She gave a shaky nod and accepted the offered items before disappearing through the flap.
Venick paced. His boots squelched wetly with river water, his heart thrumming the way it did, sometimes, before a fight. He didn’t know what he was thinking. He wasn’t even sure hewasthinking. His heart continued its insistent pounding, his angst morphing into something like dread. Beside him, Branton was staring at the tent with an odd expression on his usually blank face. “Did she really swim here?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Where is her horse?”
She didn’t have a horse, Venick realized. That silver mountain she’d been riding wasn’t really hers, just one of the army’s many. If Ellina had left the stallion in Igor’s stables, anyone would have been free to claim him. Venick should have thought of that, but never in a million years had he considered that Ellina might decide to stay behind, only to change her mind, find herself without a steed, and choose the river instead.
“Did she know that our army planned to follow the Taro?” Artis asked softly, coming to stand on Venick’s other side.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t discussed.”
“So she took a guess about the path we would take,” Branton said. “And without a horse, she figured the river’s current would carry her faster than she could travel on foot.” He sounded impressed.
Venick stopped pacing. He didn’t understand Branton’s approval. Venick felt sick.
“At least it was the Taro,” Artis said, seeing Venick’s agitation. “The Taro is a hot spring.”
As if that was supposed to make him feel better. Sure, fine, Ellina hadn’t frozen within the first few minutes of her journey, but they’d been on the road for days. She couldn’t have swam that far from Igor nonstop. She would have exited the water at various points to rest. Venick imagined her pulling herself up the Taro’s rocky bank, trembling from cold and fatigue, alone on the winter plains without so much as a bit of flint to start a fire…if she’d even bothered to light one.
She’s not stupid.
Venick gave a hoarse laugh. Branton and Artis glanced at him worryingly.
She’s survived this far.
They could thank the gods for that, or some impossible stroke of fortune. Not Ellina’s own planning. Not her will or her smarts. Hell and damn, she used to be smart, but this stunt went beyond stupid, beyond anything Venick could comprehend.
He listened for her inside the tent and heard nothing. “Ellina?”
No answer.
Venick called once more. Still nothing.
His worry was eating its way down his arms. His veins looked huge on the backs of his hands.
She’s fine.
She was so clearly notfine.
She’ll come out when she’s ready.
But Venick recalled the look on Ellina’s face when they’d walked her through the camp, some anguish in her eyes that he didn’t understand.
He couldn’t take it. He pushed inside the tent.
She was there, standing quietly beside his bedroll, looking no less rigid but now partway dry and dressed in his things. His shirt was too big on her. The trousers were secured with an extra coil of rope. She held the water jug in one hand and the cheese in the other, but it didn’t look as if she’d touched either item. Her fingernails were distinctly blue.
Venick took the objects from her weak grasp and set them aside. He touched her shoulder, and when this failed to elicit a response, he cupped her jaw, rubbed his thumb across her cheek. She raised her eyes. They were no longer vacant, but swimming with tears.
Her pain. The sight of it, like a wound to the gut.
“I don’t want to push,” Venick started, trying to find a way to speak without allowing his own growing anxiety to hijack the situation, “but I just don’t understand. I thought you’d chosen to stay behind. You were going back to Parith with Traegar, but now you’re here, and you swam the whole way and—” He brought both hands to cup her face, his gaze darting between her eyes. “Something happened. Please, tell me what happened.”
She was shaking again, and not just from the cold. Her eyes were shining pools.Dourin,she mouthed.
A fresh wave of dread. “He isn’t…?”
