Mariah still didn’t know what had happened to her parents, and now, before they had even gotten started on their mission, they had been discovered and had soldiers on their trail. For she had no doubt that either Hanas Vasdaf or that archer would be reporting to their superiors as soon as they could and would maybe even be following them. All because she couldn’t contain her curiosity, her longing to see her parents again, for that’s what it really was. She had held out hope that she would see her father again after so long, and after she’d read the letter from her mother, the desire to go home had gotten only stronger.
What does it really matter? I left that life behind eight years ago, didn’t I? I should have just left it in the past. We’ll be lucky if we survive long enough to help even one more child. Her mind drifted to Old Cat Eyes. I knew this was a bad idea. Why did you plant that seed in my head? I should have never come back to this cursed place.
Craning her head around to check on Shira, who was still running hard without showing any signs of fatigue, Mariah dipped, leading her into the dense tree cover that filled the area between Eaglespire and Chagan’s Run. There was a little wooden bridge over the river. Shira thundered across it, and in moments, they were heading west toward the last of the foothills that ran north from the Highlands.
Mariah let the air buoy her up. It sang under her wings as she angled through the trees, shifting from side to side when the passages became too narrow to fly through with her full wingspan. Shira’s growl suddenly brought Mariah circling back around to check on her once again. The bear didn’t stop altogether when she turned but slowed to a lumbering walk, so Mariah adjusted her pace to match it.
Time passed quickly as they continued on, getting ever closer to the foothills and deeper into the forest. The name of the wood tickled the back of her mind, but Mariah couldn’t remember it. She did recall that it was vast but without the dark reputation of Laikos, at least according to Shira. Hopefully, that meant no wolves. The Ceo San of Laikos were the last thing they needed to deal with when they were already running. A dark part of her mind whispered that those same wolves might take care of their soldier problem for them, as they had the owl man’s body. She shook the thought away roughly, her whole body wobbling in flight before she steadied herself.
The sun was at its peak in the whitewashed sky when Shira lumbered to a stop and transformed. Mariah flew down to her, letting the magic flow through her small body, and landed in the snow with her knees bent and on booted human feet. Resting her hands on her hips, she found herself breathing heavily. They hadn’t stopped for hours.
“I’ve got to rest, lady,” Shira said, echoing her thoughts. “I don’t think I have ever moved this far this fast.”
Mariah nodded, still surprised at the exhaustion filling her own bones. She looked around, finding no cover; only bare trees seemed to surround them. About a hundred yards north, she spotted a little copse of tall evergreens, thick with dark needles, and she nodded toward them.
“Do you think you have enough energy left to climb? I want to double back, make sure we’re not being followed.”
“Are you sure? You look beat yourself. And besides, I’m not sure we left anybody behind to follow us,” Shira grumbled. After several quiet moments, she continued in a low murmur, “I mean, I got no love for those that serve the king, but I didn’t mean to … I was just tryin’ to protect you, protect myself. I’ve never … never attacked someone like that, except maybe at that camp.”
Mariah stepped forward and put her arms around Shira. “I know,” she said into her friend’s hair, but it wasn’t sympathy that filled her breast. It was anger. She stepped back and met Shira’s brown eyes. “You remember, we didn’t attack first. All we did was walk out of that inn to be recognized for who and what we are, something we have no control over, and they attacked us. How many others have they attacked and killed without thought? I mean, to think we were sitting near one of them while we were eating, and then he and his people try to hurt us. And according to them, we’re the monsters.”
Shira nodded, but Mariah could still see the conflict on her face in her knitted brows and her tight eyes. “You know, my ma says that we’re blessed. That’s what the Keepers told her when she was training to be a healer, back when I was a babe.”
It was Mariah’s turn to nod. “I know they say that, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. Sometimes, I’d like to be normal …” Shira’s eyebrows climbed high on her forehead, and Mariah continued, “but then I remember what it’s like to soar, to fly. It’s like nothing else. And how I would have never met Gwen or Bria or Xae.” She chuckled when Shira laid a hand on her hip and cocked it to one side. “Or you, of course. If it hadn’t been for my freakish nature, I never would’ve met any of you.”
Although Mariah swore she had seen the glint of tears in Shira’s eyes, the other woman slapped her on the shoulder with a gloved hand and muttered, “I thought you were going to go scout, make sure those thugs aren’t followin’ us. Me, I’m starvin’, but you’ll have to wait to eat until you’ve done your scoutin’.” And with that, Shira changed into a great bear again and lumbered over to the trees Mariah had pointed out. Without hesitation, she slapped both paws onto a wide trunk and began to pull herself up. It was not a graceful climb, but her strength got her bulk more than halfway up the trunk, where she disappeared along a branch and among a thick cluster of dark green needles.
Mariah wondered how she intended to eat like that. Her chest tightened at the possibility that Shira would transform in the tree. What if she fell?
Taking a deep breath, she decided to leave it to her friend, who was usually smarter than she was about these kinds of things. After all, Shira had been transforming all of her life, but Mariah hadn’t even known how a year before. She shook her head and shifted once again, fighting her own exhaustion as she winged back the way they had come, the icy wind slicing across her face and over her feathers as she flew.
