by T L Greylock
It was a breathtaking image and Albus could understand how a person who wanted to believe in such things could succumb to it. But for him, the hair on his arms stood on edge not because he saw living gods before him, but because he saw the destruction of his home in their shadow.
Chapter Thirty
“Because I had brothers.”
It was the wolves that brought Manon to her feet.
The long, undulating howl raised the hairs on the back of her neck and the answering cry had Luca reaching for the knife at his hip as they both searched for the origin of the sound.
But it was the sound of far off hooves that had Manon rushing to her horse and heaving the saddle up onto its back, her movement made awkward by the reliquary tucked in the crook of her elbow and pressed hard against her ribs. With the saddle secured, Manon shoved the reliquary in the saddlebag and made to mount, but a sharp tug on her cloak sent her sprawling to the ground, the breath fleeing from her lungs.
Justina stood over her, her intent written in the fierceness in her eyes and the tautness of the cords in her neck. With one swift movement, she freed her bow and nocked an arrow on the string.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the huntress said.
Manon never had the chance to decide if she thought her fire could beat the woman’s arrow. A lean grey shape charged into the stone circle and leaped—not at Justina, not a Manon, but at Luca, who stood between it and the other horse.
The hunter tried to dodge, catching the wolf on his shoulder instead of full on in the chest. Three more wolves, teeth bared in silent snarls, stalked into the circle, watching their pack mate crouch in front of Luca, who had regained his balance, and Manon caught a glimpse from the corner of her eye of more grey shadows.
Taking advantage of the stand off, Manon got to her feet and flung herself at her horse once more. Justina got there at the same time and they wrestled each other to the ground. Manon fell hard on her elbow and cried out in pain, a cry Justina echoed a moment later when Manon caught her with an forearm to the throat.
Voices shouted in the distance, men urging their horses to greater speed, and as Justina pushed Manon’s face into the dirt, she saw the rest of the hunting party arrive, a blur of hooves and horse tails, barely seen through the blades of grass masking Manon’s sight. The horses shied from the wolves, but stood their ground, and the wolves, driven to a frenzy at the sight of the men, circled together, forming a tight group behind Manon. Flinging out an arm, Manon summoned the spark in her ribs with a desperation she had rarely felt. Without the aid of the powdered white Carrier substance, her range and strength was limited, but with a cry, she sent a burst of flames across the circle toward the group of mounted men. The horses reared back as the grass blazed to life. The flames, hot and hungry, licked their way to the sky, forming a temporary barrier. Another burst of flame at the wolves sent the stone circle into chaos.
Justina, caught with a shower of sparks, rolled away from Manon, who scrambled to her feet and vaulted into her saddle. The mare, eyes rolling wildly, half-reared, forcing Manon to cling precariously until she could find the second stirrup and take a grip on the loose reins. The wolves snarled and barked and one leaped through the flames at Justina. The horse settled beneath Manon—and then bolted.
The windswept plateau was a blur beneath the horse’s hooves as its instinct drove it away from danger. Manon bent low over the horse’s neck, as much for her own preservation as to keep out of the wind. Still, the wind whipped tears from her eyes and she had little sense of direction or distance until at last the horse slowed enough for Manon to regain control. She turned it, trying to catch a glimpse of the stone circle, but other than a faint tendril of smoke from the burning grass, she could make out nothing. The horse had raced inland, taking her away from the pounding sea, and the sudden silence was startling—and all the more crushing because it allowed Manon a moment to think.
And she had only one thought: Luca.
She had left him—well, the horse had left him and not given Manon much choice in the matter—and he would certainly be arrested, once the wolves were chased away or killed and order was restored within the stones. What followed only the Principe could have said with any certainty, but that alone was enough to knot Manon’s stomach.
And yet…she was free. There was no time to ponder the fate of a near stranger. She had far too many troublesome things weighing her down to take on that burden.
Manon turned the mare once more, angling her in a northeasterly direction. To Arconia.
***
Or she tried to head to Arconia.
