“I’m sure we’ll meet again,” she said with a vicious smirk.
She was right. We would.
When I took my husband back.
She turned to leave, her soldiers following.
“Dolion!” Stephanos yelled out, and I heard the hurt, confusion, and anger in his voice.
“Don’t come after us, Stephanos. I don’t want to have to hurt you. And Rokh, if you fly after us, I will shoot you out of the sky.” Dolion brought up the rear of the group as they left.
Then the Carians were all out of sight.
I remembered how that voice had urged me to tell Xander about Dolion and how he had kissed me. If I had listened, if I had done what it directed me to do, my husband would be safe right now.
Now I would have to live with that knowledge.
I could feel him, feel as he was pulled farther and farther away from me. It was like Zalira had said—I could track him. I would be able to find him with this connection. That thought briefly lifted my spirits.
Hope wasn’t lost.
Ahyana came over and put her arms around me.
“I shouldn’t have let him come,” I told her, fighting off tears. “I should have insisted he stay in Troas.”
“We aren’t valuable hostages,” Ahyana said. “She would have just killed us outright. The only reason we’re alive right now is because they only wanted him.”
“She’s going to kill him,” I said.
Rokh said, “No, she won’t. If she planned on killing Xander, she would have done it immediately. Like she said, she needs him alive. She’s going to use him as a bargaining chip.”
Stephanos had his head in his hands. “I am such a fool. Dolion told me to give him all the arrows to carry. He said it would be easier if they were in one spot.”
Zalira went over to him. “You were tricked. We all were.”
Artemisia was the only other person that I’d ever heard use that phrase about women being silent. I had once asked Xander about it, assuming it was Ilionian, but he said it wasn’t.
Because it was a Carian phrase. I thought of how Dolion had made himself seem like a hapless fool, pretending that he was behaving impulsively from one moment to the next when everything he had done had been deliberate and calculating. It hadn’t been an accident that Dolion had come into the room when I was questioning Lysimache. He hadn’t wanted to protect me. He had intended to stop her from giving me too much information. He had come in with his weapon deliberately, knowing what she would do.
Whenever I had watched Xander and his phratry train, the other men were all bare-chested, but Dolion never was.
It must have been because he had that hammer tattoo on his chest.
He had gotten a Sasanian tattoo on his wrist as a misdirection, to hide his true background. It was why Stephanos had assumed the phrase was Sasanian.
That red string I had seen on the tree this morning—Dolion had been leaving them for the Carians so that they could track us.
“We have to go after them,” I said. “We have to get that bridge tied up so we can cross.”
Rokh put his hand on my shoulder. “We can’t. There will be traps. Ambushes. They’ll be expecting us to follow.”
“Then we fight!” I said, wiping away angry tears. “We have to rescue him!”
“We will,” Zalira said. “But you know better than to walk into a trap. There will be another way to get to him.”
I did know better. The problem was I didn’t care. I would turn on my aspect and slaughter every Carian I came across to get him back.
“Let’s stop discussing it,” Ahyana wisely pointed out. “They might be just out of sight listening.”
