Chapter 73
In the Distance
The mountains release us slowly. The cold does not break so much as thin, the air losing its particular sharpness as the path descends and the passes widen and the grey overhead begins to carry more light than it has in two days.
I feel it from inside the transport, through the fabric walls, through the particular change in the way sound moves around us. Kiss feels it too. She turns her face toward the covered opening, alert in a way that is already entirely her own, and I pull her closer against my chest and let her look.
Ari sleeps against my other side, one small fist curled against my collarbone, entirely unbothered by everything the last several hours have held. I envy him that.
Cambra sits across from me, watchful as always.
Saurin is beside her, her head tipped back against the transport wall, her eyes closed.
She has not moved since we left the attack site.
Her skin is too pale and her breathing too careful and I have been watching the rise and fall of her chest without meaning to, the way you watch something you are not certain will continue.
"Saurin," I say quietly.
Her eyes open. It takes a moment. "I am here," she says, the words coming out thinner than her usual voice.
She does not close her eyes again. She looks at me with the attention of someone who has been turning something over and has decided it cannot wait.
"The ones on the road," I say, before she can speak. "They were deathmages."
"Yes."
"We saw one in Alarna. One." I look at her. "There were more than a dozen on that path."
Saurin is quiet for a moment. "One is a tool," she says.
"A placed thing. Something left behind." She looks down briefly.
"What was on that road was a deployment.
Someone built them, bound them, dressed them in glamours, and sent them to a specific location on a specific route.
" A pause. "They knew where we would be. "
The transport moves beneath us, the cold pressing at the fabric walls.
"The words they used," I say. "They knew my name. My title."
"Yes."
Saurin says nothing further for a moment. But something in her face tells me she is filing it away the same way I am.
"Who does this?” I ask. "Who has the power to build something like that and control it from a distance?”
"I do not know who sent them," she says carefully.
"But the construction, the precision of the glamours, the number of them held at once.
" She meets my eyes. "That is not a small power.
Whoever it is has resources and reach and they used both to find us in the middle of the Gyarin mountains.
" A pause. "That is what concerns me more than the deathmages themselves. "
The children breathe against me in the quiet that follows. I do not say the rest of it aloud. If someone knew our route, it did not come from the mountains. Cambra looks at me across the children. I look back at her. Neither of us says anything. We do not need to.
Outside, Colsar's horse keeps pace with the transport. I do not need to see him to know where he is. I have learned the sound of him, the particular way the Avanki nearest the transport adjust when he rides close. For now we have this. The path. The cold. His horse beside ours.
It is enough.
The Veynar soldiers appear from behind the last curve of the pass in loose formation, forty or more, their armor carrying the wear of men who have not seen a city in months. Cold and something harder to name worked into the lines of them.
Rorin rides at the front.
I pull the fabric back far enough to find Colsar. "You planned this," I murmur. "Putting them behind us, and the Shalvar soldiers behind them. You kept them protected on both ends.”
He does not look away from the pass. "Yes. They are weak from what they have been through, and they deserve our protection.”
"It was smart."
A pause. Then, quietly, "They have been through enough."
That is all he says. It is all that needs saying.
Rorin brings his horse alongside the transport and finds my eyes. He is thinner than the last time I saw him, the kind of thin that belongs to months rather than weeks. But his back is straight.
"Majesty."
"Rorin." I hold his eyes briefly. "Your son will be glad to see you."
Something moves through his face that he does not entirely contain. "He had better be," he says, dry enough that the man riding nearest him almost smiles.
I let the fabric fall. Behind us the formation closes in, the Veynar soldiers folding into the line with the quiet ease of men who have learned how to move without being told.
Saurin does not stir again until the path levels out completely and the cold has thinned enough that the transport no longer needs to work as hard to hold its warmth. When she does, she sits upright and holds out her arms for Kiss without a word.
I look at her.
"I am fine," she says, before I can speak.
"You are not."
"I will be." She holds my eyes with the certainty of someone who has been through worse and knows it. "Give her to me. Your arms must be exhausted."
They are. I pass Kiss across carefully and Saurin takes her with the ease of someone who has done it a thousand times.
"Stripping the glamours across that many bodies at once," I say quietly. "That is what it cost you."
She does not deny it. "Dismantling a wielder's work is not the same as fighting it," she says. "It requires finding every binding and undoing it at the same moment. If even one holds, the others can reconstruct." A pause. "There were many bindings."
I look at her for a moment. "You could have told me."
"There was no time." She looks down at Kiss, who has already found something interesting in the fabric of her collar and is pulling at it with focused determination. "And it needed to be done."
I do not argue with that. I only say, "Thank you. For all of it."
She does not answer. She only looks down at Kiss.
That is answer enough.
We smell Veynar before we see it.
I know it through the fabric walls, wood smoke and river water and something green, the particular mixture that belongs to a place lived in long enough to have its own scent worked into the ground. I know it without choosing to.
Then Colsar pulls the transport covering back himself, just enough, and holds it open. I lean forward and look out.
Veynar. It sits in the distance below us, spread across the valley in the last light of the day, its rooftops just visible, the river catching what remains of the sun in a dark ribbon that moves even in winter.
From this height the palace is visible on its rise above the city, its towers small but unmistakable, its flags moving in a wind I cannot feel from here.
We are not there yet, but tomorrow we will be.
No one speaks. Even Kiss goes still. I look at Colsar. At the road on him, the travel clothes, everything the mountains have left behind. He looks at me and I know he is seeing the same thing in me.
"We need to change.”
He looks down at himself briefly. Then back at me. "Tomorrow."
"Tonight," I say. "We prepare tonight. So that tomorrow we arrive as what we are."
He holds my eyes for a moment. Something moves through his expression that is not quite a smile but belongs to the same place one would come from.
"What are we?” he asks.
I look back at Veynar in the distance, small and bright against the darkening valley, entirely unaware of what is coming through its gates tomorrow. "Everything they did not expect," I say.
He takes my hand through the opening. Holds it once, brief and certain.
"Then we prepare," he says.