by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Thirty-Two
Before Allara even turned to see the tree branch, Chris knew she was going to fall. He hit the ground in a running dismount. His horse shied at her crumpled body, then charged ahead into the trees toward the river. Behind him, the Koraudians crashed through the brush, almost in sight. Barely slowing, he grabbed Allara and rolled both of them over the top of a fallen log.
If the Koraudians saw him dismount, he was dead. If they spotted his trail over the log, he was even more dead. Tucked in the damp shelter of the log, with Allara pressed between him and the moss-covered bark, he held his breath.
They galloped out of the trees, and their thunder reverberated up through the ground into his shoulder and hipbones. They never slowed.
His breath hissed past his lips, and he leaned away from the tree. Allara rolled, boneless, to the ground beside him. Blood threaded her face from a gash near her hairline. She didn’t open her eyes, but a quick check of the pulse in her neck told him she was alive.
They had to get out of here before the Koraudians realized they were chasing riderless horses. Hiding behind a fallen tree would only work once. He got his feet under him and hefted her into his arms.
Behind him, a branch cracked. The carpet of leaves rustled once, then again, and again. Hoofbeats. If it were a lone Koraudian, he’d probably have a better chance trying to fight. He stopped, body poised halfway between running and dropping Allara in favor of his pistol.
A big brown horse trotted into view, reins swinging. Allara’s mount.
He breathed out and started toward the horse. The animal stopped short and stared, ears pointed so far forward they almost touched at the tips. The wind caught at Allara’s long coat, and it scrambled back a step.
“Don’t give me that. This was your fault to start with.”
The horse took one more step back, then froze and looked over its withers. He took advantage of the moment, dropped Allara’s legs, and reached for the reins. The horse jerked its head once but didn’t protest as he hefted Allara into the saddle and swung himself on behind her.
From the rear, hoofbeats pounded. The horse bolted. Chris kept his back straight, the reins short in both hands and Allara braced between his arms. The horse seemed to know where it was going, so he let it choose the path, only directing it when a branch threatened a repeat of Allara’s concussion. The forest blurred past, the trunks interspersed with the fluffy gray hanging moss.
Minutes later, he reemerged at the spot where they had originally crossed the river. When a quick glance upstream showed no sign of Koraudians, he urged the horse into the water and fought the current to reach the opposite bank.
Only once he was beyond the trees and a good mile upriver did he allow the horse to slow to a walk and breathe. With any luck, his head start would be enough to get him back to Quinnon before the Koraudians could find him. He cast a last glance over his shoulder at the sway of the trees.
In his arms, Allara twitched with the first signs of consciousness. He touched her throat and felt the insistent flutter of her pulse. A spark of relief mingled with his concern. She’d be all right. Probably only five or six minutes had passed since she’d blacked out.
He eased a strand of hair away from the laceration, pinched the edges to stop the bleeding, and held it shut. The bump on her forehead had melted that ice-princess mask she liked so much. She wasn’t indomitable any longer; she was vulnerable.
“Where have you been hiding?” The words came out soft, and he found himself admitting what he’d known for weeks now: that with even the slightest nudge, he could fall in love with this woman so irreversibly he would never be able to love again.
It made no sense whatsoever, of course. She was a mess of a person. She frustrated him out of his mind half the time, with her demands and her commands. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would give him—or anybody else, for that matter—an effortless, comfortable relationship. Every day with Allara Katadin was a fight for survival.
But, from the moment he met her, he had known there was more to her than just that. Her defenses might have been stone to others, but to him they were glass. He’d seen the demons she hid in her inner darkness. He’d seen her anger, and he’d known it for fear. And part of him—some instinctual, protective, and probably self-destructive instinct—wanted to shelter her from that fear. He wanted to slay her demons. He wanted to heal her so completely that someday she would wake up and look at him with eyes full of innocence and hope and happiness.
It was impossible nonsense, all of it. That was why he couldn’t let himself fall in love with her. That was why he couldn’t let himself admit he was already in love with her. He snorted softly.
She whimpered, and her eyelids trembled.
