plan all of this, he wouldn’t expect me to trust him either. Still, I go through the door as the man seems to want, and to my relief, the only things waiting for us are two horses hitched to a tree.
“See,” he says. “We’re out.”
I don’t say anything to him as we saddle up and make our way south into the hills. My mind is too busy, and I want to calm myself down and just relax for a moment before whatever is coming next. To his credit, the man doesn’t intrude on my desire for peace and quiet.
The use of the journal as a means for getting that brief of a message to me seems altogether unnecessary. There are so many ways that Karsa could have embedded that phrase into my head without letting my fate rest on the chance that the guard would give me the journal at all. Then again, maybe it didn’t.
When the man removed the bag from my head, I recall looking briefly at the guards he had incapacitated. There were two of them, not three. The absence of the third, the one who gave me the journal, didn’t seem important to me in the frenzy of the moment, but now it does.
Karsa wouldn’t leave something like that up in the air. He somehow got the guard to give it to me.
“Why wouldn’t Karsa have you save him as well?” I break the silence.
The man looks at me skeptically, studying me like I studied him earlier before finally answering.
“Anyone with the knowledge of how to pull someone out of that prison would know better than to do anything but let Karsa rot.”
“Why do you say that?” I shoot back, irked by his demeaning tone.
“There weren’t many people who didn’t want to see him die in that tower. Springing him would be to make a lot more enemies than I reckon anyone would want.”
My mind jumps to the end of the journal where Karsa described the captivity his life had led him into. Death, he wrote, was the only way for him to gain freedom. It’s a sad thought that his life came to that, that he felt like suicide was his only escape. It makes me wonder just what to do with the freedom I now possess, assuming I am free.
After a few moments, we turn off of the main roadway down a much less beaten path.
“Where are we headed?” I ask.
“Do you really not know?” he puzzles.
“I wasn’t told anything,” I say frustrated. “Up until you rescued me, I thought I was a dead man.”
“Huh,” he replies. “Karsa must really be dead.”
The simple statement of something so obvious at this point makes me feel hollow, like I’ve been punched in the gut and all of the air has been knocked out of me. I’ve dealt with loss twice before, but even if I have had years to grow up and move on since then, I can sense that dealing with Karsa’s death will be no different for me. The numbness of what happened last night is about to pass, and with it gone, the real anguish is ready to begin.
After we cut between a couple of hills and enter a more heavily forested area, something trailing behind us catches my eye. Not guards or soldiers in pursuit, but a bird that I now realize has been following us for a while. As I look closer, I recognize it as a falcon. Elsu.
He’s following me because he associates me with Karsa and must be thinking that wherever I am, Karsa is going to be somewhere nearby. Elsu is a smart and well-trained bird. It would be a pity for him to drift back into the wild. I should get him to come with me when I leave.
“Karsa’s protégé,” someone calls out from ahead.
I rotate my body back forward and see a man standing just ahead of us with his hands stretched up in the air. He smiles as though greeting an old friend, but we have never spoken, though I know who he is. Like Karsa, he has had many names, but the one behind them all is Eryk.
My eyes shift over to the man who saved me, whose name, Ludo, now comes to mind. The reason I can recall it is because I’ve heard it once before, at Karsa’s home a couple years ago. I had just returned from an assignment in the mountains to find Ludo leaned up against the fence beyond the property, his face masked and hidden. He refused to speak or tell me what was going on, so I went inside to find Karsa, who was engaged in a heated argument with Eryk. My arrival prompted Eryk to leave, but Karsa was unwilling to tell me what had brought him.
Eryk stares at me perhaps anticipating a response, but I don’t give him one as we stop at his side. I instead look beyond him, where a pit has been dug by the pathway.
“Did you break me out just to bury me?” I ask, a bit of sarcasm in my voice.
“I hadn’t planned on it,” he jests, “but I’m tempted since the hole’s already dug.”
His countenance instantaneously changes from playful to aggressive as he continues.