But come nightfall, for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom, much less put words to, Manon was wading through a boggy pond, crouching among tall reeds and cottontails and breathing in the occasional insect. Beyond the muddy shore ahead of her flickered the light of a campfire. And somewhere within that firelight, hopefully conscious, almost certainly with his hands bound, was a moderately irritating hunter.
She could not have said, as she rode the mare far from the stone circle, which of the many thoughts roiling through her mind was the one that ultimately prompted her to turn the horse around. But of one thing she was sure—the moment she did so, her mind went quiet and stayed that way.
She had traced her route back toward the stone circle, but short of reaching the stones, she had turned more sharply south, trying to cut off some of the distance and assuming the master hunter and his band had followed the same track she had taken from the lodge. If she could catch them by the time they reached the ruins, she would be on territory she had passed through after taking the coastal road from Licenza. If she did not, she would be forced to try to find their tracks, for she did not know where the Principe’s residence lay within the massive estate of Pontevellio.
She did not catch them.
Cursing as she dismounted within sight—diminishing sight, given how low the sun hung in the sky—of the burned lodge, Manon had paced back and forth, the mare watching her nervously as she tried to determine how to proceed. The band of hunters had not remained on the path, that much even Manon, who had never tracked an animal in her life, could ascertain. The soft earth of the coastal path was marred by only one set of hoof prints—her own from the previous day.
The trodden-down grass of the clearing was a quagmire of mud and distorted tracks, but as she had increased the range of her search behind the ruined lodge, she stumbled upon a fallen branch hidden in the underbrush. Righting herself before she plunged face-first to the earth, she noticed the first clear hoof print—and then a second and a third. Beyond that, the prints were a tangled mess and were quickly swallowed up by the thick layer of growth on the forest floor, but it was enough. Returning to her horse, Manon had mounted once more, her legs, unaccustomed to riding such distances, protesting every move. She guided the horse along the edge of the burned timbers of the lodge, the scent of smoke and ash still strong in her nose, and then—slowly, carefully, lest she lose the way—continued in pursuit of the hunters.
Pursuit which ended with Manon up to her thighs in a swamp.
She paused, watching, waiting, trying to discern movement. Though the faint sound of voices reached her, she could see nothing. She crept closer, then felt the treacherous ground beneath her boots begin to slope downward. Manon grimaced, having hoped to avoid a true swim. But the pond provided more cover for her approach than trees, and so she lowered herself to her chin and began to glide through the water.
When she reached the shallows on the shore closest to the camp, she waded in a crouched position, flinching at every wave her movements made in the water around her. The voices ahead of her went quiet and Manon froze, waiting for one of the hunters to appear in the reeds above her, a torch in hand to illuminate—and terminate—her rescue attempt. But after a moment, the low voices resumed and Manon let herself breathe again. She waited, aware that she had not thought past the point of reaching the opposite side of the pond. The spark in her ribs itched for s
ome of the pale powder she had used in her attempt to blow up the Firenzia ship. But the safety of a ranged attack was a luxury she did not have, and so Manon forced her limbs to extract her from the pond and she crawled through a thicket of cottontails until she emerged into a precarious middle ground—outside the firelight but equally removed from the sanctuary of the reeds.
From that vantage point, her stomach plastered to the earth, her hands black with mud, Manon could make out the shapes of three men sitting around the campfire. A fourth stood a short distance away, his hands cupped around a pipe he was trying to coax to life. Another figure was stretched out on the ground, and for a moment Manon thought it to be Luca, but a flicker of light on metal told her it was Justina’s iron foot. Beyond Justina, the horses, six in all, were staked in the darkness. Manon continued to let her gaze rove over the camp, and at last she picked out Luca.
The broad-shouldered hunter sat slumped against a tree trunk at the farthest reaches of the firelight, hardly more than an outline in the darkness. His head hung toward his chest, though whether due to sleep or distress, Manon could not tell.