He breathed out and waited for her to focus. “You’re okay. Just stay quiet a minute.”
“I . . .” She tried to sit up.
“You got knocked out by a tree branch.”
She closed her eyes. “Koraudians?”
“We’re okay. You slept through all the exciting parts.”
“Oh.”
With the free fingertips on the hand pinching her cut, he smoothed back the sweat-damp tendrils at her forehead. “You should get hit in the head more often.”
She blinked groggily. “What?”
“This is the most cooperative you’ve been since I met you.”
“Oh.” She blinked again.
“How’s your head?”
“Hurts . . .” Her hand fluttered toward her face and stopped short when she found his fingers on her forehead.
“You’ve got a nice gash. Probably a nice concussion to go along with it. I haven’t got anything to use for a dressing right now, but I don’t think it’s that deep.”
“Why is it so cold?”
“Long story. I’ll tell you later, if you don’t remember. Can you tell me what day it is?”
“Um . . . the twenty-fourth of . . .” Her eyes drifted shut. “Hearroen?”
He tried to dig back through what’d learned to figure out if that was right or not, then gave up. “Do you know your name?”
“Allara Katadin.”
“Know mine?”
She opened her eyes. Her pupils were beginning to shrink back to normal. “Chris.” She said it softly, her tongue lingering on the s.
With a little imagination, he could almost believe she said it fondly.
“Yeah.” He smiled. Too bad she couldn’t stay this way all the time—minus the conk in the head, of course. “Still mad at me?”
She shook her head. “I don’t remember.”
“Good.” Whatever it was that had made her push him away that first day in Glen Arden could disappear from her consciousness and he would never miss it.
Two fine lines feathered the skin above her nose. Her brain hadn’t quite rattled back into place.
He held a peace sign in front of her. “How many fingers?”
“Two.” But her gaze didn’t leave his face. “How did we escape the Koraudians back there?”
“I pulled you over a log before they came around the tree. They followed my horse and gave us enough of a head start to get out of there.”
“Oh.” Her new favorite word. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
The fog was beginning to clear. In a moment, the old Allara would be back, hoarfrost and all, and he wouldn’t get another chance to see past her walls. But for now, she just lay there, her head against his shoulder, the blood dark against the pallor of her face.
“Why have you shut me out lately?” He asked the question before he could change his mind. If he wanted a straight answer, his only chance might be now. “What are you afraid of?”
The peace that had filled her face began to seep away. Her lips parted, and when she spoke, her voice was a whisper. “You.”
“You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“Oh, yes, I do actually.” A weariness that was almost sadness deepened her eyes.
Her shoulders tightened against his arm, and she groped for the saddlebow to pull herself upright. She didn’t look at him again. “You can let me down now. I’ll ride behind you. There’s some oronborne in my saddlebags.”
He reined up, and she slid down. While she caught her balance and pressed one hand against the cut on her forehead, he dug out the oronborne. She stood at his stirrup, her hands gripping the saddle, and lifted her face to him, eyes closed. He squirted the paste into the cut and smeared it with his thumb. It burned cold against his skin, and he wiped the excess against his trousers before returning the syringe to the saddlebags.
Then he reached down and pulled her up behind him. She clutched a fist in either side of his jerkin, and at his signal, the horse leaned into a canter. He didn’t ask if she was sure she could handle the ride. Already, her walls were rising back into place.
_________
Hours slipped away to the beat of the horse’s running feet. Allara held herself still and balled what was left of her strength deep inside her body. She rode with her eyes closed and her pounding forehead against the warm leather of Chris’s jerkin. She’d had to encircle his waist with her arms just to keep from falling off, and he’d laid his free hand on top of her wrists.
The pain in her head thrummed with every footfall. Her vision spun in wild circles, and nausea clamped her chest. Her thoughts looped and whirled somewhere in between consciousness and dreams, her mind swimming back and forth between her two bodies, so hopefully she was safe in bed in the other world.
She gripped Chris tighter, and he patted her hand, almost reflexively. The horse slowed. She tilted her head against Chris’s back and eased her eyes open.
