Chapter Thirty-Nine Reyanwyn of the Mountain #2
Before this interaction could get any worse, Reya cut in, “I’m in need of your talents.” She didn’t ask how he’d already removed his collar. Indeed, she noticed several Sages nearby who were also missing theirs.
“Anything for you.”
Caelan let out a low snarl of warning, much to Citrio’s amusement, and something in her melted. For the first time in days, she wanted to laugh.
Never taking his eyes off Citrio, Caelan said, fire dancing in his irises, “I will melt you.”
“Fire elemental. I should have known.” Citrio snorted and headed for the exit.
“I shouldn’t like the territorial bullshit,” Reya murmured. “But I do.”
Caelan cupped her jaw. “Good.” Not caring who saw, he slanted his mouth over hers and stayed there, tasting her long enough to earn an amused yet pointed cough from Thance. Reya felt the warmth of it long after he pulled away. They needed to go.
“Grab whatever weapons and clothes you can,” Reya shouted to the crowd as she moved through it. Short swords and daggers lined the racks on the walls, along with an array of cloaks, bags, even some general supplies. “The mountains are not forgiving terrain.”
Several people spoke at once.
“We will never make it!”
“They will kill us all!”
“Who are you to give us commands?”
Everyone was looking at her now, more questions she couldn’t answer in their eyes.
Reya didn’t want to be anything to these people.
“Stay here to die if you wish. It is your life to do with what you will. I cannot promise you will survive the mountains. If you stay close together, help one other, then maybe. But I can promise you this: Whatever end you meet out there is better than the one you will meet in here.” Pride shone in Caelan’s eyes as she joined Citrio above the tunnel opening.
A boom shook the prison. Citrio grabbed her waist to keep her from falling through the opening, and she threw her arms out to steady herself like she was balancing on a rooftop in Edris. “What was that?” she asked no one and everyone.
A crack shot up the side of the armory, spidering like the veins of Caelan’s Faerie curse.
The bulges of stone around the archways. The mortar along the floor.
They hadn’t been repairs at all. Each one of the arches had been placed near a strategic intersection, all key points where damage would have the farthest-reaching impact to the building. That’s why the guards had retreated.
The men she’d just killed hadn’t been corralling prisoners.
They’d been lighting the fuses.
Rothmire, it seemed, had learned something from the last attack on his prison and would rather lose the entire fortress than allow a possible army of magic-born to escape again. And if that was the case, then he no doubt had a copy of his research somewhere. She’d been right. This wasn’t over.
The Rhiterrans had lined the prison with explosives—and they were going to bury them.
“EVERYONE, MOVE NOW!” Caelan shouted. “REYANWYN, CLEAR THE PATH!” She wasn’t going to leave him. But Citrio shoved her forward as more cracks shot up the walls.
“Come on, Red, you heard him! He’s got this, come on!”
She didn’t have a choice; people were stampeding toward the opening, and she and Citrio got caught in the wave.
Swearing up a symphony, she stepped down into the darkness, moving quickly to outrun the crowd shoving at her back. The passage was wide and tall, like it had been built for more than just people. The Cogors would have to duck, but they would fit. Barely.
She felt as though the ground had swallowed her, imagined the walls caving in.
With every body she bumped into, the harder it was to breathe.
She pushed until she was at the front of the procession, Citrio at her heels.
The farther they descended, the colder she became.
Stalagmites reached up from the ground, creating more obstacles for them to maneuver around.
The Etellinian Mountains were as old as Ianess. These caves were similar to the ones beneath the mountain she’d been raised on—sacred caves in which her father had warned Reya and her brothers not to delve too deeply, lest the All-Gods punish them for their curiosity.
Her hair and shift were sodden with lake water, sweat, and blood, leaving not one inch of her to the imagination. But she had no time to dwell on it, the temperature, or how every few minutes the ground seemed to shake.
Thance was right. The air was beginning to clear. She followed the scent of home like a beacon down and down and then up more stairs, until the passage opened onto a snow-spotted slope.
The freezing wind struck her like a physical blow, and she immediately regretted not claiming a cloak for herself or demanding Caelan stay close. Behind them, the fortress was a smoking ruin, the surrounding wall the only structure left intact.
