I sprint after the others. Thorns from the pomegranate branches scrape my arms. Mother has been jogging along at the rear but she slows to a halt, puffing as she struggles to catch her breath. The others stop too, Mis supporting Mother with a hand under her elbow.
I charge up. “It’s Nikonos himself. Right on our heels.”
“Honored Lady, I’ll take the baby to lighten your burden,” says Ro.
To my consternation—because I should have asked first—Mother hands Wenru over to the poet. After a moment of disgruntled squirming, my infant brother settles into Ro’s arms with an expression of unbabyish disgust.
The sounds of snapping branches and men cursing at thorns chase us onward as the soldiers push through the trees. We emerge at a run from the orchard and hurry through grain fields toward the stately roofs and walls of the main compound, built for the Saroese stewards who supervise the estate with its rich fields, groves, and fishing. A path lined by trees leads to the northeast, toward an Efean village.
“Shouldn’t we head toward the village?” I whisper urgently.
“My grandmother always keeps an escape plan in reserve,” says Kal. “There’s a merchant galley hidden in a backwater river channel beyond the northern fields for just such an emergency as this. She and the rest of the household should already be boarding it.”
“In other words,” remarks Ro, because he just can’t stop himself, “you Saroese nobles expect at any moment to be murdered by your own relatives.”
Kal touches my arm as a warning not to bother answering. “This way,” he says in a tone like an echo of my military father, a reminder that Kal fought a campaign in the desert and commanded a squad of spider scouts.
We splash through a shallow irrigation canal and race across another stretch of fields.
“Do you visit here often?” I ask in a low voice, sticking beside him.
“Twice a year with my grandmother. When I was a boy I would play on the hidden ship and pretend I was a sailor on the high seas.”
I grin at this innocent memory. Without breaking stride, he bumps a shoulder against mine, just a tap. Despite the danger we’re in, it’s exhilarating to keep pace together, feet hitting the ground in perfect time.
Mudbrick reservoirs rise at the end of cultivated land and the beginning of marshier ground where bushy-headed papyrus sways over our heads. Fresh wagon tracks in the earth mark where the Garon fugitives passed only moments ago, so it’s with shock that we emerge onto the bank of a backwater river channel to find the dock empty.
The merchant galley is gone.
Except for an embroidered blue silk shawl fluttering in the branches of a sycamore, there’s no trace of the Garon household; of Kal’s grandmother, Princess Berenise; his sister, Lady Menoë; his uncle Lord Gargaron; nor any of the fifty relatives and retainers who escaped with us out of Saryenia. Nothing except three village rowboats bumping against the pilings with neatly folded fishing nets inside, and the two abandoned wagons.
“How could they have left without me?” says Kal, a hand on his neck like he’s trying to stem the bleeding from having his throat cut.
We stare, all too stunned to ask the same question. Safarenwe gives a fussing cry, and Mother takes her from Mis, soothing her with kisses. Wenru remains uncannily silent in Ro’s arms.
Mis points back the way we came. “Look!”
We turn. Shock tightens to a new stab of fear. Threads of smoke rise in the distance. They thicken to columns and then boil up into fierce black clouds.
Nikonos’s soldiers are burning the estate.
Kate Elliott, Bright Thrones
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends