‘I’m sorry, Princess,’ Mykkael ground out at length. ‘If we’re not to stay penned, we’ll have to use trap scent.’ Outside, the new day had lifted the mist. Broken sun pierced a thin cloud cover. Lacking the need to mask any horses, enough potion remained to maze the predators’ light-impaired senses and cover the start of their southward journey through the canyon.
Yet the void left behind by the wicket teams’ absence did little to balance that life-saving asset.
‘Stormfront,’ broached Anja between panted gasps. ‘You used him! Kept him living as a diversion.’ Like that treacherous, surprise kiss: a coldblooded act that made her ache to strike out at the self-contained warrior before her.
Mykkael measured her blaze of resentment. He chose to address her straightforward pique concerning the gelding foremost. ‘Not entirely, no.’ Though a simple confession would have served to vent the worst of her festering anger, he had too much respect to belittle her feelings by sheltering behind a falsehood. ‘Sometimes I must honour my deeper instincts. For Stormfront, I could not loose the bow.’
‘Why?’ Anja pressured. ‘Was his future foreseen by a witch thought? Did you have any sure reason to spare him?’
Mykkael glanced down, though not in regret. Gloom masked his subtle expression. Outside, the incessant rattle of rocks bespoke the kerrie’s balked efforts to root out its fugitive prey. Since the gaps in the sheltering stone overhead allowed the beast wind of their scent, the captain grimaced and shifted his weight. He dug into his scrip and fetched out the dregs of Benj’s repellent trap potion. After he loosened the cap with his teeth, he answered the question left dangling. ‘I had no good reason then, and no empty promise to leave with you now. Your Grace, I won’t justify my broken nerve. I could not kill the horse. He became your diversion. Understand this much, and clearly. I have sworn a crown oath. Beware of your gifts, Princess. For I will wring use out of every advantage to ensure your continued survival.’
Anja stiffened to shout at him.
He cut her off, merciless. ‘Admittedly you are now still alive to revile my choice of tactics.’
‘Alive!’ Unable to contain her explosive fury, Anja ground her fists against her tucked knees. ‘Oh yes, we survived an unconscionable risk! How close did I come to being shredded by hatchlings? No, don’t answer, Mykkael! That horror did not happen by the grace of sheer luck! How dared you defy my free will on this matter? Tell me, Captain!’ Green eyes narrowed, the princess looked wild enough to spit in contempt at his feet. ‘What would you have done if your overweening folly had ended in failure?’
He maintained his fixated gaze on the ground. Yet the fingers supporting his crouch had turned rigid, and his carriage was not relaxed.
‘Answer me, Captain!’ Anja’s anger swelled in her, wounded hurt and emotional recoil built to an ungovernable rage. ‘Did you have a contingency plan for defeat? Or would you in your idiot glory of male pride have stood by as I perished, screaming?’
‘In my scrip,’ Mykkael said, ‘I still carry one blow dart.’
Shock reeled her off balance. Anja sucked in a ragged, stunned breath. ‘Merciful powers!’ Yet even that stark admission held no power to deflect her fury. ‘You let down Stormfront,’ she snapped, her ardour still savaged by his past night’s adherence to duty. ‘Do you love me enough to have lost your nerve, if my straits had demanded a mercy stroke?’
He did look up, then, his regard sparked to searing self-honesty. ‘Princess, I don’t know. I can’t answer that question.’
‘You betrayed me!’ accused Anja.
Though Mykkael knew very well she condemned his brazen handling of her affections, his nature when stubborn was adamant steel. She had backed him as far to the wall as he was prepared to allow her. He would not apologize. Neither would he grant her the one glimpse she craved, of clear insight into his heart. Instead, he adhered with unwavering form to the unanswered fate of the horse. ‘You told me that gelding doesn’t like snakes. Princess, I entreat you to look there for hope.’
To make certain the contentious subject stayed closed, he upended the opened phial at speed and sprinkled her hair and her clothes.
