Lyria suddenly stands as well.
“Death to the traitors!” she yells in perfect Marnan. Then she repeats it again and again.
The Marnans pause, baffled by a woman who looks and speaks like them. Their confusion lasts long enough for Gambria to coax the horses into a gallop.
All of us fall silent as Gambria urges the four winter horses faster, out of range of the Marnans.
I kneel and check Euyn’s leg. I will need to cauterize the wound or stitch it up when we get to safety. For now, I tear a blanket apart and tie it tightly around his thigh. He’ll live.
Or we’ll all die, and then sutures won’t matter.
We’ve outpaced everyone on foot, but three Marnans pursue us on horseback. Those horses look suspiciously like the ones we lost.
One of their riders has a bow. I notice it just as an arrow whizzes by my ear. He’s apparently a decent shot.
“Euyn,” I say. “An archer.”
With a pained grunt, he gets to sitting and then to standing. The archer has ridden up, gaining on us because his horse doesn’t have to pull a sleigh with five people. The Marnan doesn’t aim at us, though. No, he’s focused on our horses. Clever. If he takes one out, we will be sitting ducks.
Euyn is unsteady, leaning on the side of the sled, but he brings the loaded bow to his shoulder and aims. He fires. With one arrow, the archer drops, hit in the neck. The Marnan falls from his horse, toppling into the snow.
Euyn then collapses onto his knees. Too much blood lost.
There are two more riders behind us, still in pursuit. I grab Euyn’s bow. I don’t have his aim, but it’s better than nothing. Before I get the bow reloaded, though, the other riders fall back. I stare with the crossbow to my shoulder. What just happened? Why did they give up?
I watch them gallop back toward their caves. Then I realize why they stopped: they won’t risk being far from the caves with Khitan looking to eliminate them once and for all. Although the Marnans would like to kill us, we didn’t actually succeed in getting Staraheli’s head. They can let us go.
We failed but made it out alive. Somehow, fate saw us through another night. Well, fate and Gambria.
Then again, she also put us in this situation. I suppose it’s a wash.
“Thanks for the hot tip,” I say in old Gayan.
No one else can follow us in this language. Lyria speaks Khitanese and Marnan. Sora speaks Yusanian and a surprising amount of Khitanese. Euyn learned all four major languages, but his ability in Gayan never improved over that of a small child. He called it dead, since once Yusan took over hundreds of years ago, they made Yusanian the official language. Old Gayan died out for the most part—or so the empire thinks.
But Euyn is also lying on the floor of the sleigh, distracted by his blood loss and the pain in his leg.
Still, I speak at a normal volume to not encourage him to listen in and try his hand at translating.
“You’re welcome for saving your ass,” Gambria says, picking up on my language choice. “Who are these two?”
“They are a long story. Why did you help me?”
Gambria is direct and only respects others who are the same.
“After you left, Lyria told me I’d given you old information,” she says. “That they moved the body years ago and you were walking into a death trap. I tried, but I couldn’t get a message to you—you’d already left Loptra. And if you’re asking why I helped you in a broader sense, you already know why.”
She turns back to face me and arches an eyebrow. Then she stares over at Sora because everyone stares at Sora. Gambria is curious and will definitely ask me about her later. But even I can’t fully explain her at the moment.
I sit back on the bench and speak in a low voice to Sora. I watch my feet, though, since Euyn is trying and failing to get comfortable on his stomach on the floor.
“Are we going to talk about why the guard was still alive?” I ask.
Her lashes shade her eyes, but she doesn’t respond. She pets the fur blanket covering her lap. “Poisoning is complicated.”
It’s a truth that’s also a lie.
“You made an antidote,” I murmur.