* * *
Less than two hours later, Mariah returned to the spot where she had left Shira. Zeroing in on the tree she thought the bear had climbed, she found a gap in the needles to fly through and landed on a rough branch. In the dim light, Shira was just a deeper shadow, and a low, warbling rumble emanated from her. As her eyes adjusted, Mariah saw that Shira, in bear form, had laid her huge form across several adjacent branches and gone to sleep. She was snoring, and not quietly.
Mariah ruffled her feathers in annoyance, and she began to snap her beak at the bear woman. When Shira didn’t stir, the hawk gingerly stepped across the tree’s branches until she reached her. Latching onto bunches of fur with her talons and using her wings for balance, Mariah made her way up the bear’s back until she reached Shira’s ears. She nipped at them until her friend began to moan in protest. Mariah called softly, enough to get Shira’s attention but hopefully not enough to startle her and send them both hurtling toward the ground.
Fortunately, the bear only blinked open her eyes and met Mariah’s gaze. After another moan of complaint, she began to move, and Mariah fluttered up off her back before heading toward the ground. Again, she changed before her feet hit the snow.
“He’s following us,” she said as soon as Shira’s hind feet touched the forest floor. “He’s well out of Eaglespire already and right on our trail. On horseback. He’s covered half the distance already.”
Shira’s sleepy brown eyes, which were almost level with her own blue ones, stared back.
“The soldier, Shira, the one from Eaglespire. He’s following us.”
Letting out a great blowing sigh, Shira turned in the direction they had been traveling in and pulled herself up onto her hind legs. In a gesture that looked decidedly odd coming from a bear, she held a paw out as if to say, “Lead the way.”
Mariah sent her a narrow-eyed glare and started walking. She wanted to fly, to put as much distance between them and their pursuer as possible, but they had
a little while, and they needed a plan.
“I should have known he’d follow us. He’s a soldier. They must be taught how to track people, right? And did you know that you leave huge prints behind you?”
Shira grunted at her but didn’t change and instead kept plodding along behind Mariah.
Mariah didn’t know what else to do, so she kept walking. “You know, he—that soldier from the Rookery—he seemed familiar, but I can’t place him. The maid said his name was Han or something, but I don’t remember anyone named Han. You know, I didn’t really know that many people in the village. My mother wanted me to stay at the house all the time. She was afraid if too many people saw me, they would realize what I was. My father, Magnus, he would send me out once in a while when she wasn’t around, to do things like gather water or buy food, but not often, and Mother always made his ears burn whenever she found out.” She swallowed hard. “It would be really something if I got caught because I was too stupid to stay away, wouldn’t it?”
She stared ahead as she continued to walk, her jaw tight. Grief rose up from her belly, but she pushed it back down, focusing on the task at hand. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about him, Shira. We have to lose him somehow.”
“How far are we from the river?”
Mariah jumped, stumbling. Shira, back in human form, came even with her and grinned. She had startled her on purpose!
“You know,” the woman said, bumping Mariah’s elbow with her own. “I should do that more often. Stay bear, I mean. You never talk that much. I didn’t know you could. Guess ya got no choice when there’s nobody to talk back, eh, hawk breath?”
“At least it’s not bear breath,” Mariah muttered, and resumed walking. “What about the river?”
“Maybe we can cross it. I could probably even swim a ways. He can’t track us through the water, can he?”
“I don’t think so. It’s quite a distance back east.” The thought of Shira swimming through the icy river made her own flesh erupt in goosebumps. “We might run into him before we even reach it.”
Shira nodded and began chewing on her lower lip. Mariah stayed silent, letting her friend think as they navigated the trail, now traveling northwest and angling toward the line where the foothills on the left met the forest on the right. They seemed just beyond the horizon. Her leg muscles felt like liquid, even though it had been her wings keeping her going all morning. She pushed through, hoping the feeling would fade.
Shira suddenly stopped and squatted in the snow, pulling her pack off and digging through it. The maps. Once she had them in hand, Shira plopped down into the snow and began to sort through them until she found the right one. Mariah sat down next to her, air hissing through her teeth as the cold of the ground quickly seeped through her cloak and all the way up her spine.
“Here, this one.” Shira handed Mariah a map and stuffed the remaining papers back in her pack before snatching it back and spreading it in her lap. “I thought so,” she said, jabbing the map with her finger. “See, we’re in the Foxgrove. There’s a little lake, Sanden Pond, right here.” Her finger moved west and landed on a little circle. The pond lay at the base of the mountains and was connected to Chagan’s Run by another smaller river. “We could head to that stream. If we keep moving, we might be able to stay ahead of him and then lose him there. He’s got to rest his horse, right?”
Mariah stayed silent, trying to pretend she wasn’t already tired to the bone from their earlier flight. She would keep going however long she needed to. She’d done it before, and she would do it again.
“Plus, it looks like the Chagan bends west a bit up here. You could keep an eye out from above, figure out the most direct route to get us to the water.” She pointed again, and Mariah pulled the map away from her, studying it.
“You can’t swim in the Chagan, Shira.”
