She was looking over her shoulder, Dippy galloping down the trail like he was back on the racetrack. Her slender frame was bulky with the thick coat she wore and her face was partially obscured by a woolen cap, but even across the distance, seeing her was like a punch to the gut.
Ahnna’s lips parted, then she twisted back around and leaned over Dippy’s neck.
“I don’t think so,” James snarled, and dug in his heels.
“Sir!” Arthur shouted from behind. “James! Stop!”
James ignored him, but as Maven galloped ahead of his companions, a dark cloud of smoke blew over him.
Far up the slope was a large fire, a fallen tree with its exposed roots ablaze. Perhaps an attempt at starting a forest fire, but it was a waste of effort: The trees around it were laden with snow. Even as he watched, the fire lessened its intensity, more smoke than flame.
The sound of wood snapping was deafening even over Maven’s hooves, and it was followed by a far worse noise.
Horror gathered in James’s stomach as debris exploded through the burning tree roots and tumbled down the mountainside.
An avalanche.
Ahnna meant to block the trail.
Instead of checking Maven’s reins, he bent over the mare’s neck and shouted, “Run!”
Boulders and chunks of ice smashed through trees and tore up earth, the mass of debris growing with each passing second. The noise was deafening, louder than a thousand claps of thunder rolling through the sky at once. Everything in its path would be destroyed, but James raced toward it anyway.
Because if he didn’t get to the other side, Ahnna would escape.
Flecks of foam flew from Maven’s mouth, his horse seeing the wave of death rolling down the slope as clearly as he did.
Faster,he pleaded, feeling his mare’s fear, knowing she was loyal to him even if it meant death.
A large rock bounced on the path ahead of them and Maven veered to avoid it, nearly going off the cliff to their left. Smoke and embers clouded the air, and a rock clipped James in the shoulder, another striking Maven on the neck. She barely flinched, terror driving away pain as she ran for both their lives.
He’d made a mistake. He was dead, Ahnna would escape, and his father would never have justice.
The slide was upon them.
Maven leapt forward—
And the murderous tide of ice and rock washed over the trail.
15
Ahnna
The plan had worked farbetter than Ahnna had intended.
But God help her, the results had been so much worse.
Fear had driven Dippy at high speed for a long time after the roar of falling rocks and snow had ceased. Yet as the rush in her veins faded alongside the clouds of snow and smoke, it was replaced with a grief that threatened to consume her.
Climbing off Dippy’s back, Ahnna fell to her knees and pressed her forehead to the snow. “Breathe,” she whispered.
But the next breath was a sob.
James was dead.
The last thing she’d seen right before Dippy had galloped around a bend was James riding straight into the path of the enormous avalanche, and it had been all she could do not to turn around and try to save him, despite knowing that there would be no surviving that wave of death.
Her body shuddered as she sobbed into the snow, because it never goddamned ended. The suffering. The loss. It was as though life itself were a war—a ceaseless battle to survive while those you cared about fell to either side. A scream boiled up inside of her, one of rage and grief that would echo off the mountains so that even the stars in the growing darkness would be forced to acknowledge what she endured.
