Benedict’s voice cut through my pondering.“Meet me in Ostchen when you have made up your minds.”
He abruptly spurred his horse down the churned road then off into one of the flooded fields.The sound of cracking ice and sloshing water drifted to us, loud in the twilight hush, but the water was no deeper than the horse’s fetlocks.
Sam let out a long breath and gathered his reins, while Charles promptly followed Benedict across the flooded fields.I nudged my horse after him, grateful to leave the forest and its shadows behind.
“What are you thinking about?”I asked Samuel as we guided our mounts carefully down the road.
“I am wondering if Ben was worth saving,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear.“Worth putting you through this.”
I sat back in my saddle as our horses descended into the field.Icy water splashed up onto the hem of my robe, adding to an already substantial rime of ice and mud.
“I chose to come with you,” I reminded him.“You can’t think like this, not now—”
“I can and must.”He seemed to catch himself and grimaced.Beneath him, his horse dutifully picked her way through the ice, seemingly resigned to the discomfort.“I am sorry, Mary.I am tired and overburdened.”
His honesty cut me to the bone.I leaned over the gap between our horses and snagged his hand, holding it tightly.He gripped mine back, and for a moment we were quiet, our breaths steaming in the chill.
Ahead, Benedict and Charles closed on the bridge.Their forms were growing harder to see, the Winter Sea’s rapid dusk cloaking the already gloomy landscape.
“If the healer-mage at the Oruse didn’t have a cure, where can we look next?”I asked, releasing his hand as my horse navigated a deeper section and I swayed in the saddle.
“Nowhere.”The word was like a closing door, firm and final.“We must put that behind us.We make for Ostchen.ReclaimHart.And then sail for safe waters.That is all that matters.”
The shadows that were Ben and Charles had reached the bridge, or as near as they could with the deeper floodwaters.On a quiet day their voices might have reached us, but the rush of the water and the sweep of the wind tore them away.
I fought the urge to look back at the trees again.
“Surely there will be healer-mages in Ostchen,” I said.“There is still hope.”
“Hope will only endanger us.We focus on finding our ship and crew and escaping with our lives,” he countered, a fresh hardness in his voice that warned me he was finished with the conversation.Abruptly, he twisted in his saddle.“Someone is following us.”
I turned just in time to see a flash in the gloom.The crack of a musket reverberated at the same moment, echoing and overloud, yet distorted by the rain and fog.
My horse startled and reared.I hit the frigid water an instant later, rolling, twisting away from a cacophony of pounding hooves.Dirty water filled my mouth and ears, ice scratched at my face, then I found my hands and knees.
I tried to stagger upright, but my sodden robes dragged me back down.I tore at my belt, loosing it with shaking fingers, and snapped one of the hidden ties that bound the garment closed.Distantly, I was aware that my horse had bolted—one set of splashing, pounding hooves fading while a dozen others closed.
“Mary!”Samuel’s boots landed beside me.I could hardly make him out, but his voice, his presence, that I knew.
His bigger hands grabbed at my sodden robe, snapping the last ties.He pulled the soaked garment off my shoulders, took my hands, and I lunged upright.
His horse, too, must have fled.But the splash and pound of hooves still came to us, ever closer—not at a gallop now, but a more inexorable pace.Another musket cracked in the night, and I heard a voice shout some command.
“Fuck,” Samuel hissed, one arm around me, the whites of his eyes pale in the darkness as he stared back.“Hae is with them.”
“Not dead, then,” I wheezed.
“Mary!”Charles’s voice shouted up ahead.
I grabbed Samuel by the robes and urged him forward.One of my legs nearly buckled, numbed by my fall and the cold, but we steadied one another as we raced towards Charles’s voice.
A shadow peeled from the twilight—a man on horseback, robed and looming, coming not from the forest but the river.
Benedict reined in as he passed us and turned about, placing his horse between us and our oncoming pursuers.He lifted his chin and exhaled a long breath of steam, closing his eyes.
Another musket cracked, followed by a scream of shock and pain.Then another shot, and another.
Our pursuers were shooting one another.
