He looked carefully at the house again. At the broken tiles. The collapsed beams. Damn, it was so obvious. The Blue Guards he’d met were both wingless. And bloody arrogant. It would never have occurred to either of them.
“Garet, Jos, fly up, please. Look on the roof.”
The two Mabin soldiers unfurled their wide leathery wings and launched themselves into the sky. It was only a minute before a satisfied voice came floating down. “You’re right, Captain, she went this way.”
Jos landed next to the rest of the squad, Garet a few seconds later. “Looks like the fire tore through the ceiling and then the girl broke through the rest of the way. There’s blood, thick on one of the rafters. I reckon she caught her wing as she fought her way out.” His voice held a reluctant respect.
“And we’re in luck,” Garet added. “There’s a trail. Hard to see from the ground, but from the air….” He shrugged. He didn’t speak much, and they already had the gist.
No wonder the two Blues had been so pissed. She’d made them look like idiots in front of the Chancellor.
And they were idiots. Who the hell sent dogs to scent for someone that could fly?
Tristan clasped his hands behind his back, willing his scales to settle. This was good. The Blues’ ineptness worked in their favor. They couldn’t track her, but the Hawks could. She was alone and injured; it wouldn’t take long.
Fuck, now he had a picture in his head of Nim, hurting and all alone.
He shook it away, but his voice was rough as turned his back on the burned-out ruin. “Mount up, Hawks. Garet, you’re in the air. Find her.”
Chapter Five
The ointments had soothedthe burns down to a dull ache, but she couldn’t do anything about her torn wing muscle. Rest, ice, compression… all things she couldn’t do.
Flying was out. But she could still run.
She had to be in Kaerlud before Thursday. What she would do once she was there, she had no idea, but she knew she had to go. And so, she ran.
And when she couldn’t run anymore, she walked.
Eventually a farmer passed her with a cart laden down with hessian sacks filled with recently harvested barley and offered her a ride. She accepted gratefully, allowing herself to rest among the rough bags, and finally eat her lunch. The fish was cold and oily, the peas grown bitter, and the smell turned her stomach. But she forced it down as she watched the coastal gorse and scrubby blackthorn give way to chalk down land with its rolling hills of springy grasses and the occasional wind-twisted hawthorn tree.
When the farmer reached his turn, she hopped off, thanked him gratefully, and continued to walk. She was used to being on her feet all day, but not like this. Her whole body hurt. And she was travelling far too slowly. Gods, she wished she could fly.
The mileposts at the crossroad showed fifty-four miles to the city. By her reckoning, so long as she only took short breaks, she could walk it in a little less than a day. Two days if she allowed time to sleep, which she would have to do.
It was doable, but only just.
If she’d been able to fly, she could have halved that time. She stretched out her wing, just to test it, and nearly went to her knees as the torn muscles clenched in agony.
She put her head down and carried on walking.
By the time the sun started to sink behind the hills, she had crossed the down lands and entered a stretch of woodland interlaced with little streams and ponds. It would offer her the best chance of finding somewhere to hide, which she needed before it became completely dark.
She left the road and walked a good length into the woods before she found a dense copse of trees that she could rest amongst.
The thick moss and ferns that surrounded her were soft but damp and cold. She wrapped herself tightly in her woolen cloak before sinking down, knees bent, back against a tree, and closed her eyes.
Frogs and nightjars called in the clammy air, and Nim sighed. Was Val sitting in a cell while she sat out in the woods? Was he being tortured? Did he know what Grendel had done?
She shivered, not wanting to think about it.
He was alive. She knew it in every cell of her body. She would find him and figure out some way to get him free. To prove that he was innocent of whatever stupidity he’d been accused of. And then they would both tell Tristan to fuck off.
She groaned softly, wishing she could stop thinking about the man that had abandoned her brother. He sure as hell wasn’t thinking abouther.
It was the sudden shocking destruction of her life—the loss of Papa, Val’s arrest, the attack on their home—that had brought Tristan so powerfully to mind. It was the only explanation. After years of her love for him being a small, unspoken grief, suddenly it was all she could think about. Tristan’s betrayal and Val’s arrest, intrinsically linked and equally impossible to understand.
Tristan and the rest of the Hawks should have stayed with Val. Helped him to clear his name. But instead they’d abandoned him. Grendel had been only too delighted to tell her just how quickly they’d walked away.
