but when he did, he knew just the right way to twist my arm. He held the bargeman’s daughter hostage. She didn’t know it, of course, just like she didn’t know that her father died from poison, not an infection, but I knew. That was enough for me to live the life of a captive for all these years.”
“Then what was I?” I ask.
“The one thing that made it bearable,” he replies softly.
I have nothing to say to that, and the stalemate continues in silence. Eryk slowly brings us both to our feet, prompting Karsa to draw another arrow and pull it back against the string of his bow.
“It’s not going to work,” Eryk warns. “That arrow isn’t going to stop me from slitting his throat the moment you let it fly.”
Eryk begins walking us backwards toward one of the horses, but Karsa does not ease up the tension on his bow. His window to save me, however, is closing very quickly. The moment Eryk is close enough to the horse to jump onto it, he will cut across my neck and then flee.
My only hope for survival is to do something myself, and there is just one thing I can do. Elsu has perched himself in a branch just above us, out of Eryk’s limited view. Eryk won’t see what’s coming until it’s too late.
With a sharp, quiet whistle from my lips, Elsu dives down and digs his talons into Eryk’s head. At the same time, I throw my weight into his chest, swinging up with my right arm to knock the blade away from my neck. The hit is only partially successful, causing Eryk’s killer blow to slash me deeply across the chin instead of the throat.
Our joint momentum carries us back toward the ground, though Eryk balances himself well and ends up on top of me. With the blade still in his hand, he begins to drive it down toward my chest. I am unable to throw my arms up quickly enough to stop him, but something else does.
He stiffens up as an arrow drives itself into his back, forcing him upright before he again tries to drive the knife down, but he fails once more as another arrow strikes him. His body goes limp this time, and he collapses forward while I push him off of me to the side.
My hand quickly presses up against my chin, which is bleeding badly. Karsa pulls out a cloth and holds it out to me. I accept it and press it firmly against my wound, standing back up to say something to Karsa, but he is already dragging Eryk toward the pit he dug.
I decide not to say anything for a moment, focusing instead on treating my cut. Karsa meanwhile drags Ludo over to the hole as well, picking up a shovel and beginning to bury the two of them. I watch him, still in disbelief that he is alive. There have been many times when he seemingly came back from the dead, but each time, I knew what was going on and what to expect.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask as he finishes up.
“You had to believe I was dead. Eryk needed to be able to see it in your eyes. Both of them did. It made them unknowing, vulnerable.”
“So I was bait,” I sigh.
“No,” he snaps back. “You were the catch.”
His sternness catches me off guard, making me diffident.
“Will you go back to the girl from the river now that you are free?”
He laughs in response, so heartily that I have a difficult time associating it with the way he’s acting.
“I know I come across as a bit heartless, but I meant what I said and wrote about you. Evelyn is her name, since I think you deserve to know, and I won’t ever be seeing her again. She moved on after I left. Has a new man and a family now. She’s old enough, her babies will be having babies of their own pretty soon I imagine.”
“Life was never fair to you was it?” I say hollowly.
“Life isn’t fair or unfair,” he corrects. “It just happens. I learned that when you came along. From that day, I became determined to give us both new lives.”
I smile at the thought. I’ve spent much of my life being raised by a man who lived in a prison only he could see. We’ve never been close in same way that my father was close with me, but we’ve been close enough that I feel inexpressible joy at the relief that Karsa must now feel.
“You had to die in order to make it happen,” I conclude. “But how did you do it? Ludo told me that no one would be foolish enough to save you given all your enemies.”
“The prison from the journal was not in Teuvinna, it was in Lyndwald,” he explains. “The guard who gave you the journal was the jailor’s grandson. Where do you think the treasure Eryk was trying to dig up actually went?”
The guard helped Karsa fake his own death. So simple, and it was in front of me the whole time.
“You’re returning to the plains,” I mumble. “That’s why you don’t need the fortune you saved, because it won’t do any good if you want to disappear there.”
He nods and quickly walks over to one of the horses, mounting up onto it as though he is about to leave. I panic, fearing that he means for this to be our final farewell, one that I am still trying to get my head around.
“Wait,” I say. “Before you go, I have to know something. In the journal, you wrote that you could never call someone friend whom you had never given your name.”
“Well, you already have my name,” he says.
He’s right, I do. Like everything else, it was before my eyes, but I never saw it. I’d always suspected that Karsa wasn’t his real name, even before seeing the journal, but in the pages I read was hidden the answer.
“Elsu,” I say, looking up at the falcon perched above us.
Hearing it out loud causes an unexpected level of emotion to fill my heart. There was always a barrier between Karsa… between Elsu and me because of the kind of life we shared, but it’s gone now. He’ll never fill the hole in my heart that my father’s death left, but the place he occupies is just as large. I’m not about to let him ride away from it after all that we’ve been through together.
“I’m coming with you,” I tell him, jumping up onto the horse next to him before looking again into his eyes.
The smile he returns is uncharacteristically warm, though brief. His eyes then turn down the pathway, which heads further south. The distant mountains shine in the morning light, challenging us to reach them by sunset.
“Then let’s go.”
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