‘No conquest, not yet.’ Mykkael qualified with delicate care. ‘I glimpsed fighting, some bloodshed. A courageous attack by your sire’s subjects has forced the sorcerer’s minions to unmask.’
‘Powers defend us!’ Anja’s ringing cry silenced the noontide drone of the insects. ‘Are you telling me there are more shape-changers?’
‘Minions, surely. Shape-changers? I think so, though how many, I cannot guess.’ Mykkael sensed mounting peril in the roused force of his wards. Yet he dared not voice the extent of the truth, that all of the High Prince of Devall’s armed guard had become hideously corrupted.
‘Your people have been resourcefully staunch,’ he assured her. ‘They have countered the threat of subjugation for a time. The sorcerer has not yet seized his sure foothold to lay down grounding power in Sessalie. He must still work his lines of attack over distance. But if his immediate effort is foiled, his invasion is far from disarmed. A setback against an assault by cold sorcery is not a long-term defeat.’
‘This foothold,’ Anja ventured. ‘If the enemy achieves his triumph, what then?’
Mykkael shut his eyes. Honesty this time came sharpened by grief: the penalty exacted by a high prince’s vain pride, and the glory and grace of the Efandi culture cast into desolate ruin. ‘If Sessalie falls under the heel of this evil? A portal will be opened into the world,’ he admitted, ‘a hot connection to power that will serve to expand the demon’s reach.’ Cedar smoke, simples fashioned of copper and salt—the small charms and banishments would all cease to work. A whole kingdom would become stripped defenceless. The rock and soil that sustained earthly life would be claimed and for ever suborned by the powers of the unseen.
Anja clasped her scraped hands. ‘My people are worthy of this adversary. I have to believe their strength can prevail, no matter the odds set against them.’
Mykkael inclined his head, bereft of encouragement as the pain of the moment shattered and reshaped this young, untried spirit with the cruel force of a hammer. Anja refused despair. She stood upon character, though her inexperienced hands were left empty. Shorn of all power, all comforts, all safety, she embraced understanding of what her role meant, as a royal. There and then, for no hope of personal gain, she shouldered the gift of a people’s raw courage. ‘Promise me, Mykkael! No matter what weakness should overtake me, never let me fall short.’
The captain could do nothing else except bow to her greatness. ‘Your Grace, you shall bear my service.’ He accepted her plea to stand guard in tribute, honouring the commitment that acknowledged the fact she was no more than human, and fallible.
‘No choice, now, Princess. We have to press through.’ Mykkael foresaw with pernicious clarity. First-hand, he had battled the miserable aftermath when the heart of a demon’s creche became hazed. He had walked through the deadly entrapments, as desperation and wrecked plans turned the fell being’s bound sorcerer to atrocities born out of rage. Inevitably, the brunt must fall upon Anja. Her freedom now posed the most urgent impediment to securing her kingdom in long-term conquest.
The wards Mykkael carried did not subside, but flared and pressed at his senses, set in flux by the rise of unnatural currents. The ground underfoot no longer felt safe, and the salt packet confining the shape-changer’s trapped essence seemed to burn like a coal of liability. Spurred on by unease, Mykkael sheathed his knife. He bundled his unfinished arrows into a thong tie, and packed them back into his quiver. ‘Whistle for your horses, your Grace. We can do little but run fast and far, before fresh pursuit overtakes us.’
Remounted at speed, the princess and Mykkael left the boulder-strewn hollow that cradled the marsh. The horses abandoned the grass with reluctance, yet Anja drove them on firmly. Kasminna accepted the hurried trot asked of her with a head-shaking fuss. Fouzette trailed her, resigned, while Mykkael rousted the small band from the rear. He handled Vashni with an expert touch, using herdsman’s yips to turn Stormfront’s efforts to wheel and break free, with Covette as his agile accomplice.
Down Hell’s Chasm they pressed, while the overhead sun branded scalding light over the towering cliffs. Amid that vast setting, stalked by circling kerries, the puny endeavour of two human riders seemed an act of abject futility. Progress was tortuous, with the scrambling clatter of the horses’ strides swallowed by reaching silence. Their cast shadows flowed like spilled ink beneath them, leaving no mark to commemorate the princess who challenged the impossible on behalf of her threatened kingdom.
