Anja covered her mouth with her wrist, her seat in the saddle stark straight as she absorbed the horrible, warped destiny that had befallen her brother, and also her dearest beloved: the young man she should have married in state ceremony, wreathed in the flowers of harvest. Her voice emerged muffled. ‘You expect they’ll attack?’
‘One of them must, Princess. Inevitable tactics. The other will stay to hold your sire hostage until Sessalie falls under conquest.’ Mykkael paused, measuring his words with much the same care as the horse underneath him took footing a brave course over the jumble of cracked rock.
Yet the princess’s nimble mind leaped ahead of him. ‘You seek a cave or a cleft, so you said. Then you’re needing a guard on your flank?’
‘Both sides, and behind,’ Mykkael affirmed. ‘With your Grace exposed at my back, I can’t hope to fight off the assault of a winged predator.’
She received that dreadful disclosure with no more than a choked-off gasp. Darkness hampered his detailed review of her face. Mykkael could not tell if she was silently crying. Her slight hand on the rein never faltered. Hating the additional cruelty, he added, ‘I’m sorry. We won’t have much time to prepare.’
Anja tugged her cloak around her slim frame. ‘There are caves not far distant, old lairs used by kerries.’ To her credit, she faced apprehension without begging for useless reassurance. ‘The caverns are found in the gulch that leads to Hell’s Chasm, and to make matters harder, it’s spring. We could run headlong into the fire and claws of a mated pair nesting a clutch.’
Mykkael tossed her an insouciant smile, as much to shake off the pervasive gloom of his doubts. ‘Princess, if I can’t defend you against a few kerries, my war-hardened skills aren’t going to matter against the shape-changed get of a demon. Do you swim?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Her smile held the spontaneous fire of her indefatigable spirit. ‘But only in private, and in the douce company of four attired maidservants.’
Mykkael laughed. ‘My stark-naked sword blade will have to suffice to vouchsafe the lapse in propriety.’
‘Better surety than the women, since the indolent creatures invariably used to fall asleep. Shai and I could have invited the stableboys. Once, to flout the rules, we nearly did.’
A steel shoe rang out in dissonance as the black gelding slipped. Mykkael gave on the rein, his reaction pure reflex. ‘What held you to prudence, your Grace?’
Anja regarded him, her green eyes turned shrewd. An animate mischief suffused her flushed face by the starlit gleam off the ice fields. ‘Taskin must have overheard the whispers in the tilt yard. I don’t think it was coincidence he dropped his comment in my presence, that he hated to be forced to the task of whipping mere boys caught making lewd eyes at a princess.’
They had been brash adolescents, children who could have been scarred for life through the foolish play of two girls who lured them on by the heat of raw instincts. ‘Shai and I had no intention of any serious misbehaviour,’ the Princess of Sessalie admitted. ‘Our prank was meant to give Lady Phail a livid fit, and I saw the horrid truth, that we would have used the stable-boys as game pieces.’ Even now, remorse showed in the wry set to her shoulders. ‘That was the first time I was made to recognize that servants were people with feelings.’
‘An apology, Princess, for the constraints of my station? Or is this some backhanded diplomat’s warning to salve the inevitable bruises to my dignity?’ Mykkael bridled at the insult, his carriage hackled stiff. ‘What kind of an upbringing do you think I had, to require that high-handed slap on the wrist?’
She grinned broadly, the witch. ‘How delightful to find the breathing man underneath the impervious swordsman. I would rather hear you talk without the provocation. What sort of snob do you think I am, Captain, to accept a protection that might come to cost your life as nothing else but my royal due?’
The strike caught him blindsided. Left speechless, and strangely touched in the heart, Mykkael shook his head. ‘Mehigrannia have mercy,’ he murmured the moment he managed recovery. ‘What under the nine names of hell have I done to deserve your vicious wit? Perhaps I set too high a value on privacy?’
‘If you do, it wasn’t preference,’ Princess Anja replied. ‘Sessalie has treated you like a pariah, and such solitude has marked you with sorrow.’
