Ran until he simply
He lay where he fell, waiting for one of the ambushers to come after him and kill him, fear making him whimper and tremble, but too spent even to crawl.
But nothing happened.
He pulled in great shuddering breaths of air, sobbing with fright, while his body finally stopped shaking with exhaustion and began shivering with cold. And still nothing happened.
He levered himself up out of the snow, and there was nothing in sight; no enemies, not even a bird. Only the snow-covered bushes he had fallen into, blue sky, bare tree-branches making a pattern of interlace across it, and the churned-up mess of snow and dead leaves of his backtrail through the undergrowth.
He listened, while fear ebbed and sense returned, slowly. He heard nothing, nothing whatsoever.
And finally thought returned as well.
He struggled to his feet, and fought his way back through the bushes, staring wildly about. Still there was neither sight nor sound of anything.
Once again he ran, this time driven by guilt, along the swath his flight had cut through the snow and the forest undergrowth. He burst through a cluster of bushes onto the road, and literally stumbled onto the site of the ambush.
There was blood everywhere; blood, and churned-up snow and dirt, and bits of things that made Stef sick when he saw them - bits of things that looked like they had belonged to people.
Then his eyes focused on the center of the mess, on something he had first taken for a heap of snow.
Yfandes. Down, lying in a crumpled heap, like a broken toy left by a careless child, blood oozing from the stump where her tail had been chopped off.
No sign of Vanyel.
Stef stumbled to Yfandes' side, afraid of what he would find. But there was nothing, no body, nothing. Yfandes had been stripped of her harness and saddle, and a trail of footprints and bloody snow led away from where she lay.
His legs wouldn't hold him. His mind could not comprehend what had happened. In all the endless things he had imagined, there had been nothing like this. Vanyel had never been defeated - he never
His heart tried to deny what his eyes were telling him; his mind was caught between the two in complete paralysis. He touched Yfandes' flank with a trembling hand, but she did not move, and Vanyel did not reappear to tell him that it was all a ruse.
His heart cracked in a thousand pieces.
He flung back his head, and howled.
“Damen!”
The boy started, fear so much a part of him that he no longer noticed it, and looked up from the pot he was tending on the hearth across the smoke-filled hall to the doorway.