The wind whipped at the tendrils of hair come loose from her braid, and her long coat flapped noisily. Dusk was falling early, hastened by the storm. A rim of red underlined the wind-driven clouds, as if someone had dragged the edge of a sword through the sky in an attempt to liberate the sun.
When she opened her mouth to speak, the words lodged in her throat. She swallowed hard, waited for another wave of nausea to pass, then tried again. “Why are we stopping?”
“Thought I heard something.” He let go of her hand and drew his otherworld pistol from one of the two bandoleer holsters against his chest.
She straightened and strained against the pain to see into the trees. Leaves rustled. Something was definitely in there. Even as she prayed for it to be a zajele or a scavenging jiswar vixen, the green tabard of a Guardsman materialized from among the trailing hespera vines. His left shoulder hunched from an old wound.
Air rushed from her lungs. “Quinnon.”
Chris holstered the pistol and urged the horse forward. “I was beginning to think we weren’t going to catch up tonight. How long have you been here?”
Quinnon rubbed a hand up his forehead. “About an hour. We had no choice but to stop and get control of Lord Thyra’s bleeding. Wanted to give you a chance to find us too.”
Chris reined to a stop beside Quinnon. “Any sign of Koraudians?”
“No. But we need to move out and keep moving, soon as we can. I don’t like all these troops we’ve been seeing these last few days, especially after what happened today.” He shook his head. “Could mean things have gone bad back at the Aiden.”
Allara leaned down to grip his shoulder. “What about Eroll? Did you stop the bleeding?”
Quinnon shrugged. “Well, he’s alive. For the time being. Three of the men made it back with me, and we patched him up best we could. But the wound’s bad. I don’t know how he kept it clean as long as he did, but it’s starting to get inflamed. We could have a full-blown infection on our hands in another twenty-four hours.”
Her thoughts flitted around like moths drawn to half a dozen flames. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to focus. “We’ll take him straight to the Wall. That will cut nearly two days off what it would have taken us to get back to the Aiden. We can get treatment at the station at the top, then take him back to Glen Arden by skycar.”
Quinnon scowled at her. “What in the Garowai’s eye happened to you?”
“Ran afoul of a tree.” She shook her head. She didn’t want to explain.
He turned on Chris. “Lost a horse too, I see.” He made a disgusted noise that she knew was mingled frustration and relief. “Come on into camp.” He held aside the trailing veil of leaf-vines and frowned up at her. “And get off that horse before you fall off and somebody has to carry you.”
They entered the campsite, where Yemas and two other Guardsmen huddled around Eroll’s prone body. One, his arm in a sling, rummaged cold rations out of his saddlebags, while Yemas and the other lashed a canvas bedroll between two fresh-cut branches to make a litter. Yemas looked up at her and a strange expression edged his mouth. Anger?
She leaned against Quinnon and slid to the ground. He steadied her until the world stopped spinning and she could think past the throbbing in her head. Then she put one foot in front of the other and sank to her knees beside Eroll.
With both hands crossed over his chest, he looked too much like a sarcophagus. She caught one of his hot hands in hers. His eyes flickered once, then drifted closed.
“Oh, Eroll.” If he died, it would cut her heart from her. She’d already grieved his death once. To have him smashed from her life again would be more than she could handle.
Still holding his hand, she scooted back until she could lean against a hespera. Pain, heavy and dark, drummed inside her skull, and the stiffness in her muscles tightened into paralysis. Her every bone felt fractured, every sinew torn.
She looked at Quinnon. “Why would Mactalde move troops away from the Aiden? His quickest way to Glen Arden is up the Karilus Wall.”
“If he can split our troops by forcing us to shunt reinforcements to Ballion, he’ll have fewer of us to fight all the way around.”
Chris tugged loose the horse’s girth. “We beat him the last time around.”
Allara shook her head. “Last time was a drawn battle. Had it not been for you—for the presence of a Gifted—he would have carried the field and won the war in one blow.” She slid her free hand inside the warmth of her coat. “And if this ambush could really have been because he knew you’d come for Eroll . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t like that he could predict our actions so well.” In all honesty, it terrified her.