Once the kerrie grew bored of rooting up stones, princess and captain abandoned the bolt hole and turned downstream towards the emperor’s realm of Tuinvardia. They followed the riverbed, where the gravel-strewn verge offered the easiest footing. Mykkael moved badly, despite the tight strapping improvised to bind up his cracked ribs. The rough ground overtaxed his scarred knee, and the constant need to keep vigilant guard pitched his wary senses to snapping. In the canyon’s flat lowlands, with roost sites on both sides, the predation of kerries posed a constant threat.
Mykkael’s limp could do nothing but steadily worsen. Lines of pain and fatigue etched his features. He pressed onwards, undaunted. As morning wore on, he expended his waning resource without reservation or complaint. Anja watched him wrestle the looming certainty that the seizing cramps in his leg must eventually come to impair him. Unable to walk, unfit to wield weapons, his oath to defend King Isendon’s daughter would soon be an empty promise.
After a trying passage across a dry wash, Anja could no longer bear to watch his determined, halting step. ‘We should rest,’ she entreated.
Mykkael shook his head, no. He answered, his speech gritted with the sawing discomfort of who knew how many other contusions left by his jounced fall through the treetops. ‘Rain’s coming. We dare not pause.’
The low clouds overhead were steadily gathering, piled up by moist wind from the south. The drizzle that threatened to blow in by nightfall was bound to rinse off the trap scent. Their last ploy to deter the questing feints of the canyon’s infestation of kerries was not going to withstand a soaking. Yet more than weather hackled Mykkael’s deep instincts. As his dark skin ruffled up into gooseflesh, he moved with one hand gripped to his sword hilt.
Whether he suffered from witch thoughts or the arcane prompt of his wardings, the grim depth of his silence spoke volumes. Anja was too unutterably worn to make even half-hearted inquiry. Her best effort required her to keep moving, and avoid pointless conversation.
Even so focused, even so brave, her leaden despair overwhelmed her.
The bleak landscape offered no sign of habitation or safe harbour. Its barren expanse of open floodplain and brush extended to the horizon, clumped with hillocks whose crowns of scrub trees showed the patched scars of fire, where kerries had engaged in their savage rites of spring courtship. No game moved in the coverts. Even Mykkael was moved to make comment, that the mud at the river’s edge bore no tracks left by deer, mice or hare. Hungry and silent, he plodded ahead, well accustomed by war to the stresses of privation.
Anja had no such hard experience to buoy her. Never so sore and tired in her young life, she strove to bear up. Her step dragged, regardless. As noon brought a sky dimmed under clouds, with more ominous banks piling up to the south, she fell back upon brute determination. The sloppy fit of her shoes chafed her feet, until both of her heels rubbed to blisters.
For all that, her limp was less pronounced than Mykkael’s. At last, beyond hope, Anja reached the point where further effort seemed meaningless. She realized the captain’s bad leg had locked. He now moved hunched over, often using his hands to raise his scarred knee over even the most trivial obstacles. Descending a mild slope, he almost fell down as his quivering muscles betrayed him. Undone by pity, the princess stopped her raw outcry behind a closed fist.
Such punishment could not be allowed to continue. Anja reviewed her dearth of wise options. The kerries that stalked them were circling nearer. The bold ones raked past, claws ripping the wind to a whistle of air, while the breeze off their wingtips flattened the gorse with the violence of their passage. Inevitably, one of the large males dipped close and hurled an eruption of flame in their path.
Mykkael recoiled to hair-trigger wariness. When the next beast stooped over them and spat its volatile fuel above their heads, he shouted, ‘Anja, get
down!’
His war-sharpened response already acted to compensate. He reached out, shoved the princess flat on bare stone. His crouched pose shielded her body, with the salvaged wing leather bundled over his sheltering shoulders.
The kerrie passed over them, raining fire. The barren outcrop they traversed offered no prospect of safety. As the incendiary vapour burned away to an oily pall of black smoke, Mykkael dragged Anja back to her feet.
‘Run,’ he gritted.
They managed no more than a half dozen paces. When the second pass came, Mykkael took a longer time, rising. The effort taxed him to grunting distress. Still, he straightened, erect. Sweeping the sky for the next sign of threat, he blotted the beaded sweat from his brow, lips clamped with determined ferocity. Then he extended his hand and assisted Anja up off her knees.
