Chapter 11
White Milk
Roark scanned the mountainside with the
spyglass. They’d ridden long and hard the past three days, saddling
up at the first light of dawn and riding ’til the dark of night,
stopping only long enough to eat, make love, and sleep before
rising and doing it all again. By pushing the horses and
themselves, they’d made the Mounths’ northwest range and would
start their slow descent toward the lowlands tomorrow. Which meant
farms and villages, and eventually towns to avoid until they
reached the North Sea Firth in another three to four days.
He glanced at Alina, who was watering the
horses at a stream and checking their hooves. She’d never
complained once since they’d fled North Shore Keep, though she’d
been on horseback, eating camp food, and sleeping on the hard
ground for the past seven days and nights. They’d used the last of
the dry stores Roark’s mother and uncle had given them two days
ago, and had been surviving on the small game they caught, and the
wild greens and mushrooms Alina foraged. She could lay a snare as
well as Roark, and hadn’t exaggerated one whit when she’d claimed
she could skin and cook whatever game she caught.
She caught him watching her and smiled. Their
time in the wilds hadn’t been all drudge and hardship. There’d been
dips in streams and ponds, and the nights making love under the
stars. Their whispered endearments as they lay huddled together on
their bedrolls and their conversations as they rode, covering
everything from the natural world they traveled through to the
spiritual world they could feel and hope to find one day. Though
not yet.
It was that spirit world niggling at the back
of his neck that’d had Roark on edge since he’d given Alina the
vial of White Milk. He knew Leif was dead and buried, yet he
couldn’t shake the feeling his ghost was haunting him. He’d shared
a brotherly bond with Leif for ten years, and though he’d hated him
in the end, and would’ve killed him if Alina hadn’t stopped him, he
had left him bound and gagged, a sitting target for whoever it was
who had killed him. He felt Leif’s presence dogging his every move.
This was the one thing he hadn’t discussed with Alina, and
wouldn’t.
Perhaps it was his own pending death preying
on him. He knew the odds of him surviving were poor at best if he
returned to North Shore Keep to make things right between his
family and Roger’s. Those odds would go way up if he returned with
Alina to Sea Ridge.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t considered it a
hundred times a day since she’d asked him to return with her. He
was a young man in his prime with a woman he loved who loved him
back. A woman offering him a life he hadn’t dared dream of since
he’d been sent to Roger and became betrothed to Gwyneth. Yet as
much as he wished he could accept her offer, he couldn’t live with
himself if he left his family and hundreds of others to suffer for
his actions. He wouldn’t dishonor Alina by marrying her in such a
state.
If, by some miracle, he made it back to North
Shore Keep alive and survived a public trial and was released from
his betrothal to Gwyneth—all big unlikely ifs—then he promised
himself he’d go after Alina, and hope she wasn’t carrying his child
and been forced to marry another man in order to give their child a
name.
All big, fucking ifs.
He gave the mountainside one last look as
Alina walked the horses over to him, and stopped cold. “There are
five riders coming from the south,” he said. “Riding hard and fast
from the looks of it.”
He handed her the spyglass as he checked the
cinches on Artur’s and Etain’s saddles and double=checked the ties
on their gear. She handed the spyglass back to him and he booted
her up onto Etain’s back and swung up onto Artur’s.
“Can we outrun them?” she asked as they sent
the horses into an easy lope due north.
“We’re going to find out.” Artur and Etain
were both good horses with lots of heart, but they’d been ridden
long and hard for days now, their only respite when they’d been
huddled damp and cold under the cave’s overhang, and that was four
days ago.
A lot would depend on where the riders were
coming from and how hard they’d ridden to get here. “They’re coming
from the south, so it’s likely they followed us across the Mounths.
Hopefully, their horses are as tired as ours.”
Alina patted Etain’s neck. “My faerie girl
has the heart, the will, and the legs,” she said. “They’ll be
hard-pressed to catch us.”
Roark pulled out the spyglass and looked over
his shoulder. “It’s time to put those legs to use,” he said, urging
Artur into a full gallop.
They kept ahead of the riders for most of the
afternoon, and though they hadn’t gained any distance on them, they
hadn’t lost any either. Roark could feel Artur struggling for
breath as they climbed, making the pass as the sun was touching the
top of the western peak. He could see that Etain was struggling as
well. They stopped at the top of the pass to give the horses a
quick rest and take a quick piss. Mounting back up, Roark took a
look behind them with the spyglass.
“Damnation.”
“Are they gaining on us?” Alina asked.
