***
At dawn, Saoven announced that they needed to leave the region. Janir obediently saddled her bay stallion, but Karile whined and complained. “What about breakfast?”
Saoven and Karile argued about breakfast and the necessity of it while Janir saddled her horse. Several minutes later, Janir had mounted her steed.
Karile stubbornly refused to ride. “I tell you, I won’t get on that thing,” he resolved. “That’s not a horse, that’s a hooved siege tower.”
“You’ll get on it or you’re staying here,” Janir snapped.
“Horses are smelly and sweaty.”
“And you aren’t?” Janir longed so badly to hit the enchanter. “And I thought you just said Kalbo wasn’t a horse.”
Karile had opened his mouth to retort, when Saoven suddenly picked him up and set him arguing and whining on the saddle behind Janir. Kalbo balked for a moment, then begrudgingly settled.
“I don’t like it either,” Janir mumbled to the horse, patting his neck.
“Under normal circumstances I would leave you, enchanter,” Saoven growled. “But I have a strange suspicion that you would point them in our direction if you saw those soldiers.”
“Soldiers?” Janir gulped.
“Scouts, I think. I don’t know what they were doing this close to Brevia, but I think they were Stlavish.”
Janir’s spine prickled uncomfortably. First mention of the Argetallams, now their closest allies—neither of which had ever been on particularly friendly terms with her mother’s country.
“Where are we going?” Karile asked.
“Higher into the mountains,” Saoven replied, swinging up into his white mare’s saddle.
His brief elaboration would have to suffice. Now that the enchanter was on the horse with her, Karile gripped Janir’s waist like a lifeline. Undoubtedly, she would be bruised by the end of the day. Knowing that this was no time for complaining, Janir resigned herself to the situation and tried to pretend that Karile didn’t exist.