That bold statement closed him like a netted clam. He clamped his heels and urged the black gelding ahead, his face set against the blast of the wind, until the cold burned his ears to red agony. They crossed over the ridge crest. He led, wrapped in silence. Only as the horses descended the back slope into a sheltered stand of pine, did the stinging surprise of the princess’s onslaught relent. By then, the jab to his pride had cooled down enough. Mykkael could ponder her words without setting his teeth. Good-natured and something beyond rueful, he realized just how cleverly the royal minx had played him away from concern for her threatened welfare. He recalled he had been sounding her fears, and rejected her shameless deterrent.
As the horses wound through the storm-stunted firs, he offered truce, but not capitulation. ‘Princess, if you want to dig up my history for diversion, that’s demeaning.’
She grinned back with a candour fit to wrench a man to the soul. ‘Only if you see me as Isendon’s daughter. I’m a human being, first, a blood princess second, and a gently raised woman last of all. Please call me Anja. I would have my life unencumbered by formalities that don’t have any meaning out of court.’
‘Princess,’ Mykkael said in gentle remonstrance, ‘when have I given you less than your due as a human being first of all?’
He had done far more. The shaming force of his honesty threatened her with sympathy, and worse: his evident quality cried out to her need for close friendship. The isolation she saw in his outsider’s face was in fact the reflection of her own secret loneliness. Too resilient for self-pity, Anja laughed at the trap she had spun for herself. ‘A rotten influence, to be born royal. There are too many times when perception gets turned by the surfeit of admiring flattery.’
‘That’s hedging, Princess. If you’re afraid, then be afraid,’ Mykkael snapped with clipped force. ‘If you’re going to quit pretending, do it now and spare me the anguish.’ Hardened by the awareness he could not grant her shelter by tempering his disclosures, he aimed his dart well, and struck. ‘Don’t make me second-guess the state of your mind. The distraction is a hindrance that could make or break the long odds of securing your survival.’
She stared at him, shuddered, then curled up on the neck of her mare and started uncontrollably shaking. ‘No one has ever lived through Hell’s Chasm!’
This time, the ambush worked: her ragged terror burst through her tight barriers. As the onslaught of weeping stormed her reserves, he realized her bravery exceeded his first assessment: somehow, at some point, she had guessed that Howduin Gulch was not going to pose a safe option. Her intelligence was sharp enough to cut, which posed him a snagging difficulty. Given the arduous terrain lying ahead, too bright an imagination could break the active mind with overpowering dread.
The scope of his charge dwarfed all of his skills, left him humbled to rage for his helplessness. As a human being, first, the young woman on the chestnut mare was a treasure more than worth every sacrifice.
Mykkael let her savage anxiety wear down through the fiercely let salt of her tears. After a while, he laid a hand on her back, offering warmth and shared comfort. ‘It’s a very short step to arrive at a solution,’ he said when Anja ran dry and stirred. She rallied quickly, her mind clear once again. The restored tilt to her chin bespoke a new determination to recover her plundered freedom.
When her wan smile resurged, the captain obliged and removed his tacit touch. ‘We’ll just have to become the first fools who live to blaze the trail.’
Pale gold wisps of hair snagged out of her braid streamed in the gusts off the heights. For one moment, in fast silence, Anja surveyed his immovable calm. ‘You’re not afraid, Mykkael?’
 
; He owed her the truth. ‘Not of the hazards that lie in Hell’s Chasm.’ For the sorcerer who pursued them with two shape-changed minions, she would see soon enough: the fear in him outstripped all words.
With that wrenchingly difficult turning behind, and the rock ridge that arose to the Howduin Gulch glacier dropping away at their back, the terrain for a while became easier. The horses made speed through a wracked stand of fir, and the gusts wore the fragrance of resin. The wheeling stars turned halfway between midnight and dawn.
Anja requested the chance to pause for the horses to rest and feed. Mykkael gently refused her. ‘For your safety, Princess, we should not dismount.’ Here, the harsh footing lay softened under thin soil and drifts of dead needles. They might have no better opportunity to make speed. The demonic creature the sorcerer had set on their trail would overtake their position. To be caught unprepared would bring them to certain disaster.
