halfway across the field, she heard it again. The quivering wail. She had left Rihawn at the Aiden camp to rest, but when her new mount twitched his ears forward, she knew she wasn’t imagining the sound.
She pulled the horse to a stop and tilted her head to listen. Quinnon moved on to inspect a body, half-hidden in the grass, and left her alone in the middle of the field. Gooseflesh chased across the back of her neck. Her pistol had hardly left her hand since the Aiden. Now, she dropped her thumb onto the hammer, and the hydraulics hissed.
In the expanse of trees to her right, a white face flashed. She turned to get a better look.
Straight and tall in his saddle, his leather greatcoat flapping in the wind, a Cherazim male sat upon a chestnut horse. Her breath caught. Why would a Cherazim risk riding alone in an area that had been recently and heavily raided by Koraudians?
She raised her voice. “Quinnon,” But he had moved farther afield, intent on the dead.
She twitched her rein and urged her mount into a trot. As she neared the trees, she could see the medallion buckled to the Cherazim’s baldric. It bore the crest of a Garowai’s extended wing. Recognition slammed into her like a fist. The Cherazim before her now could only be the traitor who had given Chris the Orimere and fed him with lies.
“You—” Only five paces separated them. “How do you come to be here?”
A tic flexed his cheek. Without a word, he lifted his hand to rein back his horse.
Her pistol twitched up to his chest. “Stop.”
He kept going. Behind him, clinging to his baldric, rode two Rievers, stilettos in their free hands. They peered back at her, and one shook his head fervently.
She aimed at the center of the Cherazim’s back, between the Rievers’ heads. “One more step and you’re dead!”
The Cherazim looked over his shoulder, and the dark of his pupils flashed against his pale skin. “You should leave, Searcher.”
One of the Rievers waved his sword to shoo her away. “Please go!”
“Don’t be daft, lady,” the other one said.
The Cherazim’s horse hopped its forequarters over a fallen log.
The deadweight of resolve hurtled through her. But even as she squeezed the trigger and the hammer fell against the firing pin, even as the gun shuddered in her hand and the round that should have killed a traitor jammed and died, she heard two impossible sounds.
In the moors behind: Chris’s voice broke above the wind. “I found him! He’s alive!”
In the trees to her right: the tread of horses rustled through the undergrowth and the battle cry of twenty Koraudians tore through the wind.
So the trailing Koraudians had found them. So it had been a trap. Perhaps both. Her heart gave one hard thump, and heat flooded her limbs.
She left the Cherazim and spun her horse around. She broke from the trees simultaneously with the enemy’s charge. Red tabards filled her vision on either side. Hoofbeats thundered up her spine.
Their triumphant shouts drowned her cry of warning.
Scattered across the meadow, her men turned to look.
On his knees beside Chris, Quinnon bellowed orders, and the men scrambled to horse. Swords loosed, pistols barking, they galloped into the Koraudian charge. Ten paces more, and the lines would collide.
On her left, a Koraudian drew into sight. Two strides carried his horse apace with hers, and, almost as one animal, they leapt a pile of peat bricks. The useless weight of her pistol hung in her hand.
The horses landed, forelegs catching their weight, bodies leaning forward, hind legs plowing into the ground and shoving off. The Koraudian darted a glance from Allara into the face of Canard Yemas.
Yemas stampeded past. His blade disappeared into the Koraudian’s chest and glinted red from his back. As Allara galloped one way and Yemas the other, she glimpsed his face, dark with confusion. He wondered, no doubt, why she hadn’t used the pistol in her hand. Then their horses carried them apart, and he disappeared somewhere in the melee behind.
She galloped to the center of the field where Quinnon and Chris worked over Eroll’s body. He lay, white and unconscious, in front of a hollowed-out peat mound. Had he survived, huddled in there? Her heart twisted.
Before her hor
se had completely stopped, she threw herself from the saddle. “Six men can’t hold twenty for long!” She drew her sword from the scabbard on her saddle and shoved the horse around to stand as a barrier between the men on the ground and the line of Koraudians sweeping across the meadow.
At the Koraudians’ center, the traitor Tarn’s heavy blade scythed through everything, man and beast, that stood in his way. And so he was truly a traitor. He fought not only with the enemies of Lael and the enemies of his people, but against the Gifted and the Searcher.
“Where the devil did he come from?” Quinnon said.
Chris bent over Eroll’s body. With one hand, he shoved a compress against the crusted wound in his back. With the other, he groped for another bandage. “Help me with this!”
The wound had been staunched, badly, with strips of Eroll’s blouse, but at some point, either of its own accord or when Chris and Quinnon pulled him from his hole, the blood had started again.
