As the day progressed, the black markings on his shoulders and back continued to grow warmer as the Raven Talisman sensed life, a fourth life,separate from him, Tomaz, and the Exile girl, coming closer and closer. There was someone behind them, farther back along the path the Exiles were taking.
The single point of light split into several, and he realized that it wasn’t just one following them. It was many.
Hope sprang into his heart again.
A rescue party. It had to be.
The bright points continued to gain on them. When they were only a mile away at most, the Prince felt half of them separate from the others and move farther to the west, and then pass beyond them, circling around to their front. He and the Exiles were moving through the middle of a wide ravine, with high, rocky slopes on either side. Tall trees that provided perfect cover for an ambush topped the slopes, and stunted trees grew along the path as well, forcing the Exiles to weave back and forth. The horses’ hooves made barely any sound as they walked—the ground was soft dirt covered by a thin layer of fallen leaves that were as skinny and sharp as needles. The day was cloudy, the sun hidden, and everything had an iron gray cast to it that seemed to flatten and wash away the color of the world.
This is it,he thought.They’ve come to bring me back.
He tilted his head under the hood, and his eyes locked onto the girl walking in front of him, calm and unbothered. Beyond her was Tomaz, just visible in the gloom, scouting slowly ahead on his enormous stallion, but not far enough to see the group closing in around them.
The Prince allowed himself a small smile.
He reached out with his mind and felt again the points of light and heat, the sparks of men’s lives, moving slowly with them toward the end of a ravine, which led out into a wide funnel-shaped valley.
And then something strange filtered through the Talisman. He frowned in concentration, but he couldn’t manage to grab onto the feeling. Something whined and shimmered in his mind’s eye, and then slipped away.
The lights began to flicker and bounce oddly. First they were on his right side, then they were on his left, then gone, then up ahead, then above him, which made no sense. He focused harder, and, despite the cold, felt a bead of sweat run down from his temple, trace the line of his jaw, and fall onto his shirt.
Finally, he located the source of the nebulous something, and realized the strange feeling was coming from two points of light that felt different from the others. They felt… wrong. They weren’t bright enough somehow. In fact, it was as if they were only half there.
Why is that familiar?
He’d sensed it somewhere before, but where? His head suddenly throbbed, and an image of the Fortress came to mind… but no, no one in the Fortress felt like that. The Children would stand out even more strongly, like beacons, and Guardians would too, to a lesser extent. No, what he would expect from them was directly at odds with this strange sense of hollowness, as if the lights had been shrouded in the cloaking mask of night.
A sharp whistling filled the air from all directions, and immediately both Exiles converged on the Prince. His horse panicked, and he fell off, once more sliding down the side of the beast. As he fell, his hood was yanked away from his face by two somethings he couldn’t see.
He cried out through the gag, his stomach lurching as he swung off the side of the horse. Tomaz grabbed him, and with two quick flashes of a dagger, cut the ropes holding him in place. The Prince dropped free and fell to the ground in a heap as Tomaz whirled away on his black stallion.
More dark streaks shot through the air. Two of them struck the Prince’s horse and it shrieked in pain and surprise, the sound deafeningly loud.
“They’re on both sides!” the girl yelled. Another dark, blurred shape streaked past the Prince’s face, stinging the bridge of his nose, and he recoiled in shock. He crab-walked backwards as quickly as he could up the side of the small valley and ducked behind a large bush between two trees. His hand landed on one of the black streaks and he picked it up: it was a small arrow, both head and shaft painted black, with black raven’s feathers for fletching.
His mind flashed back to the blackened dart the Exile girl had pulled from his neck, with its hollow points. He made the connection and felt again the two wavering less-than-human points of light, just before they dimmed even further and then faded completely from his mind.
“Death Watchmen,” he gasped.
It wasn’t a rescue party. It was an assassination.
His daze was interrupted when a man dressed all in black with a drawn short sword burst into view from the foliage on the side of the ravine. The Prince stood and motioned for the man to halt, pulling himself up to his full height and assuming an imperious stance.
“Stop!” he commanded.
The man ignored him and slashed at his head.
“I am the Prince of Ravens—I order you to stop!”
The man swung again, just missing the Prince’s outstretched hand. The Prince, out of pure alarm, sidestepped, and the man’s own weight sent him sprawling through the bushes behind them. There was the sound of him hitting something, the crack of a branch breaking, and then a fading shriek. In alarm, the Prince plunged through the bushes after the man, and immediately pulled up short, only just managing to stop himself before he fell headfirst into a hidden chasm, an ugly five-foot wide gap of black emptiness where the ground and the side of the valley ravine should have met.
More arrows shot past his head, striking the ravine wall. He quickly ducked and moved back toward the valley floor, diving behind a tree just as a blackmetal arrowhead hissed through where he had been not a second before. The sound of steel on steel came from in front of him—he rounded the tree to see the giant engaged with a group of men in black farther down the funnel-shaped valley, using the limited space to force his attackers to engage him two by two. No doubt the high ravine walls amplified the sound of their weapons, but the battle still looked extremely fearsome to the Prince’s eyes.
Tomaz’s cloak had been thrown back and the shirt underneath had been ripped and torn by arrows. Through the tears the Prince could see strange glints and flashes of silver—and with a start of surprise he realized that the giant had been wearing a concealed layer of armor beneath his clothing all this time. A large, hastily donned half helm encompassed his head, protecting the sides and back of his neck as well as the top of his head from the arrows that were still raining down.
But the arrows were thinning. The Exile girl had scaled the stone walls—how, the Prince couldn’t understand—and was dealing swift and silent death to the archers with her two wickedly curved daggers. Her forest-colored clothing blended perfectly with the shadows of the trees, and her long black hair flowed behind her, drinking in the light, wrapping her in a shifting patch of darkness. Aside from brief glimpses, he was only able to track her movement by the shocked cries of the men she came upon like a vengeful spirit.
But these were all ordinary men. Highly trained, but ordinary just the same. Where were the two Death Watchmen, the true Death Watchmen?
