Chapter 72
Zarek
THE RUIN OF EVERYTHING I’VE TOLD YOU
Somehow, we make it through the first night.
We collapse in an abandoned barn at sunrise, and I’m asleep before my shoulders even hit the rotten wood floor. We spend the next night hidden beneath a thick stand of pines, and the night after that under the tangled roots of an upturned oak tree.
Lilias never complains, even as the nights get colder the higher we climb and the only food we have is what I manage to steal from the few farms we pass.
She hasn’t stopped bleeding either. This evening, as the sun set in fiery splendor above the mossy boulder where we spent another miserable day trying to sleep, and I reached over to shake her awake, I was suddenly, horribly certain that Princess Lilias wasn’t going to wake up at all.
She’s so very pale, with circles under her eyes that look like bruises.
So I started to pray.
I haven’t prayed since I was a child, sitting at the table in our cabin, mimicking my mother as she sang praises to the gods of the house. I didn’t think I even remembered the words to those old prayers.
But they all came back to me, in the thick gold of sunset, with my wife curled on the soft moss, unmoving and pale as carved bone.
The songs spilled from my lips, haunting and soft, almost like they were coming from another person, another world.
I sang praises to the gods of a house that burned decades ago, and then to the god of the morning, and to the gods of the mountains.
Lilias turned, and her eyes opened slowly, dark pools catching the last of the light.
“Are you—singing?” she whispered. Her voice was as thin and ragged as the yellow silk dress she wore.
“It’s time to go,” I replied.
Now, we’ve been walking all night. Lilias rides the red mare until it’s too painful for her, and then she walks, and I get to experience the slightly different agony of trying to ride a horse while my body attempts to stitch my ribs back together.
At some point during this miserable, endless night, both of us abandoned riding, and now we’re limping beside the horse, following a thin trail up and up into the granite embrace of the northern mountains as the stars thin and the sky begins to turn gray.
We have to be getting close. Gods above, it can’t be that much farther. The mountains can’t stretch on for much longer.
The road we’re following has turned into a rutted carriage path more suited for mountain goats. We’ve passed a few farms and small log cabins with huge stone chimneys, but nothing to suggest we’re getting close to what Petrys told me I’d find.
Unless this is the wrong road.
I raise my head, staring blearily at the vague gray outlines of the peaks above me. They look like broken ribs jutting from a corpse, or maybe ragged teeth in the mouth of some predator.
I run my hand through my hair, then turn back to the path, which at this point is hardly more than a bare track of slightly less mossy rocks. The trees around us are stunted and windswept, suggesting that winters here last a lifetime.
I turned in the right places, damn it.
I pull in a breath, wince as my ribs protest, and then go over Petrys’s instructions once again. Turn here. Look for that. Turn—
Lilias makes a sound, a soft gasp. I pull my dagger from its sheath before I even realize what I’m doing. The horse stomps and snorts like she’s sick of both of us. I can’t blame her.
“Oh,” Lilias says.
She’s standing a few steps ahead of me, on a small rise in the path. I walk up to her, my dagger at my side.
A wide valley opens up beneath us, filled with shadows.
The gray sky shines from the glossy surface of a lake in the valley below us, and a few lamps flicker from the houses clustered around its shore.
Beyond the valley, a row of massive peaks shines with snow, looking so much like fangs that I shiver before I drop my gaze back to the lake.
“Is this—” she begins, but her voice fades.
I shake my head. Now that we’re here, staring at exactly what Petrys told me I would find, I don’t know what to say.
Here is the ruin of everything I’ve told you.
Here is the only possible place where we can be safe.
I push forward, leaving the horse and Lilias to stumble after me.
A guard comes sooner than I’d expected. We’re not even halfway down the slope to the valley when a man on a horse rides up to meet us, his black cloak flapping behind him.
By now, the sky is a bright turquoise blue, and the snow on the high peaks is almost golden with the light of the still-hidden sun.
I stand in front of Lilias as the man approaches us.
The poor mare who’s followed us this far doesn’t even seem very interested in the strange horse approaching.
She swivels her ears with perfect indifference.
I let my hand rest on the hilt of my dagger.
I can’t imagine we look like much of a threat, two people in filthy clothes hobbling down the mountain with a limping horse, but I’d be a fool to believe that means we’re safe.
The man pulls his horse to a stop and narrows his eyes at us.
He’s roughly my age, with dark hair and a lined face that makes me think he spends most of his time outdoors.
I see at least two blades on his body, not counting his sword, and I’m sure he didn’t come alone, although I don’t want to risk taking my eyes off him to find the archers hidden among the boulders all around us.
“Who in the hells are you?” he barks.
I take my hand off my dagger and bring it to my neck. Slowly, so he doesn’t think I’m pulling out a weapon, I lift the metal cylinder from around my neck. I hold it out like an offering. It gleams in the soft morning light.
“I carry the ashes of Dungal,” I say.
The man’s face changes in an instant. He throws his head back and laughs. It’s so unexpected that it takes my brain a moment to remember what that sound means.
“Gods above!” the man says. “This is a surprise!”
His horse shifts beneath him as he whistles, high and sharp. Two figures in dark robes emerge from the rocks beside the road and walk toward us. No, make that three figures.
“W-Where are we?” Lilias stammers.
The man on horseback laughs again, and then he bows his head and waves an arm at the valley. When he smiles at Lilias, I notice with a pang that he’s actually quite attractive.
“Why, this is the fair Kingdom of Dungal, my lady,” he says. “And I am Zarek, king of these fine lands.”
Lilias turns to me, her eyes wide in her pale face. She’s trembling.
“I— I’m not a prince,” I finally admit, spreading my hands wide in surrender. “My father was the king’s gardener.”
And then I step forward to catch my wife as she faints.
What was he thinking?