“A little.” He turned Artur’s head north and
urged the stallion forward. Twenty paces in, Artur started limping
on his right front leg. “Hold up,” Roark called to Alina. He
dismounted and lifted Artur’s hoof. “Fuck me.”
“What is it?”
“A stone bruise.” Roark touched the dark
swelling and Artur jerked his leg. “It’s not too bad yet, but he’s
done running.” Gently, he lowered Artur’s hoof and met Alina’s
worried frown. He untied the spyglass sheath from his waist belt
and handed it to her. “Ride due north until you make those woods.”
He pointed to a thick forest about two leagues down. “Turn west
into the woods and do the best you can to hide your tracks. Find a
stream to ride down or back and forth across while making your way
northwest.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m not leaving
you.”
Roark pulled his flint out of his saddlebag
and his dagger out of his boot, holding them both out to Alina, who
was shaking her head even harder, her eyes wide and wild.
“Yes,” he told her, shoving the flint and the
dagger into her hands. He took the bow and quiver from Artur’s
saddle and tied them to Etain’s. “The mare can’t carry us both,” he
said. “You have to leave me or we’ll both die, and this will have
all been for nothing.” He could see her mind working, arguing
against the truth of what he said. “What if you’re carrying my
bairn?”
She blinked twice, and then she grabbed him
by the tunic. “They will grow up knowing they were made of our
love. None of this,” she said, her voice as fierce as her gaze,
“was for nothing. I love you, Roark.”
He gave her a smacking kiss on the lips. “I
love you too.” He took her by the arms and practically threw her up
onto Etain’s back. “Now fly, my lady owl. Fly to Silver Water Keep,
and the gods willing, I’ll join you there in a day or three.”
“Roark…”
“Go.” He slapped Etain on the rump and
watched Alina ride away from him, and then he walked Artur over to
a log and untied the saddle blanket he’d been using as a bedroll
and cut strips off it that he tied around Artur’s hoof. When he was
satisfied the hoof was sufficiently cushioned, he pulled out his
last two strips of rabbit meat and ate them, took a long drink of
water from his skin, pulled his short sword, and sat down on the
log and waited.
He didn’t have to wait long.
He stood and stretched his back and touched
his toes and swung his arms from side to side as the riders
approached and circled him.
“Where’s the woman?” demanded a man of
indeterminate age with stringy brown hair and a long, scruffy
beard.
“Woman?” Roark glanced around, taking in the
four other men. “What woman?”
“The one you was ridin’ with,” the man, who
appeared to be the leader of the motley band, said.
Roark was a laird’s son who’d been taught
sword fighting since he was eight years old, and by the ragged
looks of the men surrounding him, he was at least five years
younger than the youngest and outweighed every one of them by three
stone of muscle. Still, there were five of them on horseback. The
best he hoped to do was stall and give Alina more time to get away,
and to take one or two of them down with him.
“You must mean the lad I was riding with,” he
said. “A fey lad, to be sure. I ken see why you’re thinking he was
a woman.”
“He’s messing with ye, Ned,” another man, the
beefiest of the five, said.
“Shut up, Shaw,” the leader, Ned, said. “I
know he’s messing with me.” He glared down at Roark. “An I know who
you and the woman be. Now, where is she?”
Roark shrugged and shook his head.
“Rob,” Ned barked at the rider to the right
of Roark. “Look fer her tracks. She can’t’ve gotten far.”
“Aye, Ned.”
Roark turned and took two running strides for
Rob, leaping into the air and skewering the man through the back of
the ribs with his short sword. He pulled the blade from Rob’s back
as the man slumped forward, and landed on his feet. “Well,” he
snarled, swinging the short sword and slinging Rob’s blood. “Who’s
next?”
The youngest and twitchiest of the gang
charged Roark with his horse, which was as twitchy as his rider.
Roark stepped up and bellowed like a bull, waving his arms and
shouting at the wall-eyed creature. The horse panicked and reared
and threw its rider, who landed on his back with a thud and cracked
his head open on a rock. The horse ran off, and the other three men
stared at their dead companions for a breath or two, and then they
slowly tightened their circle around him.
“Yer a dead man,” the one called Shaw
spat.
“No, Shaw,” Ned snapped. “He ain’t worth spit
to us dead. We take him alive.”
Roark grinned and swung his sword. “You can
try.”
***
Alina made the woods and picked a winding
path in a northwesterly direction over the driest ground she could
find, backtracking where Etain’s hoofprints would be easiest to
track. She came upon a stream a half league into the woods and rode
Etain downstream, stopping to look back over her shoulders and