“Why not? I’m a great swimmer. Proved it up in Jadenmere every summer. Just ask my—”
“Shira!” Mariah pointed to the map herself and traced Chagan’s Run to its discharge in Kilgereen. “The river flows south. You’d have to swim against the current. Unless you want to go back to Eaglespire?”
Shira’s mouth hung open for a moment before she snapped it shut. “Well, we’ll just have to cross then, either the Chagan or that other stream.”
“But where are we going? We didn’t plan further than Eaglespire. I guess I was hoping my parents would still be there, that they would help us get started.”
Shira folded the map and tapped it on her thigh. “I know you don’t want to. Gods, I don’t want to, but we gotta start somewhere, and it just makes sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“Laikos. We have to start with the wolves.”
Mariah’s heart felt like a stone in her chest, but before she could respond, Shira continued.
“We find Ruby. Maybe send her back into Kannuk. She knows where the temple is, and maybe she can talk to that Keeper of yours and see what’s up. Then, the two of us can head to Direstrand, maybe Falmermere. My papa has an old cabin there, but there’s others. Maybe I could get a message to him, and he can start something in Westholde—”
“Shira! Wait!” She took a deep breath. “Ruby can’t do anything without permission from Loleon. You know that.”
Shira’s growl came from something other than a human throat. “We’ll just have to find a way around Loleon.” Twice, the alpha of the Laikos wolves had forced the bear woman into a binding, a blood oath that bound her to do what he required. The first had made Shira keep the secret of their presence in Laikos. During their quest into the drudge camp, only Ruby’s knowledge of how to manipulate the second binding had kept Shira from ignoring the children and saving Loleon’s brother Faylan instead.
Getting around the alpha was going to be easier said than done. “If we can convince him that he has a stake in this, too, maybe he’ll help willingly.” Mariah didn’t think so, but hope was all she had. “I’m sure he’d be happy to undermine the king at the least.”
“I don’t care whether he’s willin’ or not,” Shira replied. “We’ll take Ruby from them if we have to. She’s pretty much a child herself, even if she doesn’t act like one.”
Mariah agreed, but she wasn’t sure the omega wolf would be willing to leave her pack. In any case, they couldn’t ignore the wolves. Shira was right about that at least. They were the largest—maybe the only—group of organized Ceo San she knew of. At least, they were if she could consider a pack of people who had been living like wild animals for years on end organized. Ruby had been so accustomed to that kind of life that she had refused to go inside the temple in Kannuk. Being under any kind of roof had seemed to frighten her. She must have lived in those woods her whole life.
“All right. We’ll give it a shot.” First, they would lose the soldier, and then they would head to Laikos. She was not hopeful. Thinking about the wolves and their pursuer, Mariah for the first time admitted to herself that their whole quest to save the Ceo San children of Varidian might turn out to be an utter failure.
Unbidden, quiet words whispered through her mind.
You, Mariah, will be our emissary. The Ceo San need a leader, a leader to break them free of the slavery that Rothgar has imposed so that they may fulfill their purpose.
Mariah shuddered as the memory flowed through her. Old Cat Eyes.
Chapter Ten
Trap
They resumed moving, but they had already lost more time resting and planning than Mariah had intended. As Shira began trotting northward on all fours, Mariah rose into the air and saw that the winter sun was already midway down the horizon. They had only a couple of hours left until the land would be consumed by darkness and bitter cold.
Still, she had time to scout. Shira would have to run full out to keep up with her, and Mariah didn’t think she was up to that again so soon, even after her rest. She thought sh
e noticed a hitch in the bear’s gait. Was her old injury acting up?
Dread crept into Mariah’s veins when she spotted her pursuer’s horse only a quarter of an hour behind them. He was moving at a canter and steadily gaining ground. Shira’s tracks, especially from her large, long back feet, were just too clear in the snow. Hoping the scattered tracks at the resting spot where the women had moved about and transformed would confuse the man, Mariah silently tipped one wing up and turned back, picking up as much speed as she could.
A short time later, she passed over Shira, who was still jogging through the trees with her powerful, lumbering gait. Mariah dipped down and, instead of scouting further ahead, began to look for places to hide.
* * *
It was fully dark when she found herself waiting in the cold, with her back pressed up against the northwest side of a tall outcropping of boulders. Mariah thanked the gods that the moon wasn’t shining, although the chilly night made her fingers ache inside her gloves. Hand on the hilt of the short sword at her waist, she waited. Shira had argued that she should be holding a rock instead, a small boulder large enough to knock the man out.
“I don’t want to kill him if I don’t have to,” Mariah had growled.
“Why not?” Shira asked. “He’d kill us as soon as look at us. Have you forgotten who he works for?”
“Of course not,” Mariah said, but she had no desire to repeat the incident with the owl man, especially with someone who technically had not even raised a hand against her … yet. And he hadn’t attacked them back in Eaglespire but had chosen instead to help the innkeeper. It made her question his motives, and when Shira let the argument go easily, Mariah realized that killing the man wasn’t really her desire either, but neither of them wanted to be captured or killed themselves. If it came down to it, they would do what they needed to do. No regrets this time. I cannot feel bad for someone who believes that the king’s power is more important than our freedom.
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