Mykkael forced the pace. Confronted by his charge’s straight back, and a hardship that strained her sweet-natured intelligence, he could do no less, though exigency pained him. He could not evade the sorrowful cost, as harsh striving wore down and destroyed her young woman’s innocence and beauty. Entrusted to temper her steel-clad resolve, he could not back down. At each stride, through each test of hostile terrain, he endured the price of his warrior’s stewardship: of Anja’s bright hair whipped into sad snarls, and the outrage to her unspoiled flesh, abraded to blistered exhaustion.
The princess had invoked the cruel burden of his service, with her survival pledged beyond compromise. Sessalie’s populace rode on the balance, as well as the lives of who knew how many more innocents who inhabited the lands surrounding this kingdom’s borders. The charge Mykkael guarded was one unformed girl, when a sorcerer run rampant into new territory held the shattering potential to destroy lives by the countless thousands.
No less than the excellence of all that he was demanded that this one woman should enact the full forfeit for the cause of the hapless many. Mykkael ached for necessity. As the forged sword must perform its harsh purpose, oh, he knew: he must force this proud princess to expend all her resource without thought of mercy or quarter.
Again, as he had done for Prince Al-Syn’s daughter, he rose to the bitter, long odds. Although the ordeal yet to come should break Anja, heart or mind, he still must carry forward. His, the task to secure the unbroken integrity of her royal inheritance. The consequences were irrevocable, should he fail. If Anja and the captive remains of the minion fashioned from Prince Kailen’s spirit were not brought under the arcane protection of a learned vizier, or a shaman, Sessalie’s ground would lie open to conquest beyond mortal hope of redemption.
Mykkael denied the raw cry of his grief. Down the stone throat of Hell’s Chasm, he pressured the horses to trot, where even a walk was imprudent. He walked, edging in zigzags over the unsafe, stepped ledges, where reason insisted no living horse should be risked. Anja cringed for their hazard. Sometimes, choked silent, she wept for the sacrifice asked of the animals, again and again, with no pause for praise or acknowledgement. Mykkael dared not slacken. He sat Vashni, cranked to a vigilance that pitched the grey into snorting, volatile tension. The demanding passage forbade conversation. Anja stayed game. Her unflagging spirit matched every demand as the way wended through arched rock, and seamed cliff, and ravine. Peril attended their precarious course over steep slopes and smashed boulders. Other times, they ploughed through sucking mud, where the melt-fed springs sluiced off the rock face and plumed in white sheets towards the flume.
Later, their path hugged the base of the cliffs, streaked with guano and heaped with the fly-buzzing bones dropped from the active kerrie roosts. While crossing one such unsavoury midden, hard under the site of a hatchery, Mykkael saw a kerrie fly in with a stunned buck gripped in its talons. The massive claws had drawn no blood, but cradled the unmarked prey in full flight with a chilling delicacy.
‘Hunt training, for the young,’ Anja explained, a quaver struck through her voice. ‘As the hatchlings grow hardened beaks and sharp claws, the parents fetch them live game. Our foresters say the practice awakens the instinct to chase and kill.’ While the horses picked their way over the noisome rubble of stripped carcasses, the princess shuddered. ‘That deer will suffer, torn and shredded as the inexperienced nestlings indulge their first frenzy of bloodlust. This is the season we’re apt to lose calves from the alpine pastures.’
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The captain rode, war-wary, through the next narrows. Horrid as the habits of kerries might be, the creatures were straightforward predators. Their killing was clean beside the vile practice enacted by demon-bound sorcery. Mykkael turned an uneasy glance to the sky, noted the lowering sun, and once again pushed the pace.
Farther on, they had to coax the balked horses over a natural stone bridge spanning the cleft of a gorge. The structure sheared the winds into dissonance. Gusts wailed like damned souls through the vast chains of caverns, wrought by the might of forgotten cataclysm. The scree of smashed granite on the far side turned their course back down slope towards the flume. Here, granite boulders were jumbled like knucklebones, doused by flung spray as the current slammed through the serpentine channel alongside.