Therefore they wended their way downwards, into the bowl of the valley beneath the wild, raked rock of the heights. The massive glacier glimmered above them, a towering rickle of groaning ice that spilled into a jewel-toned lake. The sere ground grew a scatter of mosses and fern, stabbed through by spindled fir trees. Beyond the lake, the roaring flood of spring snowmelt carved the channel that plunged like a crack in the world, and framed the massive ravine of Hell’s Chasm.
Although the easier path ran along the packed gravel shore, the riders made their way on the slope, under the thin cover of evergreens. Though the ermine that inhabited the forested vale were too small to draw hunting kerries, horses or strayed cattle posed a warm-blooded attraction. The great predators occasionally visited to roll in the ice. The glacier above showed their carved wallows, where they scoured off the parasites that burrowed into their ruff coats and nipped between their lapped armour of scales.
The horses made steady time in staged intervals at trot and walk, with Benj’s hound limping alongside. As they traversed the rim of the lake, Mykkael was forced, once again, to admire their superb condition. Hard as he pressed them, they moved without flagging. Even in the thin air of the heights, they recovered their spent wind quickly. He noted their individual strengths and watched Anja counter their weaknesses. He marked them, each one, to glean deeper insight into her character, and also to know the hearts of the animals, whose tough sinew and courage must play their part to sustain a kingdom beset by dire peril.
Whoever had paired them had chosen well, the playful, inquisitive buckskin matched with delicate Covette, whose fiery nature restrained his rough teasing with tail lashes and flattened ears. Anja allowed her mount free rein to chastise her boisterous teammate. Whenever the posturing progressed to bared teeth, or a kick, a spoken reprimand curtailed the antics.
On the paired lead rope, trailing, Vashni’s studdish bullying was balanced by Fouzette, a northern-bred mare with a sturdy frame and stoic patience that bordered on laziness. She wasted no move, planted each solid step with no-nonsense efficiency. What she lacked in grace, she made up for in broad-chested power and deep heartgirth, and a fitness like forged iron nails.
Stormfront had won Mykkael’s admiration from the first snatched glimpse of a witch thought. When the gelding was not being pestered by his partnered mare’s nipping head butts, he had the habit of peering behind, as though to size up his rider. Taken by his soft, round eye, and his odd, little satisfied snort as he faced front each time, Mykkael stroked his neck with appreciative fingers.
Anja noticed. ‘You like that horse well, I see that much.’
The captain turned his head, his quick smile there and gone in the darkness. ‘Who could resist?’ Through the light talk, he kept his trained faculties tuned into ruthless focus. No rustle of wind through the boughs missed his notice, no snapped twig, and no scattered fragment of gravel. ‘He’s superb.’
The princess’s reply held a hint of pure wickedness. ‘Not to most men, he’s not. In fact, he’s got a widespread reputation for dumping puffed-up braggarts.’
Mykkael raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that so?’
Anja nodded. ‘You don’t hang on his reins. Try that, you’ll find out. Stormfront doesn’t like brazen authority.’
‘Do you ever for a minute stop testing a man?’ Mykkael tipped up his face, his glance sweeping the open sky, and marking the turn of the stars. The tension behind his relentless vigilance could not help but set her on edge.
For of course, she had noticed the slope became steeper and rockier with each passing stride. Her response belied the gnaw of her doubts. ‘Are you asking the woman or the Princess of Sessalie?’
‘Both, of course.’ A chill raked his skin. His move masked from view, Mykkael tested the strung tension on the bow slung over his shoulder.
‘Then the answer is, seldom. Do men always measure themselves against power? Behind me stands the weal of a kingdom. Although I don’t bear the burden of crown rule, I am seen as a figure attached to authority.’ Anja stared forward, where the black fringe of the wood melded into the shadowed walls that narrowed into the impassable cleft. The lakeshore now wore slight ripples of current, with the throaty, distant boom of rushed water reflected off vertical cliffs. Her whispered appeal seemed a prayer to the brute elements. ‘I have to survive this.’
‘For the chance to gallop horses through the meadows to pick wild-flowers, and wear bracelets that sing with small bells, and not least, for the passion you bring to your verses of poetry’ When she glanced at him, startled, the captain added, ‘That’s what I saw in your portrait, your Grace.’