She would not think of who might still be inside.
Not now. Not when high on a mountaintop, a signal fire was burning bright.
Reya gritted her teeth and rubbed her hands together.
It would not be the first time she’d trudged through the snow with nothing.
She’d fled these mountains once before and survived, and she would do it again.
The Etellinian royals had paved their escape trail, long overgrown, heading due east. But that had been a different age, when the sea meant safety. If they went east now, they would be trapped between the mountains and the water, with nowhere to go. They had to go west.
It took Reya only a moment to find Ryksis’s constellation. Dellasine, the star of the north, gleamed at the tip of his sword, pointing the way.
Reya and Citrio plowed ahead, carving the easiest path they could down the western mountainside. It was steep, but not uncrossable. Citrio began parting the snows to ease their passage, but Reya stopped him with a hand. “Save it.”
He would need every drop of his power.
She glanced over her shoulder every so often to the line of magic-born trailing behind them like a colorful ribbon curling down the mountain.
One people of all sizes and kinds, helping one another cross the difficult stretches of terrain.
The dark stain of Bladestone Prison was shrinking at their backs.
“Stay together!” Reya shouted over the wind when trees began to pop up between the rocks. The trees would provide cover, but it would make it harder to see one another.
Every time she thought the incline would level out, there was another fallen tree or rockslide.
As the hours stretched, she began to grow anxious.
When Caelan appeared at her side, a sword in each hand, Reya threw herself into his arms and sighed as strength and heat enveloped her, and she slowly regained feeling in her fingers and toes.
“Omira and Thance?” she asked.
“Helping at the back.”
“How many?”
He knew what she meant. “One hundred and fifty-four.”
One hundred and fifty-four people rescued. One hundred and fifty-four souls that were now in her hands. One hundred and fifty-four out of what was once thousands. How many children hadn’t she saved? Caelan brushed her trembling chin with his thumb.
“I know, thief,” he said. “Think about it tomorrow.” He set her on her feet, and ushered her forward with a hand on her lower back.
They trudged through Old Etellina, out of the snow and down through warmer stretches of ferns and moss and patches of wildflowers. Dawn was coming too fast. They’d already lost the constellations and were about to lose the cover of the trees.
At last she saw it, glistening in the pale blue dawn through an opening in the pines, twining through the foothills.
The Sirene River.
All that lay between them and the river now was the Run, a valley where the mountain folk had once made their final stand against the Rhiterran Empire in the war for Old Etellina.
Reya pointed to the river and said to Citrio, “That is why you’re here.”
Whatever his response, she didn’t hear it. Because the rock beneath her bare, bloody feet trembled. She reached down and laid a palm flat against the earth. That kind of rumbling meant only one thing.
Mounted horses.
“We need to move,” Caelan growled.
“Make for the river!” Reya shouted, her voice a roaring command over the rising panic.
She led the way, leaping between the rocks and mounds of earth as they tore down the Run.
Caelan was a solid presence at her side.
She didn’t dare look at their pursuers—didn’t need to.
She heard and felt well enough what was coming.
In the center of the field ahead of them was a smooth gray rock carved with whorls.
A shrine to the battle that once raged upon these foothills.
This field was where the fight for the Mountain Kingdom had been lost. As they passed the memorial stone, Reya sent up a prayer that their story would end differently.
Some of the Sages began to cry out in fear. But she forced herself to hear only the rushing of the river that grew louder and louder as they neared. Reya reached the edge first, hands on her knees and gasping for breath.
Only then did she turn to see the Rhiterran force that was rolling in like a wave from the north, fanning out across the valley behind them. A hundred soldiers at least—mounted on horseback and in full plate armor.
“Freeze it,” Reya said to Citrio. If they could cross the river, those horses wouldn’t be able to follow. They could make for the cover of the Cleary Wood.
“Red, I—”
A female behind Reya fell to her knees, raised both hands to the rapidly brightening sky, and shouted, “All-Gods deliver us!”
Reya knew Caelan was scanning the survivors, counting, calculating. She saw what he was seeing. Few fighters. Many exhausted, injured, and without magic. Meanwhile the army charging across the Run was rested, armored, trained, and had the high ground.
There would be no prisoners. No quarter. No mercy.