Always Mykkael’s urgency pressed extreme limits. If the horses were fit and responsive through hardship, their agility became sorely tested. Walk or trot, they were constantly harried. Willing, they scrambled over the rough obstacles, disregarding their wiser instincts to fare over crumbling ledges, or creeping through fields of unstable boulders only safe for a sure-footed mule. The animals answered their training. Dauntless, they trusted their riders to guide them around the quicksands of the sink pools, while swooping kerries shadowed their progress, blowing fires that hazed them to trembling.
If Mykkael endured the snatched anguish of witch thoughts, showing wounded and dead back in Sessalie, Anja rode with her heart-stopping fear. She was horsewoman enough to perceive every hazard. One sliding misstep would end in disaster. She could give her brave animals nothing else beyond hoarse words of encouragement. She stroked Kasminna’s sweat-soaked neck, raked over by chills as her thoughts grappled the horror of the less tangible menace that stalked her.
Time and again, Mykkael watched her falter. He measured each battle through desperate uncertainty, each bout to curb shaken nerves. She trusted he would not expend horseflesh needlessly. Despite her faith that his handling was imperative, the incessant demand could not turn her nature to callousness. The harsh use of her wicket teams distressed her far more than her own exhausted discomfort.
Whether the princess’s profound quiet was caused by fatigued stupor, or whether she grasped his reluctance to outline the dangers that had forced their flight down Hell’s Chasm, Mykkael could not guess. No reward existed in this terrible place for the virtue of Anja’s resiliency. He brought up the rear, ever vigilant, while her fragile determination relied on his guidance, and surmounted the gruelling course, hour upon wearing hour.
Through the next pause to water at a spring, the princess caught him appraising her silenced anxiety. She sat her mare with hunched shoulders, unable to suppress her visceral flinch as a kerrie razed overhead. Buffeted by the breeze of its passage, the horses snorted and sidled, until she could no longer ignore her crowding suspicion. ‘The trap scent’s wearing off as the animals sweat.’
Mykkael nodded. He had noted the peril long since. ‘We must extend the supply as long as we can.’
Anja assessed his hardened resolve. ‘Blinding glory! What are you saying? We’re not stopping at dusk?’
Understanding flooded Mykkael, sharpened by cruel awareness, that she had pitched herself to endure for only that long. She counted each breath and pushed forward, sustained by that promise of respite. A false hope he must inevitably tear down, as the sun sank past the horizon. There, courage failed him. He gave her the kinder silence of ambiguity, his distress diverted into a needless check on his bow and blade weapons. Yet even that resolute pretence of calm fuelled the princess’s rising unease. In the end, her imploring green eyes forced his honesty. ‘Your Grace,’ he admitted, ‘there can be no question. A pause at this point would kill us.’
‘What do you know?’ Anja whispered. ‘What have you seen?’
Lady Shai, lying dead of a Devall man’s sword thrust. The glass edge of that sorrow, he absorbed, beyond speech. ‘Your Grace. We will face what occurs one obstacle at a time. To do otherwise would exhaust you with worry’
Anja wavered, overdrawn by stark weariness as she grasped the fact that nightfall was not going to bring surcease. ‘Not knowing is better?’
‘But Princess, you do know.’ Leashed by a patience he realized must infuriate her, Mykkael reached out and caught Fouzette’s lead as the mare raised her dripping muzzle. He edged the stolid bay to one side to clear the bank for the black gelding. ‘The next step is always before us, your Grace. Watch how you place your feet. Listen to what your horse tells you. Also, don’t forget to give thanks for the sun. We could be making this passage under a drenching downpour. Without the blessing of today’s clear sky, trap scent would be useless, and I could not rely on the bow.’
Fouzette stood, head drooping, her torn leg wrap oozing fresh blood. Neither was Anja unscathed. She had weeping sores on her knees. Mykkael saw the telltale stains on her breeches as she freed the stirrups to stretch her cramped calves. The strained set to her back would be due to pained hips from too many hours astride. His experienced eye read every sorrowful ache, as her mare shifted footing beneath her.
Although Anja made no complaint for herself, Mykkael braced himself, ready. The terror and the relentless uncertainty must erupt into flashpoint rebellion. Confronted, each step, by Fouzette’s tortured pain, Anja wrestled emotions her pressed resource could not sustain. Snapped at last by the cruelty, that the demonic assault that had unstrung her life must also savage her horses, she struck out in jagged despair.
‘You think you’ll win through this by the use of your weapons?’
