Before I could stop it, I rolled onto my side and dry heaved. Nothing came up, but the sudden motion made everything worse. I heaved again and again into the wagon, choking on nothing but bile.
A hand touched my shoulder, fingers looking to gripthere, and I threw him off with a snarl. “Don’t you touch me,” I rasped in a voice I didn’t recognize.
He let out a noise like a scoff or a chuckle, then dropped back down to the ground. He passed around the front of the wagon and soon I heard the sounds of the bit and bridle being removed from the horse’s head. Two seconds later, the sound of a fatslapmade me flinch.
The horse’s hooves sounded down the path and into the grass. He’d freed it, sent it away. Why?
It’s not his horse. It belonged to us, to my kingdom.
I lifted my head and the dizziness intensified at my movement, but I got on my hands and knees and stared at a whorl in the wagon’s wood bed. Familiar wood, sallow and prone to splintering.This isn’t his wagon, either.
He climbed back in. The wagon wobbled, and so did my vision. “You could crawl there, but your leathers would be shredded at the knees before?—”
“Give me a second.” My voice was thick and sickly.
I forced my eyes to fix on the whorl until the world stopped moving and I could swallow the acid back. As I knelt there, I thought of Isa and her last words to me.Never trust a man, especially not outside the walls.
Though I didn’t know if I could even call the creature standing above me a man. He had the vague look of one now, but even a bear could stand upright.
I didn’t care how much it hurt or how hard I heaved—I wouldn’t let him touch me.
After a minute, I took a deep, quick breath. The whorl in the wood had gone still and my stomach had steadied. I jerked one foot forward, planting my boot under me. That was when I realized I still had my boots on, and my leathers. At least I’d been left that dignity.
Better to do this fast. I pushed off my hands, wedged my other foot under me, and rose. The world threatened to go topsy-turvy allover again and my temple throbbed so fiercely, I had to clamp my eyes shut.
Don’t fall. Don’t fall.That was my only wish, to not fall over.
I forced my eyes open and turned, slowly, to face him. My gaze lifted.
He hadn’t moved; he stared at me from the other side of the wagon’s bed, not as tall as I remembered him from the southern district. Now, under this pale moonlight, he didn’t swim with shadows.
He also didn’t look like a bear standing upright. He looked halfway like a man. But something dark and strange haunted those features, hardly visible but pronounced at the edges, like his face had been cut from tempered glass pieced together with odd parts. His mouth curved down at one side and his nose bore a knot on the ridge like it had once been broken and reset. His cheekbones were almost too prominent in this light, his jaw too sharp.
He might have been five and twenty, but those eyes… they didn’t have a young man’s light.
“Well,” he said, “this feels familiar.”
And it did. We stood as we had on the night of the attack, facing one another. Except this time neither of us held a blade. If he wore one, it was hidden under his cloak. I saw no belt.
My lips twisted with the effort to keep me from swaying. Even so, my fingers itched to reach for my belt, to find the grip of my sword.
His eyes narrowed. “You dropped your sword when you fell. The knife’s still there, though. You want to try? Here I am.”
I wanted to. I envisioned what the fight might look like: I’d reach around, unsheath my sunlit knife, and by that time… No, it was a fool’s plan. I’d be dizzy and retching before I could even get one stab in.
My fingers stopped moving.
He gave a nod. “Wise. Start walking.”
The wagon rocked as he dropped out, cloak rising in a gust before the dark swallowed him.
Alone. He’d left me here. Some kind of trick.
My breath quickened. My eyes began to search?—
“You can try, rabbit,” his voice called out from the darkness. “You can try.”
That voice felt like a leash. It wrapped around my neck and tugged, and I knew even in this darkness escape would be hopeless.
