“A Blood Dawn bodes ill,” Mor greeted Lara as she approached. Despite that she’d battled Circines before riding all night, the Raven Queen looked irritatingly fresh. Eagal had returned to her shoulder, and her curly black hair hung in glistening curls down her back. Her plush black fur cloak wasn’t dirty or blood-splattered either. Likewise, her Ravens—one fewer now—didn’t look sweaty and disheveled like Lara and her party did.
“Bad weather doesn’t bother us,” Cailean answered.
Mor cut him an irritated glance. “I wasn’t talking about the weather.” She paused then, her gaze lifting to the sky. “I was hoping we’d get a day or two of travel under our belts before the spirit world closed in … but I sense that won’t be the case.”
Misgiving fluttered through Lara, although she covered it up with a frown. “Well, we’ve survived our first trial.”
Next to Mor, Sablebane gave a derisive snort. “Flesh and blood is much easier to fight than shadows.”
Silence fell then, and Mor met Lara’s eye. However, there was wariness in her gaze, almost as if she wasn’t sure what to make of her. “You did well back there,” she murmured. “I never thought to see the day when a Marav could command corpse candles.”
“I didn’t command them,” Lara corrected her, even as her pulse skittered. Mor’s comment reminded her of the dread that now sat like a brick upon her breastbone, of the fear that everything was about to unravel. “Iaskedthem for help … and they gave it.”
The sun warmed Alar’s face as he walked at the rear of the party.
He was the only one on foot, and so he lagged behind. Not that any of them, Shee or Marav alike, waited for him to catch up, or offered for him to ride with them.
Alar didn’t care. Mor and Lara thought they were putting him in his place by ignoring him, but he was happy enough here, journeying on foot as he’d done for years with the wulvers.
Something tugged deep in his chest then.
The wulvers.
He’d just walked out on them.
There hadn’t been any of his brothers and sisters amongst the band that attacked them the night before. Nonetheless, Lyall and Dolph would be incensed. Wounded.
He’d disappointed them. Again.
Before he’d made that alliance with Lara, he’d had to push his brothers into striving for more. But once he had, Lyall and Dolph’s attitudes had changed. Lyall especially had wanted Duncrag. He’d hoped Alar would turn on his wife shortly after their handfasting and stage a rebellion. He didn’t know their commander had made Lara a promise.
It was a cruel irony. He’d betrayed her, stolen one of her most valuable forts, but it mattered to him that certain lines had never been crossed.
Lara.She couldn’t bear to even look at him now, but he hungered for the barest glimpse of her. It was foolish—and dangerous. The truth was that her proximity unsettled him, as had their argument. The cut on his neck was starting to scab, but it was a reminder of the hate she bore him.
She’d asked him to join them out of necessity and believed he’d agreed for the same reason.
But he hadn’t. He’d done it for her.
They traveled through a narrow glen now, sheer scree-covered sides of mountains, streaked in green, ochre, and grey, rearing up on either side. The Goatfells were magnificent, dwarfing the small band that traveled beneath it.
Alar’s skin prickled as he lifted his gaze to them.
This mountain range reminded him of how insignificant they all were. Kingdoms would rise, shatter, and fall, and power would shift like sand on a beach. But these mountains would stand until the breaking of the world.
The reminder should have unsettled Alar, yet it didn’t.
If anything, it unshackled him. He’d been so driven, for so long, caught up in things that could never last. He’d realized that these past moons in Dulross. He’d thought taking the borderlands for the wulvers would be the end, but it wasn’t. It was merely the beginning of a new story.
One he wouldn’t be part of.
He’d walked free, and although it pained him to cut ties with his wulver kin, he understood this was his path.
And yet, he wasn’t himself today. Whenever he thought about the journey ahead, misgiving pitched in his gut.
Sounds like horse shit to me.Beathan’s coarse voice taunted him then. The Circines chieftain had brutally dismissed Mor’s tale about The Shattered Crown and what was needed to restore balance. Alar now worried that he’d swallowed the Raven Queen’s explanation too readily.
Maybe Beathan was right. Maybe Lara distracted him.