‘I don’t know what I can, or cannot do,’ Mykkael admitted, forthright. He regarded her closely. No anger showed in his face or his bearing. ‘Nor will you, Princess, except through hindsight. If I counted the times I should have met death, I would have no joy left for living.’
Anja swallowed, ashamed. ‘I’m sorry, Captain.’
He nodded. ‘Leave it there, shall we? There’s no foolishness in being afraid, or tired, or upset by distress or frustration. You can hurt with anger for your horses’ suffering. Just don’t lie to yourself. The emotion you choke when you think yourself helpless always turns in the hand. The original feeling that would prompt you to look for new resource becomes bottled, and sours to rage that doesn’t assist your survival.’
Anja wiped her damp cheek on her sleeve cuff. ‘Barqui’ino philosophy?’
Mykkael returned a rueful shake of his head. ‘Experience.’ Most lately, a month spent flat on his back, raving with fever from a septic wound in his knee. His wry smile followed. ‘The hard school that tends to repeat itself each time the lesson is forgotten. Your Grace, shall we ride from this place, and frustrate a few hungry kerries?’
Anja nodded. Beaten wordless, she gathered up her dropped reins.
The trial resumed, while the afternoon shadows lengthened. The cliff walls converged, once again narrowed down to a slit. Trot, walk, then trot on again, that rhythm interrupted by uncertain terrain, or by the snatched pauses to let the overblown horses recover their wind and heart rate. Worn himself, Mykkael held the pace without mercy. His sword hilt continued to whisper in warning. His viziers’ tattoo plagued him also, raising prickles over his scalp. He rode, jarred by fragments of witch thought: of flying things with sharp claws and red eyes; of women who shed grieving tears for their dead. He glimpsed Benj, snoring drunk with his feet propped on a basket, and saw Mirag’s tight-lipped anxiety for the life of a son still in jeopardy. He felt the raw fire of Taskin’s balked rage, to be strapped in bandaging and unable to stand in armed defence of his king.
The whoosh of a passing kerrie ripped Mykkael back to focused awareness. He surveyed the surrounding country, a stepped vista of rock now turning shadowed and grim as the afternoon fled. Here, the cliff walls choked the channel down to a thundering millrace of foam. Buffeting gusts whistled through the pinched gap, and all but crippled his hearing.
The melodious note of the baying hound was almost missed in the tumult
.
‘Halt,’ Mykkael said. ‘Now!’ His grip on Vashni’s nose rope tightened. He had the unslung bow already in hand by the time Anja reined in beside him.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked the princess. ‘Is there trouble?’
Mykkael withheld direct answer. A crawling grue chased over his skin, provoked by his war-sharpened senses. ‘Hold, Princess, very still. Stay at my back. For your life’s sake, I beg you, don’t move.’
He felt her unblinking stare, then her sharp intake of breath. She had noticed the hound. The baying cry was clearer, now, and bearing down by the moment.
Mykkael raised the bow, notching one of the ore-treated arrows from the quiver clipped at his flank. ‘Not ours,’ he whispered. No mortal dog could have crossed the flume’s current, or escaped the predation of the chasm’s swarming kerries. Smooth, silent, deadly, Mykkael slipped off Vashni’s back. He secured his footing on the slick rock, fingers pinched to his strung arrow. ‘Stand fast, your Grace.’
He steeled his resolve, stilled his poised mind, then let go into barqui’ino awareness.
Sunlight still flooded the open country behind, butter-yellow against the twilit gash carved through the cliffs by the watercourse. Mykkael watched that opening. Soon enough, he sighted the hound, an abomination clad in Dalshie’s black-and-tan body. The creature bounded down their backtrail with a heartbreaking show of exuberance. Where the man would have grieved for Benj’s lost hound, inflexible training prevailed. The warrior raised and sighted his bow. Taut-nerved and silent, he waited.
The hound drove through the last of the open ground and entered the gloom of the narrows. Her blunt claws clicked on stone. Rock to rock, she sniffed and unravelled their scent. Her yawling cries as she gave tongue rebounded into the gorge. Through her oncoming noise, Mykkael noted Anja’s rushed breathing. He felt the low vibrations in his sword shift upwards, humming into a whine as the wards shrilled an urgent warning. He drew. And still waited.