“Like invisibility?”
“No, there’s no magic that can turn living beings invisible, but a good enough practitioner can manipulate light so well you’d never know the difference.”
“We need to hurry,” Chitai says. “If you can wrap up camp and get everyone moving, I’ll ride ahead and alert Andras and the others to the danger.”
“I can do that,” Neville says.
She shakes her head impatiently. “I’m the fastest rider. You stay with Kaelen and Elianna and protect Soli and the amulet. But get on the road as fast as you can. If they get our scent or even a hint of us, they’ll be after us. Fast.”
In less than fifteen minutes, we’re on our way out of camp, but anyone can see we were here. I poured more water over the firepit, but the evidence of a fire doesn’t just disappear, no matter how much water and dirt we use to cover it. If—when—the Zhagarn and their twisted soldiers reach this spot, they’ll know we were here, and they’ll keep coming for us.
“Where can we go?” I ride up next to Kaelen on the little mare; Elianna is driving the wagon. “Where can we hide? They’re too many to fight.”
The lines of his face are sculpted stone in the moonlight. “We don’t have any choice, Soli. We have to enter the Barrows. Even the Zhagarn will hesitate to follow us there at night, and the Fell will fear the draugrs.”
Terror roars up inside me, and it takes everything I have to keep from losing my dinner right there on the road.
The Barrows. At night.
I force out a laugh, so I don’t cry. Or shriek.
Kaelen raises an eyebrow. “What?”
“At least I was free for an hour.” With that, I bend forward and encourage Cloud to run faster. I want to catch up to Trick and see him one last time before we all die a horrible death.
… until the end of her days.
Damn the king, anyway.
When subjected to stimuli that cause extreme terror, even the strongest person will eventually shut down. The most effective Inquisitors will know how far to go to reach, but not shatter, the prisoner’s threshold between abject surrender and a broken mind.
—Recorded scrolls, Office of the High Inquisitor, Pyrrh
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The ride is a blur of exhaustion, fear, and grim determination to escape before the Zhagarn can catch us. Strange and unexpected sensory perceptions flash through my mind like summer lightning:
The sound of Cloud panting.
The musty smell of sweat from my unwashed shirt.
The grim cast to Andras’s face when we catch up to him.
The ominous sight of the Barrows looming before us in the moonlight.
Kaelen, riding beside me, watching me. Always watching me.
It takes all my new-learned skill to stay on a fast-moving horse, no matter how gentle she is and how smooth her gait. Riding, like so much else on this journey, is deceptively difficult. At least at speeds like this.
Behind us, the wagon rumbles along, with Chitai and Neville on either side to guard Elianna and our provisions. It fleetingly occurs to me to wonder how we’re going to get a wagon through the lumpy hills of the Barrows. Perhaps there are paths and roads I haven’t read about? It’s not like the library is filled with current knowledge of geography and topography. Most of the charts I’ve studied during secret hours in the forbidden map room are decades, if not centuries, o ld. I once spent an hour with a fragile parchment scroll that predated the establishment of the kingdoms and territories. Some long-ago cartographer scrolled the wordsAltrarran Empirein delicate calligraphy across the top. Only the names of the four seas were the same as on current maps.
When Cloud leaps over a raised tuft of ground I didn’t even see, I almost tumble off her back. I stay on, but it’s a near thing. I need to focus on what’s before me, not lose my concentration to thoughts of the past. Or even thoughts of the prince riding next to me, though my skin still tingles with remembered sensation from his touch.
If I ever write the story of this journey in a book of my own, I wonder if anyone would believe it. All those years daydreaming of the travel I’d never have a chance to do …
There’s an old Valourian proverb: Be careful what you wish for.
I never quite understood the meaning. Why not wish as big and bold as possible? Where else can dreams come true but in wishes, especially for someone like me? Someone whose flaws are literally branded on my skin? TheGMmark burns my arm with phantom pain, as it has on so many occasions over the years since they marked me.
