Chapter Five The Death Watch
The next few days passed much the same: the Prince woke, was bound and gagged, tied to the horse, and forced to suffer in silence through a long day of riding.
The only change was that he managed to devise a way to tilt his head at just the right angle so as to see out from under the hood.
All that he ever saw, though, were rocks, trees, and other green things, with no end in sight.
Try as he might to distinguish one mountain pass from another, he was unable to do so.
How the Exiles did, he couldn’t begin to understand, and he eventually gave up, head pounding and eyes throbbing due to the awkward angle.
The Exiles spoke only rarely during the day, and never to the Prince, except to give him directions.
They would talk more openly at night around their campfire, if they made one, but unlike before they spoke too softly for him to hear.
Even Tomaz, whose voice always gave the impression of a distant earthquake, kept his words sufficiently muted to prevent the Prince from eavesdropping again.
But they never ignored him completely, especially the girl, who always seemed to be watching.
In fact, he realized that whenever he shifted, she shifted.
Whenever he moved farther away from the fire, she moved closer, using the excuse of stirring the coals or adding another handful of bark and leaves, but always keeping an exact distance between them.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked on the third night, breaking the silence during supper.
The effect he had hoped for, that of a sudden and forceful interruption, was slightly ruined by the fact that he was shivering from cold under his thin clothes and patchy blanket.
The knowledge of their earlier conversation also still floated in the back of his mind, making him uneasy, and he felt suddenly uncomfortable when they looked directly at him.
“Where do you think we’re taking you?” the girl asked, her eyes gleaming in the firelight.
The Prince, certain she was mocking him, almost snapped back at her.
But he cooled his temper when Tomaz conspicuously set down his food, stretched his fingers, and rolled his shoulders.
They had camped near a running stream that night, and the Prince was cold enough without receiving another dunking in the name of good manners.
“Never mind,” he said, with as much dignity as he could muster, before focusing back on his dried meat and hard cheese. Tomaz chuckled, a deep rolling rumble, and though the Prince’s cheeks burned, he stayed silent.
This was the most significant interaction they had in those few days.
The Prince, who all his life had been inclined to introversion, had no complaints.
The Exile girl, whose name he was never able to catch no matter how hard he tried, was just as quiet, and it was usually Tomaz who began any kind of conversation, often as not by commenting cheerfully on whatever seemed to be passing through his head.
The girl would respond briefly; the Prince, who was still gagged while traveling, would stay mute; and then they would all lapse back into silence.
But on the seventh day of their journey, the Prince’s shoulders and chest began to prickle with an unnatural heat.
Immediately, he sat up straight in his saddle. Could it be?
He shot a surreptitious glance at the two Exiles from under his hood as best he could and saw that they had noticed nothing. Both were out front of him, Tomaz leading the way on his black charger, and the girl holding the reins of the pack horse the Prince rode.
He slouched back in the saddle, heart pounding, and tried to show no further sign of excitement.
As the day progressed, the black markings on his shoulders and back continued to grow warmer as the Raven Talisman sensed life, a fourth life, separate from him, Tomaz, and the Exile girl, coming closer and closer. There was someone behind them, farther back along the path the Exiles were taking.
The single point of light split into several, and he realized that it wasn’t just one following them. It was many.
Hope sprang into his heart again.
A rescue party. It had to be.
The bright points continued to gain on them.
When they were only a mile away at most, the Prince felt half of them separate from the others and move farther to the west, and then pass beyond them, circling around to their front.
He and the Exiles were moving through the middle of a wide ravine, with high, rocky slopes on either side.
Tall trees that provided perfect cover for an ambush topped the slopes, and stunted trees grew along the path as well, forcing the Exiles to weave back and forth.
The horses’ hooves made barely any sound as they walked—the ground was soft dirt covered by a thin layer of fallen leaves that were as skinny and sharp as needles.
The day was cloudy, the sun hidden, and everything had an iron gray cast to it that seemed to flatten and wash away the color of the world.
This is it, he thought. They’ve come to bring me back.
He tilted his head under the hood, and his eyes locked onto the girl walking in front of him, calm and unbothered. Beyond her was Tomaz, just visible in the gloom, scouting slowly ahead on his enormous stallion, but not far enough to see the group closing in around them.
The Prince allowed himself a small smile.
He reached out with his mind and felt again the points of light and heat, the sparks of men’s lives, moving slowly with them toward the end of a ravine, which led out into a wide funnel-shaped valley.
And then something strange filtered through the Talisman. He frowned in concentration, but he couldn’t manage to grab onto the feeling. Something whined and shimmered in his mind’s eye, and then slipped away.
The lights began to flicker and bounce oddly.
First they were on his right side, then they were on his left, then gone, then up ahead, then above him, which made no sense.
He focused harder, and, despite the cold, felt a bead of sweat run down from his temple, trace the line of his jaw, and fall onto his shirt.
Finally, he located the source of the nebulous something, and realized the strange feeling was coming from two points of light that felt different from the others. They felt… wrong. They weren’t bright enough somehow. In fact, it was as if they were only half there.
Why is that familiar?
He’d sensed it somewhere before, but where?
His head suddenly throbbed, and an image of the Fortress came to mind…
but no, no one in the Fortress felt like that.
The Children would stand out even more strongly, like beacons, and Guardians would too, to a lesser extent.
No, what he would expect from them was directly at odds with this strange sense of hollowness, as if the lights had been shrouded in the cloaking mask of night.
A sharp whistling filled the air from all directions, and immediately both Exiles converged on the Prince. His horse panicked, and he fell off, once more sliding down the side of the beast. As he fell, his hood was yanked away from his face by two somethings he couldn’t see.
He cried out through the gag, his stomach lurching as he swung off the side of the horse. Tomaz grabbed him, and with two quick flashes of a dagger, cut the ropes holding him in place. The Prince dropped free and fell to the ground in a heap as Tomaz whirled away on his black stallion.
More dark streaks shot through the air. Two of them struck the Prince’s horse and it shrieked in pain and surprise, the sound deafeningly loud.
“They’re on both sides!” the girl yelled.
Another dark, blurred shape streaked past the Prince’s face, stinging the bridge of his nose, and he recoiled in shock.
He crab-walked backwards as quickly as he could up the side of the small valley and ducked behind a large bush between two trees.
His hand landed on one of the black streaks and he picked it up: it was a small arrow, both head and shaft painted black, with black raven’s feathers for fletching.
His mind flashed back to the blackened dart the Exile girl had pulled from his neck, with its hollow points. He made the connection and felt again the two wavering less-than-human points of light, just before they dimmed even further and then faded completely from his mind.
“Death Watchmen,” he gasped.
It wasn’t a rescue party. It was an assassination.
His daze was interrupted when a man dressed all in black with a drawn short sword burst into view from the foliage on the side of the ravine. The Prince stood and motioned for the man to halt, pulling himself up to his full height and assuming an imperious stance.
“Stop!” he commanded.
The man ignored him and slashed at his head.
“I am the Prince of Ravens—I order you to stop!”
The man swung again, just missing the Prince’s outstretched hand.
The Prince, out of pure alarm, sidestepped, and the man’s own weight sent him sprawling through the bushes behind them.
There was the sound of him hitting something, the crack of a branch breaking, and then a fading shriek.
In alarm, the Prince plunged through the bushes after the man, and immediately pulled up short, only just managing to stop himself before he fell headfirst into a hidden chasm, an ugly five-foot wide gap of black emptiness where the ground and the side of the valley ravine should have met.