“We have to stay a little longer until we’re sure they’ve left,” he whispered in my ear. With the thunder of the horses gone, I became acutely aware of his arms still around me.
“They wouldn’t have killed me,” I said quietly.
He leaned closer, his lips brushing my ear in a hushed warning. “Are you certain? You look like one of us now, and it doesn’t matter—man or woman—they kill us. We’re only barbarians to them.”
Was I certain? No. I knew very little about Dalbreck and their military, only that Morrighan had had skirmishes and disputes with them over the centuries, but certainly my current situation wasn’t any better.
Kaden helped me to my feet. My hair still dripped. My wet trousers twisted around me, covered in grit again. But as I looked down at my bruised and bleeding feet, two thoughts consoled me.
One, I at least knew that patrols sometimes ventured this far. I wasn’t out of their reach yet. And two, there was trouble, just as I had predicted there would be.
Oh, the power that would give me now.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
RAFE
I bent down and looked at the dark spot on the ground.
I rubbed the dirt between my fingers.
Blood.
I would kill them.
I would kill every one of them with my bare hands if they had harmed her, and I’d save Kaden for last.
I pushed twice as hard, trying to stay on their trail while I still had light. The ground became rocky, and it was harder to follow their tracks. I had to slow my pace, and it seemed that only minutes had passed before the sun became a fiery orange ball in the sky. It was going down too fast. I pushed on as far as I could, but I couldn’t track them in the dark.
I stopped on an elevated knoll and built a fire in case Sven and the others rode in the night. If not, my cold campfire would be easy to spot by day when they tracked me. I stabbed at the fire, poking it with a stick, and wondered if Lia was warm, or cold, or hurt. For the first time since I’d known of her existence, when the marriage was proposed by my father, I hoped she did have the gift and could see me coming.
“Hold on,” I whispered into the flames, and I prayed she’d do whatever she had to, to stay strong and survive until we came.
Even if I caught up, I knew I’d have to hang back until the others arrived. I had been trained in countless military tactics and was well aware of what the odds of one against five were. Except for an opportune ambush, I couldn’t risk Lia’s safety by going in there half cocked ready to take their heads off.
What was she doing now? Had he hurt her? Was he feeding her? Did he—
I snapped the branch in two.
I remembered the words he spit at me when we wrestled on the log. Give it up, Rafe. You’re going to fall.
No, Kaden.
Not this time.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The flat white sands disappeared and were replaced by sand the color of burnt sky—ochres of every hue. It was still blistering hot, and the air shimmered in waves, but now the landscape offered a variety of rocks and unearthly formations.
We passed enormous boulders with large round holes in them, as if a giant snake had slithered through, and still others teetering precariously as though they had been stacked by a colossal hand. If I was ever to believe in a world of magic and giants, it would be here. This was their realm. Sometimes we’d reach a high ridge and see for miles into multicolored canyons so deep the water that trailed through them became thin green ribbons.
It made me wonder and ache with the same feeling that a black sky dusted with glittering stars did. I had never known of this peculiar world. So much lay beyond the borders of Morrighan.
My captors were still crude and hostile, and yet if I turned my head a certain way and paused, my lashes fluttering like I was seeing something, I delighted in how I caught their attention. They would stir in their saddles and look across the horizon with dark brooding glances. Kaden would direct his dark glances at me. He knew I played on their fears, and maybe he worried about the power that gave me, but there was nothing he could say or do about it. I used this sway over them sparingly, though, because I hoped a time would come when it would serve me better than in long stretches of emptiness where there was no apparent escape. At some point, maybe it would open a door for me to flee.
I kept track of days, scratching lines into my leather saddle with a sharp rock. I didn’t care about their tack, only about how much time I had left to find a way out of their grasp. It seemed they were deliberately taking me on the most lonely, desolate stretches imaginable. Was all of the Cam Lanteux like this? But if there had been one strategic miscalculation like the one they had made at the City of Dark Magic, there would be another, and the next time I’d be ready for it. In the same way their eyes scanned the horizon for unexpected visitors, so did mine.
I tried not to think about Rafe, but after hours of the sameness, hours of worrying about Pauline, more hours of assuring myself that she was just fine, hours of wondering about Walther and where he was headed and if he was all right, hours of fighting the knot in my throat thinking about Greta and the baby, my mind inevitably circled back to Rafe.