“See, I dug and dug, much deeper than Karsa instructed, all the way down to the rock, and lo and behold, there was nothing there. I didn’t see that coming at all. For the price Karsa put on getting you out, I would have figured him to not be so foolish. He has, after all, spent much of his life keeping me happy so that I don’t hurt those he cares about.”
“What are you—” I start, but Eryk quickly reaches out and grabs onto me, ripping me off of the horse and pulling me to the ground.
I reach up to strike him, but Ludo, who has already dismounted, stops my attempt with a fist to my jaw.
“You hear me, Karsa!” Eryk yells out, looking at the trees all around as he lifts me up to my feet.
The daze Ludo’s blow put me into makes it hard for me to stay standing, and I’m about to fall over again when Eryk straightens me up once more, only to punch me in the face. This time, he doesn’t help me up, instead leaning over me and staring at me with his angry eyes.
“Don’t try to pretend that you have no idea what’s going on,” he threatens. “Tell me where Karsa’s hiding and I’ll consider killing you instead of burying you alive.”
My heart stops, and I look at him not knowing what to say or believe. Even if Karsa is somehow alive, I don’t have any answers for Eryk, and I couldn’t even guess the right lies to give him to get him to let me go.
“You’re just going to have to kill me,” I tell him. “Because Karsa is dead.”
My words only infuriate him more. Without hesitation, he strikes me hard right below my ribs, forcing the air from my lungs. He then immediately presses his knee firmly down on my chest, making me cough and gasp desperately to breathe, as he grips my jaw with one hand and applies intense pressure with the other by jabbing his fingers into my neck directly below my right ear.
The pain is sudden and excruciating. I try to fight back and push him off of me, but the weight of his knee coupled with the numbing power of what he is doing makes that an impossible task. Just when I feel I can handle no more, he releases me, standing back up and spinning around to observe the shadows of the trees that surround us.
“Is this how you’re going to let it end?” he calls out once more. “After all these years, you’re just going to run? I found you once, and I will find you again.”
I am pushing myself up onto my knees as he finishes speaking. Ludo stands nearby, staring just as intently out at the trees as though he, too, expects Karsa to emerge.
“No one is coming,” I cough out.
“Enough,” Eryk cries, spinning around and kicking me in the face.
I collapse backwards to my left, landing on my face. I try to push myself up again, but Eryk grabs me from behind, holding my neck and rotating my body around so that I face the open. Once I’m situated how he wants, he pulls out a knife, pressing its point against my side.
“The bounty he put up to pull you out was ten times more than it should have been, and the way he approached Ludo as if it would stay between the two of them, he was just begging to get my attention.”
Ludo turns around to face me for the first time.
“Maybe he’s not lying, maybe Karsa was just—” he says, but then an arrow flies out from the darkness and embeds itself into the back of his neck.
He collapses to the ground as Eryk removes the knife from my side and lifts it up to m
y neck.
“If I die, I take him with me!” he yells. “Show yourself.”
A hooded figure dressed in black emerges from the wooded area beyond the pathway. I am in such shock when I see him that I cannot bring myself to believe it, not until the morning sun shines on him so brightly that no doubt remains. It is Karsa.
“Funny how often we find ourselves in this position, Karsa,” Eryk says, pressing the blade even harder against my skin. “I’ve grown quite fond of holding a knife to those you love.”
“What is he talking about?” I say as carefully as I can to not stretch my throat out against the sharp blade.
“I wrote in the journal that the spy on the river made me want back into the game, but the opposite is true.”
My eyes widen as my mind scrambles to piece together and discern the actual purpose of the journal.
“The truth is, I went into the woods to hide. The deal I brokered with the jailor to work on the river was my idea, not his. I had seen enough of this world of shadows and wanted out. The bargeman had a daughter, one I took to liking as I worked for him. He didn’t care for my troubled past, but I stuck around for seven years in hopes that he would soften, and he eventually did.
“That was when the mayor of Teuvinna came along and ruined it all. I was identified by one of his bodyguards, prompting him to send Eryk after me to persuade me back into an arrangement not much different from slavery. That’s why I fled to the wilderness.
“I was there for years before he found me,