Spring Hope (The Silvertree Legacy #2)

The Ember Route

The Crossroads disappeared behind them within the hour, swallowed by the gray curtains of rain that had become their constant companion over the past two days.

Lark adjusted her hood and kept walking, her boots easily finding their footing on the muddy track.

Beside her, Noctis trotted through the downpour with his tongue lolling, apparently delighted by the weather.

Behind them, Pippa and Darian were considerably less cheerful.

“I don’t understand how you can be so undisturbed by all of this,” Pippa said, raising her voice to be heard over the steady drumming of rain on hoods.

Her copper curls had long since escaped their braids and now hung in sodden coils around her face.

The satchel of aetheric devices she carried everywhere had been wrapped in oilcloth and tied protectively across her chest. “We’ve been wet for two days.

Two days, Lark. My boots are making the sort of squishy sounds that boots should never make. ”

“You get used to it,” Lark replied without turning around.

She and Noctis had traveled through weather like this on the journey from Wintersorrow to Autumncrown with Rion, a week of mud and rain that had eventually become simply another condition to be endured.

But Pippa had spent her life in workshops and laboratories, surrounded by aetheric devices and theoretical problems. The road was an entirely different challenge.

“I don’t want to get used to it. I want to be dry. I want to be warm. I want to be sitting in front of a fire with a cup of something hot and preferably alcoholic.”

“We just left the crossroads. There was a fire there. And ale.”

“Yes, and now there isn’t, and I’m already regretting every decision that led me to this moment.”

Darian walked beside Pippa with his injured arm held close to his side, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, his gray eyes fixed on the road ahead.

The wound from the battle at the Narrows had healed enough for travel, but Lark noticed that he still favored his left side when the terrain grew rough, and the careful economy of his movements indicated pain he refused to acknowledge.

He had been with Rion and the bulk of the army when the enemy forces had pushed through, had fought beside him until he had been cut down, and had been among those who made it back to Autumncrown while Rion had not.

He carried that knowledge with him like a second wound, one that would not heal until they brought Rion home.

A few days prior, Lark had offered to slow their pace. He had declined with a look that suggested she might as well have offered to carry him.

It had taken them seven days just to reach the crossroads from Autumncrown, seven days of walking from dawn until the light failed, seven nights of making camp in whatever shelter they could find.

Now the Ember Route stretched ahead of them, leading east toward the foothills of the High Greenwood, and Rion was still out there somewhere.

Captured and held by enemies who had nearly destroyed Autumncrown before being driven back. Every morning, Lark woke with his name on her lips, and every night she lay awake calculating distances, estimating how far the retreating army might have traveled, wondering if they were already too late.

But she pushed the thought away. There was no room for doubt on this mission.

The trail they had been following since leaving Autumncrown had grown increasingly difficult to track.

An army of several hundred soldiers left unmistakable signs of its passage: trampled undergrowth, broken branches and churned earth, but Lark and her companions could not match the pace of trained warriors on a forced march.

They were not soldiers. Pippa was a mechanist. Lark was an assassin whose skills lay in stealth and precision rather than endurance marches.

Even Darian, as experienced as he was, moved slower than usual with his healing injury.

The distance between them and their quarry had widened with each passing day, and now the rain was erasing what remained of the evidence.

Yesterday, Lark had found boot prints pressed deep into the muddy earth. This morning, nothing. The downpour had washed the trail clean, leaving only mud and uncertainty.

“The Ember Route should take us through the foothills,” Darian said, breaking his silence. His voice was rough, perhaps from the cold or from the effort of speaking through discomfort. “If they’re heading towards the High Greenwood, this is the path they would have taken.”

“How long until we reach the foothills?” Pippa asked.

“A few days, if the weather holds.” He glanced up at the sky with an expression that suggested he did not expect the weather to hold. “Longer if it doesn’t.”

Pippa made a small sound of dismay but said nothing else.

