"I will do all decorum demands, Asha Bear," he says quietly. "I hope you bring everyone to their knees when we arrive."
Then, after a pause, lower: "It makes it all the sweeter when I get you to myself. And you are no longer queen. You are simply mine."
After everything this road has held, I cannot believe something still flutters in my chest at that. My cheeks warm. I say nothing because there is nothing to say that would not give him entirely too much satisfaction.
I ride ahead.
CHAPTER 73
In the Distance
The mountains release us slowly. The cold does not break so much as thin, the air losing its particular sharpness as the path descends and the passes widen and the grey overhead begins to carry more light than it has in two days.
I feel it from inside the transport, through the fabric walls, through the particular change in the way sound moves around us. Kiss feels it too. She turns her face toward the covered opening, alert in a way that is already entirely her own, and I pull her closer against my chest and let her look.
Ari sleeps against my other side, one small fist curled against my collarbone, entirely unbothered by everything the last several hours have held. I envy him that.
Cambra sits across from me, watchful as always. Saurin is beside her, her head tipped back against the transport wall, her eyes closed. She has not moved since we left the attack site. Her skin is too pale and her breathing too careful and I have been watching the rise and fall of her chest without meaning to, the way you watch something you are not certain will continue.
"Saurin," I say quietly.
Her eyes open. It takes a moment. "I am here," she says, the words coming out thinner than her usual voice.
She does not close her eyes again. She looks at me with the attention of someone who has been turning something over and has decided it cannot wait.
"The ones on the road," I say, before she can speak. "They were deathmages."
"Yes."
"We saw one in Alarna. One." I look at her. "There were more than a dozen on that path."
Saurin is quiet for a moment. "One is a tool," she says. "A placed thing. Something left behind." She looks down briefly. "What was on that road was a deployment. Someone built them, bound them, dressed them in glamours, and sent them to a specific location on a specific route." A pause. "They knew where we would be."
The transport moves beneath us, the cold pressing at the fabric walls.
"The words they used," I say. "They knew my name. My title."
"Yes."
Saurin says nothing further for a moment. But something in her face tells me she is filing it away the same way I am.
"Who does this?” I ask. "Who has the power to build something like that and control it from a distance?”
"I do not know who sent them," she says carefully. "But the construction, the precision of the glamours, the number of them held at once." She meets my eyes. "That is not a small power. Whoever it is has resources and reach and they used both to find us in the middle of the Gyarin mountains." A pause. "That is what concerns me more than the deathmages themselves."
The children breathe against me in the quiet that follows. I do not say the rest of it aloud. If someone knew our route, it did not come from the mountains. Cambra looks at me across the children. I look back at her. Neither of us says anything. We do not need to.
Outside, Colsar's horse keeps pace with the transport. I do not need to see him to know where he is. I have learned the sound of him, the particular way the Avanki nearest the transport adjust when he rides close. For now we have this. The path. The cold. His horse beside ours.
It is enough.
The Veynar soldiers appear from behind the last curve of the pass in loose formation, forty or more, their armor carrying the wear of men who have not seen a city in months. Cold and something harder to name worked into the lines of them.
Rorin rides at the front.
I pull the fabric back far enough to find Colsar. "You planned this," I murmur. "Putting them behind us, and the Shalvar soldiers behind them. You kept them protected on both ends.”
He does not look away from the pass. "Yes. They are weak from what they have been through, and they deserve our protection.”