She dropped to her knees. Her hands flew, passing the strip of muslin over Eroll’s blood-blackened body, then passing it once more. His head lolled on the ground, eyelids limp. A scraggly beard scuffed his usually immaculate cheek. Somehow that broke her heart more than anything.
“Tie it off!” Chris hauled Eroll halfway to his feet.
She yanked the bandage tight and ducked out from under Chris’s arm. Only then did she throw a look over her shoulder. A bare ten paces separated them from the Koraudians. Her men had rallied to present another charge. They would buy her time, and it would cost them their lives.
“Put him on my horse!” Quinnon said. They had brought extra horses to transport Eroll and any other survivors back across the lines, but, in the chaos, they had scattered.
She caught Quinnon’s reins from his hand. The horse skittered, wide-eyed, as Chris and Quinnon hefted Eroll to the saddle. She snatched the bridle and held the animal on all fours by sheer force of will. Chris steadied Eroll as Quinnon leapt on behind and took the reins.
“Get out of here!” Quinnon lashed his horse’s shoulder.
As one, she and Chris swung into their saddles. Behind them, her surviving men wavered in the face of the attack, then turned and fled. The Koraudians laid their heels to their horses in pursuit. Only the Cherazim and an officer held back. The Cherazim’s broad chest heaved, and his sword fell to his side.
Her heart pumped in hot, painful bursts. She could find it in herself to at least respect the Koraudian soldiers. They fought for what they believed. They fought for their country and their people. But this Cherazim could be fighting for nothing worthwhile. The only thing he deserved on this day was death.
She shoved her sword into its sheath and turned her horse.
Chris twisted around in his saddle. “Allara!”
She swept her rifle from her scabbard and raised the stock to her cheek. The God of all willing the distance wouldn’t be too far. Her men stared as the barrel swung around to aim through their fleeing ranks. For just a second she held Yemas in her sights.
“Allara! Move!”
The Koraudians thundered closer. She lifted the rifle to bear on the Cherazim. Her finger closed on the trigger. The gun bucked against her shoulder and spewed its round of death just as the Tarn turned his horse and fled. The shot tore through the empty space where he had been.
Almost before she could look up from her sights, Chris’s hand came down on her rein and hauled her horse around. She leaned over the animal’s churning forequarters, fingers buried in his mane. They topped the ridge in time to see Quinnon angling upriver.
Chris headed for the nearest bank. “This way!”
“Quinnon will need help if Eroll starts bleeding again!”
“You want to put the Koraudians right on their trail?” The force of his gaze pulled her after him.
They entered the shade of the trees, and the horses leapt into the river. Halfway across, the current caught them and swept them downstream. By the time they finally clambered up the far bank, the Koraudians thudded into the trees.
She spurred into a glen a few paces from the bank. The horse skidded down the slope, crunching old leaves underfoot. She winced. Chances were one in a thousand the Koraudians would miss the muddy trail of two horses.
“Where are we?” Chris asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never been here before.” She headed for a craggy bluff to the left. If they could get over the escarpment before the Koraudians crossed the river, they might be able to find enough cover to pass unnoticed.
“Here they come,” he said.
The wind almost drowned out the splash of the Koraudian horses leaving the water.
She and Chris rounded the bluff, and their horses reached the top in a few bounds. Shrouded in the swaying leaf-vines of a hespera tree, they reined to a stop and waited.
Below, leaves crackled under the horses’ feet.
She forced herself to keep breathing. “It was a trap,” she muttered. “They knew we were coming. But why? No one in his right mind would have expected us to retrieve dead men. And even then, why should they care about netting half a dozen Guardsmen?”
The cords in Chris’s neck were tight. “Mactalde must have recognized Eroll. He must have known someone would come after him, and maybe he’s figured out enough about me to know I’m just stupid enough to try it.”
“What are you saying?”
“He knew. That’s why he had Orias here.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe Orias would do this. Even after everything . . .”
A Koraudian stopped almost directly beneath the hespera’s ledge.
She held her breath, her fingers light on the reins. Stay still, stay still.
Both horses cocked their ears toward the sound. The rustle of dead leaves stopped, and the Koraudian sat listening. Beside her, Chris’s hand whitened against the grip of his otherworld pistol. Then the Koraudian’s horse nickered, the sound almost inaudible above the wind. Allara’s mount raised its head. She twitched the rein, but it was too late. Her horse rumbled deep in its throat, barely a whinny, but more than loud enough to be heard.
With a shout, the Koraudian kicked his mount forward. Allara and Chris burst from the curtain of leaf-vines. She took the lead, pounding down a nonexistent trail. The forest deepened, the trees thickened. She kept low, both hands braced against her horse’s neck. From behind, the Koraudians shouted, and she risked a look over her shoulder to check the distance.
“Watch it!” Chris shouted.
A line of green rushed at the side of her head, and the world imploded into darkness.