“What’s this?” Quinnon asked.
“All I said was he knew I was a wild card,” Chris said. “Maybe he guessed I’d rather charge off after Eroll instead of waiting around for another battle. So he took a chance, let one of Eroll’s soldiers escape to bring us the news, and planted an ambush. He didn’t have anything to lose.”
“He lost us,” Quinnon said.
“Barely.”
“Well, losing us once is all it’s going to take. He’s lost us today, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.” Quinnon squatted next to the wounded Guardsman and accepted a muslin-rolled slab of dried whitefish. “Eat and sleep while you can. We’ll stay here for six hours, and that’s it. I don’t care who’s bleeding.” He glanced at Allara.
She managed a nod.
“We’re not going back to the Aiden.” He raised his voice to speak to the others. “We’re heading for the Wall path, and if we push the pace as much as we can while carrying that litter between two horses, we should be able to make it in a day and a half.”
Yemas stood up from the litter. “What about the Koraudians?” He watched Allara. Beneath his carefully blank expression, strong emotion quivered.
What was wrong with him? She knit her brows, then wished she hadn’t. A new wave of pain rolled through her head, and she squinched her eyes shut. When she opened then again, Yemas was still watching.
Quinnon unrolled the whitefish into his hand and bit off a large flake. “The faster we move out of here, the less likely we’ll get caught in the crossfire. Mactalde will have to break through the king’s lines to reach the Wall path, and if he’s as smart as he t
hinks, he won’t even try. Ballion’s where he’s headed. You can bet on it.” He laughed grimly. “But the way won’t be clear before him. The Cherazii guard the dams in those hills, and they’ll open them without thinking twice. Mactalde will come, but only as far as the water lets him. The Cherazii may not be willing to fight with us, but they’ll fight against Mactalde, no question.”
He chomped on the fish, then glared off at nothing. “Why those poor fools of Koraudians want to follow him, I’ll never know. He’ll use them up in this war, and at the end of it, they’ll find themselves under a king just the same as before.”
Yemas was positively trembling. “Following even a fool is better than following a traitor.”
Allara’s eyebrows came together again, and this time she didn’t close her eyes against the pain. Yemas was angry . . . with her. Was this about what happened back in Réon Couteau with Steadman? Was Yemas blaming the war on her father’s refusal to negotiate with Nateros? Or had he realized she was planning to transfer him from her personal guard?
Before she could find the right question to ask, he dropped to his knees and yanked tight the thongs securing the bedroll to the litter frame.
Quinnon drank out of his waterskin and didn’t seem to heed Yemas’s words.
Chris trudged over to her side. He stood over Eroll for a moment, then unfurled his bedroll a few paces off. He lay on his side, his back to her, head cushioned in a pile of leaves.
She had to say something to him. Their conversation after she had woken was foggy, but some niggling in her brain told her she’d said something she shouldn’t have. She’d let him see some part of her he was never meant to see. She wasn’t exactly sure what it was, but the one thing she did remember was the tender look on his face.
She could withstand many things. She’d taught herself to endure pain, death, betrayal, cruelty, hatred. But the one thing that could undo it all was tenderness, especially from him. He would win her heart, and he would break it. Tears welled up from behind her pain-battered defenses, and she shivered.
Perhaps he’d already undone it, already won it, already broken it. She shivered again.
She made herself speak softly, so only he could hear her: “What I said when I woke up this afternoon, I shouldn’t have said it.”
He didn’t roll over to face her. “And what was that?”
“Everything.”
He shifted his weight, and the leaves rustled beneath him. “Are you trying to protect me or yourself? Because, if it’s me, don’t.”
She stared at him through the deepening shadows. Half-formed words caught in her throat. Didn’t he yet understand she had to be the strong one? She was the Searcher. The world was falling apart, and she was supposed to hold it together.
She drew a shaky breath. “Thank you. For what you did today, for saving Eroll. No matter what happens, I mean that with all my heart.”
A long moment passed, so long she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he burrowed deeper into the bedroll, and the leaves rustled again. “You’re welcome.”
