4. Chapter 4
Chapter four
Keera
Ifound Aderyn at the edge of the horse enclosure. She stood with her roan mare’s rear leg braced between her own, bent down to check the horse’s hooves. I watched as she put it down and moved to another.
I hoisted myself up to sit on the fence, watching her work. She didn’t greet me at first, continuing to thoroughly examine her horse’s feet before letting them drop and bracing her hands on her hips with a sigh.
“You’re not coming with, are you?” She asked without preamble.
I shook my head, and her words sent a pang of guilt through my chest, so painful I cringed. I had known it was coming, but it still hurt.
“I’m not sure I would be much help. We already saw how thoroughly I tend to fail at diplomacy.” The words came out more bitter than I intended.
Aderyn narrowed her eyes at me. “War is coming too. You’re good at that. It’s how you became queen in the first place.”
“You’re good at war too,” I pointed out.
Aderyn’s shoulders slumped. The posture accentuated just how weary she looked. She had always been pale for somebody who lived in the desert, but it seemed exaggerated now. “I thought I was good at protecting my city. The ways of the clans are new to me, though, and… Kelvadan needs you.”
I shook my head. “I’m the reason the city fell.” Saying it out loud burned like retching up lava, but I did it all the same, almost relishing the pain.
“Don’t blame yourself for something Calix did. And it doesn’t mean you couldn’t help the clans retake her. You seem to understand the clans—the desert. How to fight outside the confines of city walls.”
My lips twisted. “I have had lots of experience surviving in the wilds. That’s why I’m going to the ocean with Erix. I was a terrible queen. But I might be able to do this.”
The last of Aderyn’s argumentativeness seemed to drain from her, and she finally approached and hauled herself onto the fence next to me. She had to jump, being a good deal shorter than me, but her strong arms lifted her up the rest of the way easily.
“You’re helping the desert, and I know that,” Aderyn admitted. “But I still wish you could stay and help us retake Kelvadan.”
“I’ll come back,” I promised. “When the Heart is restored, I’ll return and fight alongside you.”
“We don’t have a lot of time.” Aderyn sighed.
“Then I better ride fast. We leave in the morning.”
“So do Lord Elion and I.”
We sat in silence for a long moment, watching the horses in the enclosure mill about. Aderyn bumped my shoulder with hers. “Come back safely. And bring Erix back too.”
“I promise I’ll try.”
I tried not to look over my shoulder as Daiti set out, walking away from the rising sun.
Zephyr fluttered in the sky above the encampment as if watching us leave, displeased that Erix had left him in Neven’s care in favor of risking him on the journey.
Unlike the falcon, I did not want to watch Aderyn and Elion’s receding forms disappear into the horizon as they headed out in the opposite direction—toward the other clans and war.
My insides warred uncomfortably. Part of me screamed that I should be fighting that war beside them.
It insisted that I should not rest until I had ripped Calix from the throne of Kelvadan and fed his blood to the desert.
But the other half of me told me to stay as far away from Kelvadan as possible.
It whispered quietly but insidiously that I had brought its ruin, and I would only continue to destroy everything around me, just like I had when a fit of grief had cost me my clan.
I did not deserve the home of a clan or a city that I would inevitably destroy. But that was why I could do this task—I could brave the harshest wilds to restore the desert. In doing so, I could save the one home I had left: Erix.
If the desert was healed, perhaps his madness would abate.
He rode Alza on my right while Dhara flanked me on the left.
Movement caught my eye as she stroked the handle of a weapon sticking out of the sash she wore across her chest. She always carried more blades than almost anyone I had encountered: Her saber and dirk, along with a wide collection of daggers across her chest, ordered from longest to shortest, and even a small set of double-bladed knives meant for throwing.
I had not noticed the one she fingered now before, though. The pommel bore the grinning face of a hyena. I cocked my head.
“Isn’t Clan Otush’s sigil the fennec fox?” I asked. “I’m surprised your weapon doesn’t match.” I jerked my chin at the leaping fox on the clasp that held her dark-green hood in place.
She jerked her hand away and shoved it into her sash. “It was a gift.”
Erix and I glanced at each other, and I sensed a hint of amusement down the tether between us.
We rode all day, but it seemed impossible to tell if we made any progress.
