Chapter 13 #2
Finally, the short man stalked away, and I counted eight seconds before I allowed myself to take in a shaking breath.
“Fucking hell,” Anders muttered behind me.
“That was fucking close,” I agreed.
“We have to follow him.” Carissa leaped to her feet, and she looked both ways before she turned back and gestured for us to follow her. “Come on.”
Anders and I shared a single look before we both got up and hurried after the dark-haired beauty. She led us around the eastern side of the encampment and then further east away from the circle of tents.
“Where–” I started, but she shushed me.
She was right, we couldn’t risk being found. Not yet, anyway.
Carissa moved like a silent snake through the grass, and I marveled at her stealth.
I did my best to remember everything she’d taught me about moving quietly, and I focused on placing the balls of my feet where she’d stepped.
More than once, I caught sight of a stick or patch of drier grass and managed to narrowly avoid them.
I couldn’t see Drezzen anywhere in the darkness, but Carissa moved with confidence, and I trusted her tracking skills.
Eventually, we reached a copse of trees, and Carissa nearly shoved me to the ground behind a large bush.
Her lips moved silently, and she pointed to a patch of thin trees nearby.
I focused in that direction and spotted Drezzen. He was standing beside a tree with thick, low branches and looking around in utter confusion.
“Where the fuck…” he muttered.
He whipped his head back and forth in irritation, and I wondered what he was looking for.
Whatever it was, he didn’t seem able to find it. After about a minute of searching through the long grass on his hands and knees, Drezzen stood up and grumbled something to himself.
“Fuck,” he hissed. “I swore it was right here.”
Carissa tapped my shoulder and silently asked what Drezzen was looking for.
I shook my head as my only answer. I had no fucking clue.
At first, I’d assumed he’d been looking for a horse, and I started to think the unsaddled horse the soldiers had found was his. Then he’d dropped to his knees, and it became clear he was looking for an object of some kind.
“This will all be worth it in the end,” Drezzen said to himself.
Then he set off walking southeast and past the encampment.
Whatever he’d been looking for wasn’t important enough to stop him from whatever his next task was.
South was the most alarming direction he could have decided to move in. The only things south of us were the rest of the Plains of Duulg and, eventually, the Haktorian Empire.
The evidence was starting to stack up against Queen Sybil, but we still needed hard proof to really bring about justice. This was way too big to risk blowing our hand on assumptions.
“Should we–” I started.
“Wait.” Carissa shook her head and pressed a finger to her lush lips.
I nodded and waited. Anders positioned himself to bolt at the right moment, and I tried to match his stance. It felt a little like waiting for a horse race to begin, and the anticipation was thrumming in my veins.
“Go,” Carissa said. “Slowly.”
“We can’t risk being seen,” Anders agreed. “Not until we’re far enough from camp.”
I nodded. That made perfect sense. If we attacked Drezzen within earshot of the camp and he screamed, it would bring every soldier down on us in seconds.
My pulse thrummed with adrenaline and cortisol as I followed Carissa’s lead once more. Anders pulled a short dagger from somewhere on his person, but otherwise continued silently behind me.
I could just make out Drezzen’s figure ahead of us, and I wondered how long we would pursue him before we moved in for the kill. Not literally, of course. We needed him alive for at least a little bit longer.
Drezzen was moving with a surprising level of agility, and he was nearly as silent as Carissa, but the sky was clear, and the sliver of moon shone on his dark hair like on the surface of a pond.
I kept my eyes locked on his head and shoulders as we followed him for a good thirty minutes. We moved at a pace that was just above speed walking but not quite jogging, and after I was warmed up, I felt like I could keep up the pace for at least a few hours.
We let the gap between us grow the tiniest bit. Before I could ask why, I got my answer.
“Not much longer,” Carissa said.
She’d let the gap grow so we could speak without risking being overheard.
“We’re far enough from camp,” Anders agreed.
“We can’t alert him to our presence upon approach,” Carissa.
“He could bolt.” I nodded in understanding. “Should we wait until he stops?”
“He might not stop at all before he gets wherever he’s going,” Anders said with a grimace.
“Good point,” I sighed. “Okay, how do we make our move?”
“Silently,” Carissa said with a half-grin. “Then we pounce.”
Anders nodded in agreement, and he shifted to the front of our trio with his dagger in his hand.
“I’ll tackle him,” he said.
My brain dumped a fresh wave of fight-or-flight hormones into my blood, and it was like the entire world slowed down and zoomed in on what was happening.
Anders stalked silently ahead of us, and Carissa stayed with me. She could have kept pace with Anders, but it seemed like she understood I wasn’t that good at being stealthy. She stayed close to me but slowly got ahead of me by a few steps.
I pushed my amateur stealth skills to their limits as I worked to close the gap between us without blowing our cover.
Anders was slowly closing in on Drezzen when I spotted something moving in the darkness about ten yards in front of him. I tried to tell myself it was a bush shifting in the wind, so I didn’t succumb to the rush of panic my hormones tried to induce, but then the moving shadow snorted loudly.
“Hush, you,” Drezzen grumbled to the dark horse.
Carissa’s wide, green eyes flashed in the moonlight when she turned back to look at me. I nodded and pushed my feet to move even faster through the grass.
We couldn’t let Drezzen get on a horse. We’d never be able to keep up with him, and whatever information he was carrying would be lost to us if we didn’t catch him.
Drezzen might have been in a hurry, but he wasn’t an idiot. He’d stopped beside the horse long enough to double-check the saddle’s billet strap and the reins. It wasn’t a long pause, but it was enough time for Anders to creep up behind him.
An undetected approach was even trickier now because sneaking up on a horse from behind could end very badly.
Anders stalked wide around Drezzen by several paces before he started to close in from the side. He was well clear of where the horse could kick him and still mostly outside of Drezzen’s main line of sight.
Anders was almost there when Drezzen grabbed hold of the saddle, put his foot in the stirrup, and hauled himself up onto the horse’s back. He put himself safely out of Anders’ reach and alarmingly close to escaping us.
Everything shifted in a split second as I made a risky decision.
Carissa’s hand flew out and grasped at my sleeve as I lunged forward out of the darkness, but I was out of her reach before she could close her fingers around the fabric.
Drezzen snapped the horse’s reins a single heartbeat before I reached him, and his mount tensed to respond, but I’d already started to reach out. My hand grabbed onto Drezzen’s ankle as the horse’s front legs raised up to launch into a run.
My fingers locked around his lower leg, and I held on with everything I had. My other hand flew up to join the first, and I pulled.
“What?” Drezzen shouted in surprise.
The horse reared up in alarm at the sudden, drastic shift of his rider’s weight, and I took advantage of gravity. One hard pull on Drezzen’s leg, and he was fully unseated.
“Aaah!” Drezzen yelled as he dropped from his horse.
The horse screamed in fear and bolted without his rider.
“Stop the horse!” I commanded.
“Aye!” Anders replied, and without missing a beat, he darted after the horse.