Even better than that, when Appius and I snuggled into our coats to sleep for the night, we couldn’t stop touching each other and giggling, and even stealing a kiss or two.
“Stop,” I laughed when my cock was too hard and my blood pounded too much. “We’re not fucking around out in the open on the top of a mountain with our friends just a few feet away from us.”
Appius chuckled quietly and said, “What do you want to bet Leander and Darius are getting each other off right now?”
“We are not,” Leander called through the darkness.
“Although that sounds like a good idea,” Darius said.
We all laughed, but no one did anything about the sexual tension. We might have been getting randy as we got closer to freedom, but we were all still far too exhausted to do anything about it.
And we had days of walking ahead of us still.
But that day, the second day after the breaking of the bridge, turned into a very, very good day.
“Is that it?” Darius asked, grabbing my arm as we rounded the corner of the jutting mountainside and spotted a streak of brown spanning a gap in the path ahead of us. “Is that the last bridge?”
I tried to get my bearings and remember the area from my trip across in the summer as we walked. “I…I think it is,” I said, my voice rising in excitement.
“This I’ve got to see,” Mara said.
She surprised us all by breaking into a run and getting ahead of us.
We all wanted to run, even though our bodies were tired, our feet blistered, and our exposed skin sun and wind-burned. We needed to run, because what we saw in front of us was the epitome of joy, and we couldn’t reach it fast enough.
The last bridge was still there, and by the look of it, General Rufus hadn’t touched it at all. It looked as solid and steady as the earth around it.
“Wait, wait!” I said, holding out my arms to stop the others as we skidded to a stop at the beginning of the bridge. “We can’t assume anything. We need to make absolutely certain the bridge is solid before we try running across it.”
“Agreed,” Lucius said, then walked straight forward and onto the bridge before anyone could stop him.
He marched all the way out into the center of the twenty-yard bridge, then jumped up and down. The bridge didn’t so much as creak.
“Solid as a rock,” he called back to us.
Joy swooped through me, and with tears in my eyes, I grabbed Appius’s hand, and together the two of us raced across the bridge, laughing and whooping as we did.
That was it. If General Rufus hadn’t destroyed that bridge, then he hadn’t destroyed anything else along the mountain pass between here and the frontier. There were no more obstacles. The way was clear. There wasn’t any question at all about whether or not I would make it home to Dushka now. I would be in his arms again within a week, all I had to do was walk.
ChapterSixteen
We did walk for the rest of the day. Then we made camp again. And again, it was like a holiday. We laughed and made fun of each other for being dirty and stinky, and for growing scraggly facial hair, particularly Lucius. Leander and Darius told us a story about their family camping when they were around fourteen, which turned into a story about the two of them discovering they could get each other off and that they liked it.
That turned into a slightly less wonderful story about their father finding them in bed together and disowning them, which explained why they’d been so willing to leave the Old Realm behind. I shared the story of how my father had sold me to Karpov the slaver, as had happened to some of the other Sons. By the end of that story, my new friends were dying to meet my old ones.
We set off in the morning amid a steady rain which chilled all of us to the bone, but we kept walking in spite of it.
We kept walking because I knew where we were now. And just as I’d hoped and expected, around midday, we spotted the first tendrils of smoke from Larth’s inn rising above the treeline.
An hour or so later, worn and wet, exhausted and bedraggled, the six of us stumbled into the common room of the inn.
And we were immediately given nasty looks by the man working behind the bar, who I vaguely recognized from the summer, but whose name I couldn’t remember. At that point, I didn’t care how people looked at us.
“Food,” I gasped to the frowning bartender. “And ale. Or, no, water first. We’ve been traveling for days and we need it.”
My friends and I all stumbled to one of the tables and started to shed packs and rope and climbing equipment as if we were trees dropping their limbs. I had half a mind to leave all of the equipment with Larth so that we could lighten our loads the rest of the way to Kettering.
“I can bring you water and ale,” the man behind the bar said in a wary voice, “but food might need to wait. Mistress Delia is busy seeing to Agnes.”