A cold fear snaked into Manon’s belly, but it was the uncertainty, the lack of control over the situation, that nearly made her turn around and swim back across the pond and disappear into the night. No one would ever know. Luca would never know she had come for him and her courage had failed. She could return to Arconia, hand over the reliquary to the Archduke, and pretend she had never waded through a swamp on the private estate of the Principe of Licenza.
But then a strange thing happened to Manon. As she lay with her cheek pressed to the earth, her heart thudding in her chest, she saw Perrin’s face—just as she had last seen him. Confused, scared. Forsaken by the one person who should have been willing to sacrifice everything for him.
And so Manon stayed, with the thought of Perrin like a spirit over her shoulder, though whether he was admonishing her or encouraging her, Manon could not decide.
The camp grew quiet as one by one the hunters went to sleep—all but one, the pipe smoker. But they were on familiar land, safer than most other stretches of dark forest thanks to the name of the Principe of Licenza, and the pipe smoker sat down close to the dying fire. He stretched his legs out and rested against a fallen log. Manon watched the bowl of his pipe glow and fade, glow and fade with every breath, and then it went dark as it slipped from between his teeth.
Manon waited until she knew her chances were as likely to decline as improve, then stood, having chosen to forgo stealth for speed. If one of the hunters woke up, there was nothing to hide behind. Better to be ready to run than caught in a crouch like a frightened rabbit.
She strode around the edge of the camp, trying to quell the trembling beneath her skin. Luca didn’t stir at her approach, forcing Manon to wake him and hope he didn’t startle and alert the sleepers. He didn’t appear to be injured, though his clothes were dirty and there was a long tear in one of his sleeves. His wrists and ankles were bound with slender cord.
Manon knelt and cautiously placed a hand on his shoulder. When her touch had no effect, she moved her palm to his cheek, his stubble rough against her skin, and he came awake surprisingly gently, to Manon’s intense relief.
His head came up slowly, turning toward the touch, his gaze taking Manon in with sleep-induced confusion, which faded quickly when his eyes focused on her face. She pulled her hand away from his cheek and reached down to where his hands rested in his lap. The knots were too intricate, her fingers too unsteady. Luca lifted his hands and gestured toward the horses, then mouthed the word knife. Nodding, Manon darted between the trees, her feet whispering over pine needles. The horses shifted at her approach, and she came to a halt, hoping their unease would pass quickly. The sixth horse was hers, the pack horse she had hired in Licenza, and after a moment, the gelding dropped his head, his eyes half closing, and the other horses followed his lead. Manon slipped among them, freeing her pack horse and the tall mare Luca had been riding. The gelding shoved his nose into her back as she began to lead them back to Luca, his soft whicker stopping her in her tracks. She dared a glance toward the glowing remains of the campfire, just in time to see the pipe smoker move—but he merely slumped lower against the log.
Manon returned to Luca, who managed to take the reins between his palms while Manon fished in his belongings for a blade. She found two, a large hunting knife with a smaller blade tucked into the sheath. Luca nodded and pointed to the smaller knife, and though Manon might have chosen to trust the brute force offered by the larger one, she discovered the hunter kept his blades in fine condition. Despite its small size, the blade cut through the ropes around Luca’s wrists with minimal effort. She let him take care of the bonds around his ankles, and then they were leading the horses into the dark and Manon, as though a piece of her had remained pressed to the mud on the shore of the pond, realized it was done.
Not a word was exchanged between them until after they collected Manon’s mare from where she had secured it to a tree some distance from the camp. Only after they mounted and rode north did Luca venture to speak.
“Why did you come back?”
It was a long time before Manon answered. The horses trotted onward. A shooting star streaked to the horizon.
“Because I have,” she stopped, cutting herself off. “Because I had brothers.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“You are brave and bold and probably more clever than you should be.”
The de Caraval family estate in the Vachon Valley was exactly as Eska remembered it.
The stately home lay in the embrace of a narrow valley that ran east to west. The hills that rose above it were thick with pines and oaks and birches, lush and green, and a swift stream snaked its way along the valley floor through forest and meadow.