‘We need a bolt hole,’ she scolded, point blank.
When he tugged the straps of his harness to rights, and flatly refused her suggestion, Anja tried using her evident weariness to make him back down and seek respite.
He would not hear reason. His dark, shadowed eyes remained fixed upon her, all the spontaneous grace of his humour erased by unyielding demand. ‘No, Princess.’
Anja whirled aside, hands pressed to her face to mask the moisture flooding her lids. Unlike him, she would not grasp at unfair advantage. Royal pride and straight character would not let her turn her woman’s tears against him as a weapon.
The quiver that rocked her braced shoulders betrayed even that sorry intent. Mykkael’s arms closed around her, his offered comfort kept tenderly light to avoid jostling his damaged ribs. ‘Princess. Bear up. No matter how bad things appear at this pass, I promise you, I have endured worse.’
Anja choked back a sob of despair. ‘Merciful powers, Mykkael! By now, you have to be lying.’
Her head pressed against the warm hollow of his throat, she felt him swallow. His answer brushed through her fouled, tangled hair. ‘Your Grace, how I wish that I was.’
He could never discount the intent of her enemies. No choice was possible, except to sustain. They had been marked as the prey of a sorcerer, a creature slaved to the vile will of a demon, whose insatiable craving for pain and conquest was never going to abate.
Anja sniffed. She rubbed her damp cheeks, and assailed him with logic. ‘Apparitions are no longer dogging our trail. Don’t you think we’ve outlasted this sorcerer’s reach?’
‘I can’t promise that we have.’ Mykkael released his tenuous clasp. Uneasy habit restored his hand to his sword hilt. Eyes turned aloft, still tracking the shuttling weave of the kerries as they dived at close rivals and scrapped in querulous spats of flame overhead, he shared his stark premise. ‘Our ploy at the canyon has most likely broken the enemy’s hold on our trail. At twilight, when the barrier between this world and the unseen becomes thinnest, the sorcerer will spin lines of seeking. I won’t know until then if we have gained enough distance to escape a short curse laid by the creature’s bound minions.’
How could he divulge the unbearable truth? The horror of Kailen’s fate had already rendered the sister a game piece. Kin ties to her brother laid the invading enemy open to an unsettling vulnerability. Without learned protection, Anja would now be stalked by every other warring demon who contended for supremacy in the nether realms.
No stubborn pride, no act of courage, and nothing akin to sane reason drove Mykkael. Anja regarded the stripped planes of his face, and there glimpsed the abject terror that would pressure him past human limits.
‘Some fates,’ he said faintly, ‘are too ugly to contemplate. I beg you, your Grace. Find the strength you don’t have. For both of our sakes, carry onwards.’
Anja reforged her shattered equilibrium and straightened. She took another step, then another. At each subsequent stride, she resisted the impulse to block her ears. She tried not to hear Mykkael’s scraping limp as he marshalled his spent resource and held his place, guarding her back.
The kerries circled above them, relentless. Kept staunch by no less than her simmering anger, Anja felt she should welcome the creatures’ murderous appetite. At least as a bone in the teeth of a predator, she would win a petty victory. The sorcerer’s deathless desire to trap her would suffer a backhanded setback.
Wings rushed overhead. Another hackled male banked and dived in aggressive pursuit. As it ripped overhead, its beak opened to lash them with fire, Mykkael snatched for the wing leather draped from his shoulder.
Just then, an earth-shaking bellow sounded above the gouged seam of the river course. The huge male sheared off. Its violent manoeuvre flattened the reedbeds and rattled the dry brush on the bank, then winnowed the thickets on the far shore in the blast of its turbulent wake. The captain stopped, listening, as with one mind, the opportunistic kerries that trailed them peeled away like a flock of scared pigeons.
‘What is it?’ Anja asked, hating the thin, lost sound of her voice.
Mykkael shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ He drew his sword. Plunged by hazed nerves to barqui’ino awareness, he caught her wrist and pressed his gimping stride forward.