The landscape hardly seemed to change at all, although when I looked back over my shoulder, the encampment we had come from was nowhere to be found.
Still, one rolling dune looked the same as the last. I had seen no significant landmarks or changes by the time the sands were stained silvery gray with the thin light of dusk.
Daiti’s pace was slowing, and his footfalls were not as energetic as they were when we first set out. I sighed. “I suppose we should make camp.”
We stopped and dismounted our horses. It did not take us long to set up what would be our home for the night.
We had brought small tents in case there was a time when we needed shelter, but the night was clear and wouldn’t be cold enough to necessitate them.
Dhara handled the fire swiftly with a wave of her hand, then rolled out her sleeping mat on the far side of the camp, as Erix and I laid ours flush next to each other.
She looked at them sidelong, but her face betrayed no reaction and she did not comment. We had publicly shared a tent and made no more effort to hide our connection, but we had not yet shared with Dhara or the other lords that we were married.
Neither of us seemed to know how to broach the subject with anybody else, though, or even if it would be expected of us. I was not a queen, and Erix was not a lord. Officially, we were nobodies, although Erix carried the fate of the desert in his pocket.
Now, Erix sat on his sleeping mat and reached over his shoulder as if for his saber, only to scowl. Kelvar’s broken saber lay bundled in his packs, and the much shorter blade he had found to carry in its stead was strapped at his hip.
His fingers spasmed, and he clenched his fists on his knees.
Sharpening his sword too much had caused it to shatter, and now he was without the nightly meditation the habit had brought him. Across the tether spilled a rising tide of unsettled anger with nowhere to go. It bubbled up in my own chest with a force that made me queasy.
I walked over and nudged his knee with my boot. “Come on, Dhara lit the fire. It’s your turn to make dinner.”
He grunted and raised an eyebrow at me. “I don’t think lighting the fire is particularly challenging for her.”
I narrowed my eyes at him though, and he set to searching through the bundles for our supplies. At least it would give him something to do with his hands.
Still, by the time we had all eaten and laid down on our mats to rest, his threads of magic tangled with mine, vibrating with barely restrained energy.
Wrapping my arms around Erix as we rolled toward each other, I tried to hold him tight enough to stop the barely perceptible quivering of magic under his skin. It worked, but barely.
The second day started similarly to the first. As the sun rose, we set out toward it. The anxious knots of Erix’s magic seemed to loosen on horseback, just as my power seemed freer and happier as well, so the three of us rode in companionable quiet.
Shortly after midday though, the silence of the wilderness was interrupted by a growing whisper on the breeze.
It skittered over the sand, like a rasping voice, and pulled my hood back from my face.
As the breeze grew into an insistent wind and picked up my braid to whip around my head, Dhara, Erix, and I exchanged glances.
Sudden winds in the desert were never a good sign.
A storm was coming.
In unison, we spurred our mounts on faster. The landscape had continued to bear no geographical features beyond endless golden sands stretching in every direction, but we needed to find shelter if we were to protect ourselves and the horses from a sandstorm.
Daiti seemed to sense my urgency, breaking into a canter, then a gallop. The other two mounts were hot on our heels, but no cliffs or inselbergs or even a boulder we could duck behind came into view.
The wind, though, only grew to the tell-tale howling and then roaring that spoke to an incoming sandstorm.
The wall of dust appeared to our right, bearing down on us with alarming speed. Daiti extended his stride, head bobbing as we ran. Even if he was as fast as the wind, though, there was nowhere for us to escape to.
“Here!” Erix shouted, his voice nearly drowned out by the screaming storm.
He veered off, Alza quickly ascending a peaked dune to our left. The downward slope on the far side would not afford us much shelter, but it would have to do.
Dhara and I followed him, cresting the sandy ridge and just starting to descend on the far side before jumping down from our mounts.
Hurriedly, I unwrapped my hood from my head, shushing as I wrapped it around Daiti’s nose and eyes, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me over the sound of the impending storm.
On either side of me, Dhara and Erix did the same with their own mounts. By the time we finished, the din drowned out even my own thoughts, and already grit started to chafe my skin where the wind whipped it into my face, even though the worst of the storm had not hit us yet.
We would be lucky to survive this, exposed as we were.
But I had stood against forces of nature before—even if briefly.