As the party approached, the sound of water grew louder, though the waterfall was buried deep within the cool shade of the trees and out of sight. Eska urged her horse ahead toward the home in which she had spent so many summers.
The valley had taught Eska the silence of an owl’s wings, the cheery call of a wood warbler, and the grace of the speckled trout in its watery kingdom. And patience. Stillness. Quiet. Things the governesses—three in all—in Arconia could not impress upon her. But there, among the pale birch bark and the faces of the wildflowers tilted to the sun and the ceaseless turning of the stars overhead, Eska had learned of peace.
She also hollered from the hilltops and listened to her voice fade into the sunlight, laughed wildly when she splashed through the stream to chase after lightning bugs, and sang songs of her own creation at the top of her lungs—very poorly—while traipsing through the pines.
As she got older, she and her family had begun to spend less time away from Arconia, both as her education became more demanding, her future more promising, and as her mother and father rose in prominence in the governance of the city. As Eska rode into view of the house, it was the first time she had done so in nearly two years.
She had come alone that time, riding through a valley clinging to the last façade of summer. But no amount of peace could shake the image of Alexandre de Minos’s face as it had looked when she rejected his offer of marriage just days before—or the feeling of her own hot tears, shed in private the moment she closed the door with Alexandre standing on the other side. She had thrown herself into the refuge the estate offered, intent on letting the late summer sun and the sound of the stream erode the persistent ache in her chest. She had even climbed to the highest peak the valley had to offer and shouted her confusion and anguish to the sky, but all she managed to do was startle a den of rabbits.
In the end, after a miserable ten days in the place that should have made her happiest, Eska discovered it was only the distractions of Arconia that could mend her. She had immersed herself into her studies and her work, producing an extensive treatise on the ceremonies and rituals of the tribes who had once occupied the mountains between Cancalo and Vienisi and leading t
wo Firenzia expeditions into warmer climes during the winter months—she had, in short, worked herself to what should have been exhaustion. But rather than wear her down, the constant use of her mind had built her up, made her whole again.
To her relief, Eska’s first sight of the two-level house fashioned from blocks of grey-blue stone dredged from the very stream that ran through the valley made her smile.
Smoke rose from behind the caretaker’s house, situated across the meadow and down a narrow dirt path from the main house. Eska turned in her saddle and signaled to Gabriel to have the wagons halt and wait, then she guided her horse through the meadow and around the back of the smaller stone house.
As she expected, the source of the smoke was a rack of fish set above a gently smoldering fire in a stone pit. Eska smiled, thinking of fishing with Master Pietro and learning the unpleasant task of cleaning the fish from Mistress Rosina. A vegetable garden, fenced in against scavenging rabbits and deer, lay beyond the fire pit.
Dismounting, Eska looped her reins over a fence post and walked to the rear door. She made it as far as the stairs before the door swung open and a woman, her cheeks bursting with a smile, stepped out.
“My lady!” she exclaimed.
“Rosina,” Eska said, her own smile widening. “Forgive my unexpected appearance.”
Rosina shook her head. “Nonsense, my lady. This is your home.” She rubbed her hands on her apron, leaving behind a smear of flour. “Let me just fetch the keys.”
The woman disappeared inside, then emerged with a ring of iron keys. “Pietro is looking after his traps,” Rosina said as she and Eska walked around the house, “but he just pruned the hedges the other day and,” she broke off when she saw the wagons and crewmembers waiting at the far end of the meadow. “Oh. You haven’t come with your family?”
“Sadly Mama and Papa are far too busy to enjoy the valley this year,” Eska said. It was the truth, but it had been the truth for nearly a decade and Eska knew Rosina was saddened by the rarity of their visits. “These are men and women of Firenzia Company.” Eska grew serious as they traversed the meadow. “Rosina, one among my party is ill. We’ll put him in my parents’ chamber. I’ll take my own. The others can share the guest rooms.”
