“Will Balger have sent word ahead?” Tylar glanced to the east, where the skies were just beginning to lighten. “Will he have alerted Tashijan?”
Rogger snorted and pulled the spitted hare from the fire. He sniffed at its baked clay surface. “To raise the alarm, Balger would have to admit that he had you and let you escape. The bastard has too much pride for that. He’d lose face among the brigands and sly folk that make up his countrymen. Word won’t travel beyond his borders until you’re either dead or captured.”
Krevan lifted a hand, standing quickly with a rustle of cloak and shadow. “Someone comes.”
Tylar’s palm dropped to the hilt of his sword, a borrowed short sword with a bone grip.
Krevan stepped back, half-dissolving into shadow. A whistle of skit-swift sounded from his lips. It was answered by another… and another. He stepped back into the circle of firelight. “One of the scouts.”
As if drawn out by his words, shadows stretched and birthed the figure of a cloaked man. It was one of Krevan’s knights. The man stepped into the glow, shedding darkness from his form. Tylar recognized him as an older knight named Corram. While it took a keen eye to discern one masked and cloaked Shadowknight from another, years of living among such men and women had sharpened Tylar’s attention: to the cut and color of hair, to the shape and hue of eye, to the subtle scars and wrinkles. Even the manner of movement, rhythm of gait, and a knight’s carriage revealed clues.
Despite his advanced years, Corram moved with a stealth few could match. His eyes were ice, his hair a matching silver.
He nodded to Krevan. “The hunters have found our scent again. They move even now to close us off from the border mounds.”
“How quickly?”
Corram shook his head. “We have a quarter bell at best.”
Rogger swore and began kicking dirt atop the wood coals, dousing the flames. “Then let us not tarry.” He lifted the roasted hare and cracked the caked clay. The scent of sizzling fat and flesh wafted strongly. He handed the spitted hare to one of Krevan’s men. “Stake this little bait on the raft by the stream. The current will carry her off, drawing the scent hounds away from our path. I never knew a hound that wouldn’t follow a bit of roasted hare.”
With a nod, the knight stepped away.
The others quickly broke camp and set off.
Krevan again led the way. His ten knights flanked forward and behind, alert for attack. Rogger strode behind the leader of the Shadowknights. Tylar followed next with his short sword and kept Delia close to his side. She met his gaze for a breath. Her face was smeared with mud, a cheek scratched deeply, and her eyes were rimmed with fear.
“Stay with me,” he whispered. It was the only consolation he could offer.
It seemed enough. Taking a shuddering breath, she nodded.
The party stumbled through the tangle of bog brier that had been their bower and splashed across a sluicing riverbed, smelling of stagnant mud and root rot. As they climbed the far banks, the mounds rose before them, limned in the thin light of approaching dawn.
These borderlands, named the Kistlery Downs, were chalk-and-flint hills rising from the swamplands, a hard boundary separating the lowland swamps and bogs of Foulsham Dell from the central plains of the First Land. While the mounds were not high, they were steep sided, creating a maze of vales, hollows, and dells. Confounding the matter, the lowest portions remained shrouded in foul mist. It was as easy to get lost among them as it was to be trapped.
“Do you know the way through here?” Tylar asked.
“Rough enough,” Krevan answered.
Tylar found little comfort in his answer.
Rogger dropped beside Tylar. “The only known route through Kistlery Downs is the main road. And that will be guarded.”
Delia studied the white cliffs on either side of them. They glistened with bits of gypsum and quartz. “I heard that dark alchemists set up black foundries here, dug into the hillsides, spewing corruption and burned Graces from their subterranean chimneys.”
Rogger waved aside such worries. “Blood witches and Wyr-lords are the least of our concerns. They may haunt the Downs, but they’ll shy from us as much as we might wish to avoid them.”
“Why doesn’t Lord Balger rid the hills of their foul ilk?”
Rogger glanced back to her. “Where do you think His Largeness gets most of his revenues? More of Balger’s humours flow through the black fires here than are traded across borders.”
Tylar noted the deepening frown on Delia’s face. Sheltered in schools and selected young as a handmaiden to Meeryn, she’d had little chance to understand how trade among the lands was more often black rather than white. Whereas Tylar had direct dealings with the Gray Traders, those who plied the rivers of commerce that flowed beneath all else, traffickers in Dark Graces, stolen humours, and accursed weapons and tools. Tylar knew that the bale dagger he had stolen from Lord Balger, a blade that healed as fast as it cut, would fetch a significant ransom among the Traders.
And one time he would have made that deal.
As a young man, he had thought himself wise in the ways of the world, capable of moving within that gray territory between the light and the dark. He had raised coin through some shady profiteering. And while most of it went to help the orphanage where he had been raised, a fair amount still found its way into his own pocket.
He’d had a wedding to plan… to Kathryn.
He shoved this last thought aside.
But memories still flooded through him: of blue eyes looking deep into his own, of hushed breaths in the stillness of a long night, of tender lips, of promises both whispered and shouted aloud. And through it all, laughter flowed, light, yet coming from the heart.
All had been so easy, so very easy.
No longer.
He gripped his short sword, fingers firm and sure. While his body had been healed by Grace, his heart remained untouched. There was no blessing to heal that which had died long ago.
“How far to reach the border?” Delia asked, drawing his attention to his current plight.
“Another six reaches,” Rogger answered. “Barring any missteps-which is not hard in this skaggin’ place-we’ll reach the far plains a bell or two after sunrise. And if the morning sea mists have burned away, we might even catch a glimpse of Stormwatch Tower in the distance.”
Tashijan’s tallest spire.
“So close…” Delia mumbled.
She glanced over to Tylar. Both had listened silently to Krevan’s report on the current tidings at the Citadel. Argent ser Fields had been named the new warden. After hearing this, Delia had bowed her head. Tylar kept silent about the familial tie between Argent and Delia, father and estranged daughter. It was not his place to speak of it.
But all knew of Tylar’s tie to Argent’s new castellan, Kathryn ser Vail. His former betrothed. Eyes had carefully avoided his as this detail was recounted.
Only Delia had the courage to meet his gaze. Both their pasts had become tied together in one place. A place they must explore to solve a riddle uttered by a dying god.
Krevan stopped ahead, his form barely discernible in the fetid fog that filled the hollow spaces between the hills. With his head cocked, he waved them to his side.
“What-?” Delia began.
He shushed her. Silence pressed down upon them-then a wheezing rasp echoed from up ahead. It was not unfamiliar. They had heard the same telltale noise chasing them all night.
“How many?” Rogger asked in a matching wheeze.
“Too many,” Krevan answered under his breath.
He motioned them back. A fresh rasping rose behind them. This was no echo. They were being surrounded. From the darkness, Krevan’s knights coalesced, closing ranks.
“They’ve cut us off,” one of the knights hissed.
