“How?”Mary demanded, turning on me.“When did a Mereish Sooth touch you?”
I shook my head, more unsettled than I cared to show.
“How are they following me?”I repeated to our prisoner.
The Sooth shook her head in a compulsive shudder and every muscle in her body flared taut.“I don’t know!”
“Then who is it and where are they?”
“Enisca Alamay.Magni.And Inis Hae, the Summoner,” she rattled, her voice weakening.In her compulsion to speak, Ben was not allowing her to breathe.“Coming.Close.”
Summoner.A Sooth Adjacent, like me.As to Enisca—that was a woman’s name.
A piece clicked together in my mind, backed by my sorcery.“Is Enisca Alamay blonde?”
The Sooth stared at me in blank desperation, tears streaming down her face and blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.The sound of her breaths was becoming thicker.
“Are they with the other soldiers you spoke of?”Ben pressed.
“No.”The word was almost inaudible, the tension in the dying mage difficult to watch.
“Ben,” I snapped.“Be gentler.”
My brother muttered something under his breath, but he stepped back.The other Sooth sagged as if a hand had dropped from her throat.
“We need to leave,” Mary said, her voice far calmer than her expression.She stared back downriver.“We’re losing any lead we had.”
Grant nodded reluctantly.“Agreed.But… should we leave her?Alive?”
The Sooth’s legs contorted as she tried to push herself farther away, but there was nowhere to go.“Yes, there is no reason to kill me!Just… leave me as I am.Please.They already know who you are.They will follow you everywhere you go.They find us.That’s what they do.”
“Us?”I repeated.
Her eyes swiveled to me, now filled with haunted desperation.
“Us,” she affirmed in a whisper.“Mages.Mereish or Aeadine, there is little difference.”
My skin crawled.“What else do you know?”
“Nothing.”Her voice was a whimper now, Ben squeezing each word from her.“I’m given orders.I execute them.”
“And I am leaving now,” Grant said, grabbing his and Ben’s muskets and giving us all a flat smile.He caught Mary’s gaze and raised his brows.
She took a step backwards, away from Ben and I, then went to retrieve the saddlebags from where we had dumped them in the snow.
Mary’s departure was like a dash of cold water.I took Ben’s arm— his good one, as the other was limp and soaked with blood.“They are right.We cannot afford to waste time, and you are already injured.”
Ben remained, looking down at the helpless Sooth.“She shot me,” he pointed out, his voice cold again.“I want to kill her.”
“And I shot her.Let usgo.”
I thought Ben would not comply, but he did.Together, the four of us set off, leaving behind the carnage—the soldiers and the mages, some dead, some clinging to life.
“I am going somewhere warm after this,” my brother told me, scrubbing blood from his face as we trudged into the forest.“The Mereish South Isles.I hear it hardly snows.”
I felt myself smile, but there was no emotion to it.“Maybe I will come with you.”
THE SAINTS—Before any intelligent discussion of the Saints may be attempted, we must first differentiate the Saints of Mere from those observed by the world at large.We do not speak of the powerless, logic-bound Saint of the Aeadine, who serves as little more than a sword of conquest and subjugation.We do not speak of the Saints (and gods) of the Usti, whose venerated beings are so numerous and chaotic as to render one another obsolete.