In daylight, perhaps, her rush of embarrassment might have raised her fair skin to a flush. ‘Has anyone said that you see far too much?’
‘Not in my life as a mercenary.’ The crawling chill that brushed over his senses ripped up a ruffle of gooseflesh. Mykkael urged the black gelding to a brisk trot, not liking the fact that the horses’ steel shoes struck stray sparks off the flint-bearing rock. That moment, any small detail that might draw attention cranked his instincts to shrilling unease.
Anja spurred her pert chestnut. Well drilled to the lead rein, the other pairs followed without lagging. Perhaps drawing comfort from conversation, the princess picked up on the subtlety. ‘Then you weren’t a born recruit?’
‘No.’ Mykkael cast a tense glance over his shoulder; saw nothing but fir trees and pale stone. ‘Your questions are better off held until later.’ Pitched to the verge of barqui’ino reflex, he gave way to the cry of his primal hunch and unslung the bow from his shoulder. ‘Watch for kerries.’
‘Not the winged fetch of the demon?’ The princess shortened the lead rein, drawing her horses in close.
Mykkael snapped off a negative headshake. ‘Not yet, we can hope. My wardings aren’t roused.’ He measured her distance, and gained the insight that she undoubtedly understood archery. Her due care not to jostle the black gelding’s balance meant she had ridden with huntsmen, or else had some skill at the butts.
He ventured the question. ‘How well can you shoot?’ Stormfront answered his heels, leaped over a gully, then shouldered through a stand of young aspen, ever closer to the gap where the coiling black current funnelled into the glacial lake’s outflow.
‘Provided the bow isn’t over my strength?’ Anja followed him, rattling over the loose pebbles piled up by the pressure of last winter’s ice. ‘I usually hit what I aim at, but then, bagging hare for some villager’s table, one’s hand doesn’t usually shake.’
‘Stick with the skinning knife, then. A small blade can be used to disable a talon. Cut the tendon at the back, just under the claw sheath. That’s the best way to release any monster’s clamped grip. Strike for the eye if you’re bitten.’
The princess met his matter-of-fact instruction with an unnerved exclamation. ‘You’ve fought kerries before this?’
‘No.’ But he had twice killed a roc in the caldera of the Vhael Wastes, and once driven off a king dragon bent on stalking the drovers who worked his supply train through Tirrage.
He had no chance to explain his experience. The next moment, a black shadow occluded the stars, to a whistle of sliced air off spread wings. If the kerrie had come to preen in the glacier, the rich, sweaty scent of Anja’s six horses posed a morsel too tempting to pass up. The creature banked sharply, its tasselled tail streaming, and sleek feline hindquarters tucked under golden-shagged flanks. No question, the creature was hunting, its taloned foreclaws raked to extension.
‘This way!’ Mykkael shouted, driving Stormfront ahead through the thick stands of saplings lining the lakefront.
While riders and horses crashed through the greenwood, the kerrie swooped down in pursuit. Glimpsed through the treetops, the monster came on, its neck thickly maned and its lean belly armoured with scales. No ready target presented itself to the defending archer. The plate-sized orb of the beast’s slitted eye was cased in a hardened, clear membrane, shielding its vision from the blasting, cold air, and the sparks trailing back from its horn-rimmed nostrils. The wind blew sour with the trace scent of sulphur from the fire sacs under its jowls. If it chose to spew, the volatile fluids it belched would vent flame from its razor-sharp beak.
Kerries by nature preferred to feed, raw. Yet if the creature that rushed down on wing-leather sails and bronze pinions could not stoop and strike through the branches, it would scorch its prey on the run, then land at leisure and gnaw on the charred meat of the carcasses.
Cursing for the bitter necessity, Mykkael grasped the black’s mane, left-handed. The bow hung from his wrist, a slapping distraction that hampered the gelding’s shoulder. He had to work fast, or risk breaking the weapon, as he leaned from Stormfront’s back. Pressed to a flat gallop, he ripped the lead rein securing the last pair of horses from Anja’s clenched fist.