“We have these small blessings,” said Amris.
“Not much chance of others, it seems.”
* * *
Grass bent under Darya’s feet. Sticks crunched—occasionally, not often. She was good in the forest. Her precautions didn’t really matter, not with Amris doing his soldierly and heavily armored best, but habit was habit. Besides, caution took her mind off her anger, which kept her from fuming as much as she would have otherwise—though not, by any means, completely.
The hell of it was, Gerant wasn’t wrong.
She’d never asked for the bigger picture. The past was interesting. The present moment commanded attention, and was often thrilling. The future, beyond the next mission, was speculation, and she didn’t speculate, didn’t take an interest in speculating. If Gerant had spoken up a month ago and asked if she’d wanted to know whatmightbe happening out far beyond the border, what the remnants of Thyran’s armymighthave gotten up to since the storms, she’d have shrugged:Get it off your nonexistent chest if you want.
So.
There was an irritating lack of rabbits, streams with fish in them, or even decent-sized birds—though Darya expected she might be eating crow before the day was out. It would have been nice to vent herself on a target, but then it would have been nice to have a horse, and not to have a resurgent army attacking in the near future, and to have an arse-high stack of gold and a goblet of chilled wine.
She scowled at a beech.
Could she, could anyone, have done more with the information? Darya didn’t know. She didn’t know that they couldn’t, was the point, and neither had Gerant or the rest of the Concilio Adeptas. If their theories had been common knowledge among the Sentinels, maybe someone would have had a bright idea about how to scout, or a better way to defend, or a method of assassination that would work.
Maybe she was just looking back and thinking,If things had been different, things could have been different, which was a typical mortal thing to do—but shewasmortal.
That was the other part of the reason for her mood, Darya realized as she picked her way down a hillside. She was the outsider, ill-informed about the threat facing them, as well as the awkward spectator to a relationship formed, likely, more than seventy years before her parents had met. Reconciling herself to that was a light enough task when she couldn’t blame anyone for it. Gerant keeping information from her was just similar enough to sting—and just different enough that she’d howled about it.
Darya started to sigh.
She stopped her breath mid-exhale, froze in place, and peered through the trees and shadows ahead of her.
There, still mostly hidden by branches, were shapes on the road. Two were horses. Five were not.
Chapter 18
Darya had been glad to be in the forest and away from Klaishil. When she figured out where Thyran’s scouts were heading, she changed her mind quickly. She’d have given any part of her body or soul to be back in a city, with its profusion of alleys to duck down and buildings to hide in.
Without any power showing up to make such a trade, she fell back on her own senses and searched frantically for cover. A little way back along the path, up a small embankment, plants and saplings had grown around and over an immense fallen tree, making a small and uneven wall in the middle of the forest. Darya tapped Amris’s arm, pointed, then made a dash for it.
From the moment she bolted, she didn’t feel a thing. It was only once she’d thrown herself to the ground behind cover, and really once Amris had settled himself beside her, that her face started stinging. Darya touched her forehead, then the bridge of her nose, then the side of her cheek cautiously, and winced each time. When she drew her hand back, it was faintly smeared with red.
Brambles, said Gerant.I’d have warned you, but it seemed unimportant, and you were unlikely to heed.
Both were true. Darya didn’t want to speak aloud, so she nodded. Then she lay on the ground, hand on her sword, listening to the sounds on the path and trying not to breathe loudly.
As her vision cleared, she sighted gaps in her cover, spaces between the tree’s branches where the plants were sparse enough to give her some view of the path. She didn’t think she and Amris were visible from the path, even if the scouts did think to look up, so she adjusted her position enough to see through the space with the best view, leaving room to one side of her.
The better view we all get now, the less we’ll have to explain later, said Gerant.
Without a word, Amris took the rest of the peephole. Side by side, they waited there to see what came along.
* * *
Amris had never been a scout and rarely a sentry. Men of his strength were more useful on the front lines; men of his size tended to be easy to spot, no matter how much training they had. Since meeting Darya, he’d spent more time hiding and watching than he’d done since he’d hunted rabbits on his father’s farm, when he’d been a gawky, spotty lad and the name Thyran unheard save for gruesome tales in Heliodar.
That boy had been better suited to the task. Better dressed for it too. Amris was doing his best to ignore his armor, which hadn’t been made to support his weight this way, and certainly not to do so comfortably. He used his elbows as much as he could, and even so suspected he’d be a solid bruise from neck to waist that night.
There were worse fates.
He felt the weight of the sword at his waist and knew exactly how long it would take him to reach and draw. He felt the damp earth beneath him and knew how long it would take him to be on his feet again—roll back and up, away from both the log and any weapons aimed at him, sweep a leg backward, fall into a defensive stance. He felt Darya beside him, both their bodies brushing against each other, and the lighter presence of the spell, and knew she could make it upright faster than he could.
The contact was pleasant in a more than tactical manner, too, especially with danger heightening all Amris’s senses. Neither of them had bared much skin, and that was just as well; there was enough sensation where their clothed legs touched. After three days on the road, neither of them smelled wonderful, but lying close to Darya was far less of an ordeal, in some ways, than it would have been with anyone else Amris could think of.
