Callum dismounted before reaching up to help me down.
“The horses will get fresh legs sooner if they are not bearing our weight,” he explained.
A whimper escaped me. The hounds were closer and their calls to each other had become less frequent as the net closed. Now there were more of them than the two that had followed us through the borderlands at Samhain.
“Why are there so many, Callum?” I whispered to the bearded man.
He slanted me a crooked smile in the moonlight, checking to see if anyone was near us before speaking.
“Girl, you are the juiciest thing they’ve caught wind of in many years; they will pursue you to the gates of Avalon in high summer, if they must.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” I returned. What girl being hunted by mystical slavering beasts that wanted to devour her would be pleased to hear that they would never give up?
“I wasn’t aware you were looking for a bedtime story.” He laughed back, wincing as the movement tore at the injury slashing across his face.
“What happened?” I asked, indicating the cut.
His bearded face creased. “My lord steward was –” he paused, raising a hand to the tender wound “– he was disappointed to have missed you.”
“Me?” I asked. Did he also know who I really was?
Callum glanced at the other warriors walking behind us before shaking his head almost imperceptibly. “Marcus.”
“Marcus plans to go to York. Why chase us?”
“Because you’re running. He knows you travel with the Griffin, and he doesn’t know why you aren’t travelling directly to York. It makes the most sense – at least to him. The Anglians have the strongest army, and Marcus is the heir to their crown. As Marcus’s betrothed you would be safe there. As for Devyn, his fate is less certain, no matter where he goes.” He looked back at me. “Speaking of our friend of few words, where is the boy?”
“We had to separate.” I wasn’t sure how much to reveal to Callum, but perhaps he could help. “He was poisoned and the hounds were coming. Bronwyn, his cousin, is with him, along with a handful of warriors, but they have to travel slowly, so we took a separate route to draw the hounds off.”
“Poisoned? How?”
I cast a dirty look at the tall man walking behind us.
Callum raised a bushy brow so high it sought to meet the tattoo that ran along his hairline on the left side of his face.
“Gideon?” he asked on an out breath. “Not really his style.”
“Well, apparently it is.”
“How?”
“He put a dagger in him.”
“Where was the hit?”
“What?” I asked. “In the shoulder. What does it matter where the knife hit him?”
“Well, if he wanted to kill him, why not take a more direct route and put it through his eye?”
I shook my head, bile rising as I remembered the moment the dagger had sunk into Devyn’s shoulder. “Because he’s a lousy shot,” I threw behind me.
“Humph.” Callum’s grunt indicated this was not his belief. “Gideon is many things, Cassandra, but he wouldn’t poison a blade. If he wants a man dead, he’ll do it with steel; he has no need for tricks. Tricks are for men who care what others think of their actions.”
I thought back again to the scene; he had claimed not to have known of anything on the blade.
“Gideon backs down to no man. Apologises for nothing. How do you think he ended up in a rival household as a teenager? If he hadn’t left when he did, either he or the steward would surely be dead by now.”
“The Steward of York is his father?” My voice rose in my surprise. They had spoken before of Gideon’s father but my mind was a whirl and I hadn’t pieced it together.
A growl came from behind us. “Are you two planning to gossip all the way through the night?” a sour voice asked. “It’s not like we’re being hunted by beings with supernatural hearing or anything.”
Point taken.
Callum and I fell silent, but my mind spun at the revelation that Gideon was the son of the Steward of York. York was no friend to Devyn, that much I knew. York had been pursuing us from the moment we left the city, but did they want Marcus in order to restore his crown or was the steward more interested in clinging on to power for himself? How had he known so quickly that we had left the city? What if he was somehow in league with the council? Was it crazy to consider the idea? Someone must have betrayed my mother to the city for them to have found her. Had it been someone here who had an interest in the balance of power being off? But why had she been so close to the imperial border in the first place? It made no sense.
As to Gideon being an Anglian, was he a plant in the Mercian court? A boy sent to replace the friend that Rion had lost? Were we all caught in a web of York’s making? I didn’t know Gideon, and what little I did know, I didn’t like. I remembered his gentle touch when I had drawn in magic. Was it only yesterday? He had helped me. But he had also known who Devyn was when he threw that knife and now Devyn was dying.
A howl ripped through the air.
“Time to mount up.” Gideon’s low voice carried across the group.
The horses had barely had time to catch their breath, much less restore enough strength to race across the dark countryside, but what choice did we have?
Gideon stepped forwards and put his great paws around my waist, lifting me up behind Callum with ease. I scowled down at him as he released me, receiving a flash of white in reply. I was getting seriously tired of being manhandled by him.
The hounds were coming and there were more of