After a moment, Darian’s hand found hers, their fingers interlacing with the intimacy of what had begun between them, new but already essential.

Lark knew they had kissed the night before the battle.

Pippa had told her about it while they waited on the wall for the attack to come, her words tumbling out in a rush of nervous energy and barely contained joy.

Everything she had wanted for so long, finally within reach, but then the horns had sounded, and there had been no more time for talking.

Now they walked together through the rain, hands clasped, and whatever had begun between them that night had survived the battle, the grief and the long road that followed. Lark found it both comforting and quietly painful to witness.

The memory of her last night with Rion surfaced before she could stop it.

The softness of his lips against hers and the way he had pulled back just far enough to look at her, his green eyes wide with surprise and hope.

All the words she had wanted to say but couldn’t find, imprisoned somewhere between her heart and her tongue.

Then he had left with the army to defend the Narrows, and she had gone to the western wall to face the assault with Pippa, leaving that brief, desperate kiss to become the last thing between them.

Not the last thing, she told herself firmly. Just the most recent thing. There would be more. There had to be more.

Noctis bounded ahead, disappearing into the curtain of rain before reappearing a moment later with his ears forward and his tail held high. He barked once, sharp and urgent, then vanished again.

Lark quickened her pace. The wolf had proven invaluable on this journey, his keen senses alerting them to potential dangers long before human eyes could detect them. If something had caught his attention, it was worth investigating.

The road curved ahead, following the contour of a low ridge that had been invisible through the rain. Lark crested the rise and stopped.

The washout carved across the track like a wound in the earth.

It was perhaps ten feet across at its widest point, but narrow enough in places that a running jump might clear it.

The edges, however, were crumbling and slick with mud.

The depth was difficult to judge through the rain, though she could hear water rushing somewhere below, a tributary swollen by the storm, carrying debris and soil toward some distant river.

The washout stretched in both directions as far as she could see, cutting across the road and disappearing into the trees on either side. Going around would mean hours of additional travel through rough terrain, time they could not afford to lose.

Noctis sat on the far side, tail wagging, looking immensely pleased with himself. He had cleared the crevasse with a single bound, because of course he had. Wolves did not concern themselves with crumbling edges or uncertain depths.

Pippa and Darian caught up a moment later. Pippa took one look at the washout and made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a whimper.

“No,” she said flatly. “Absolutely not.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Lark said, though she was not entirely sure that was true.

“It looks like a giant tore a chunk out of the earth and filled it with certain death.”

“That seems dramatic.”

“I’m a mechanist, Lark. I understand structural integrity.

That,” Pippa gestured at the washout with the kind of emphasis usually reserved for pointing out obvious hazards to small children, “has no structural integrity. Those edges are saturated. The soil is unstable. One wrong step and you’re at the bottom of whatever that is, probably with broken bones, definitely with regrets. ”

Darian released Pippa’s hand and moved to the edge, crouching to examine the washout with an assessing eye. He picked up a loose stone and tossed it into the darkness. The sound it made when it eventually landed was not encouraging.

“She’s not wrong,” he said. “That’s a significant drop. Twelve feet, maybe fifteen, and the bottom’s flooded.”

“Then we'll go around,” Pippa said immediately. “We can find another way.”

“There isn’t time.” Lark heard the edge in her own voice and forced herself to soften it.

They were all tired and cold. And Pippa was not a soldier or an assassin; she was a mechanist who had volunteered for a rescue mission because she loved the people involved.

“Every hour we lose is another hour they have to get further away. We need to cross here.”

“I don’t disagree with the goal,” Pippa said. “I disagree with the method. Or rather, the lack of method. We can’t just jump and hope for the best.”

Lark studied the washout again. Pippa was right about the edge.

The rain had turned the soil to mud, and that mud was giving way in small cascades wherever the water found purchase.

A running jump might clear the gap, but the takeoff point was unstable, and the landing could be worse.

One slip, one moment of lost balance, and the plunge into whatever waited below would be disastrous.

But there was another option.