Anja easily kept pace with his dragging leg. Scrambling, together, they surmounted the next hillock. Huddled amid the rocks at the crest, the tatter of wing leather pulled over them, they were suddenly combed by a cracking wind as a low-flying kerrie streaked over them. The creature was a massive, adult female, identified by her chevron-marked tail vanes, and by the lack of furred crest at her neck. Her trumpeting cries sounded over the vale. With enraged, darting rushes, she looped to and fro, chasing the pack of scavenging kerries and making them scatter.
‘She’s guarding young,’ Anja breathed to Mykkael, too frightened to move or speak loudly. ‘Most likely a fledgling. The mothers defend them as they learn to fly, and guard their first efforts to hunt.’
But Mykkael was not watching the ground, or the brush. His incredulous gaze stayed fixed skywards.
‘Do you see?’ He pointed towards the rampaging female.
Anja followed his gesture, then picked up the faint equine whinny of distress. The predator held Stormfront clenched in her talons, an unmarked prize borne in for her offspring to hunt on the open ground by the riverbed.
‘Stormfront!’ Hands pressed to her lips, Anja shuddered. Before her wide eyes, the monstrous creature descended into a thunderous hover, then opened the terrible trap of her claws and released the black horse to run free.
‘Merciful grace! Mykkael, do something.’ Beneath their exposed vantage, a sinuous form flapped pin-feathered wings and hurled itself with raucous cries from the thickets. Stormfront sighted the movement, bucked once, and bolted. Fast as he sprinted, tail curled in terror over his hindquarters, the young kerrie’s bumbling charge outmatched him.
‘Mykkael!’ implored Anja. ‘Act, I beg you. The poor gelding’s going to be shredded alive.’
‘I can’t take him down for you,’ the captain said, desolate. ‘Not with safety. We don’t have the bow.’
‘Then get ready with your poison and dart!’ Whipped on by her unsated, venomous anger, Anja hurled back the loose cover of wing leather.
Mykkael moved to deter her. Slowed by the disastrous cramp of his ribs, this time, he could not react soon enough. His lightning snatch failed to pull her back down, or forestall her piercing shout.
‘Stormfront! To me! Hai, Stormfront!’
The black gelding heard her. Obedient to his training, he swerved. Straight as a shot arrow, he raced down the vale, ears flat and tangled tail streaming. The fledgling came also. Naked head raised, beak parted for murder, it changed course with harrowing speed, intent on its fleeing prey. No obstacle thwarted its bloodthirsty rush. Large as a bull and bent upon slaughter, it must seize its brought meal, or go hungry. If its short, gliding efforts with immature wings could not yet sustain airborne flight, its coordination on level ground was formidably lethal. It had fire sacs as well, and blazing green eyes, fixed on the horse in the glittering frenzy of blood-lust.
Mykkael snapped out a curse in guttural consonants. ‘Stay here! Lie low in the rocks, and don’t move.’ He pressed his drawn steel into the princess’s startled grasp. Then he muttered a prayer in straight language begging for Mehigrannia’s mercy, and snatched up the torn scrap of wing leather.
Too late, Anja measured the scope of her folly. The captain had warned that the guarding protections he carried would not reach past fifteen paces. If the shaman’s mark sung into his blade was not sufficient to guard her, he could do nothing to spare her, should the sorcerer strike in his absence. Nor could Mykkael avoid intervention. Not with the panicked horse pounding in, luring the fledged kerrie and the certain wrath of its protective mother down on them.
The warrior had no time to pick his way off the outcrop. His scarred knee must disastrously slow him. With the wing leather bundled around his frail form, he jumped, tucked and rolled down the slope of loose scree. He fetched up at the bottom, sprawled in the path of the galloping horse, and the bounding rush of the predator.
The impact slammed the wind from his chest. Muscle cramps triggered by his jarred ribs curled his form in a quivering knot. Hands pressed flat to earth, he fought to arise. Even from Anja’s vantage, above, his rigid strain was apparent as he battled through pain to command his recalcitrant body. On his feet, staggering, left arm pressed to his side, he mantled his shoulders in wing leather. He knotted the tattered hide under his throat, then flung up his head in a dogged, lamed effort to set his balance in readiness.
His toll of injuries would not let him straighten. Nonetheless, he called Stormfront to him.