All complaining stopped when we were less than a mile out from the city. We could see the new army camped in the fields just outside of Aktau and in the meadows leading up to the entrance to the mountain pass.
I also noticed faint plumes of smoke far in the distance over the mountains. They hadn’t been there when I’d journeyed through the mountain pass months before. I couldn’t imagine what they were now, but somehow, they were terrifying.
“Are they injured or are they just resting there?”
Darius’s question focused my attention away from the mountains and on the army that was camped between the pass and Aktau. Darius had stood in the moving wagon, gripping the back of Horacio’s seat to keep from falling, and I scrambled up to do the same.
Leander stood behind me as well, and not to be outdone, Mara rose and wedged between me and Darius.
“It looks like a little of each,” Leander said, raising a hand to his forehead and squinting, as if that would help him see farther and determine what was going on.
“There are injuries, alright,” Mara said quietly. “You can smell them.”
Leander, Darius, and I all sniffed the wind that raced down off the mountains. She was right. There was a distinctly acrid smell in the air, like unwashed bodies and blood. Taken together with the plumes of smoke on the horizon, it made me anxious.
“It has to be a battle of some sort,” Darius said, squinting the way his brother was. “I can’t think of anything else that would leave an entire army spread out and humbled like that.”
“But a battle against who?” I asked, my voice quiet.
My friends all looked at me. I wondered if they could see what I was thinking, if they could see the fear that King Julius’s new army hadn’t battled with General Rufus and the old army, but that they’d somehow ended up at war with the frontier. But if that’s what it was, had they been fighting the cities or the wolves?
I gripped the back of the wagon seat hard, trying not to think about what I would do if Dushka had been killed in battle.
What if that last morning we spent together was the last time we would ever be together? What if our goodbye on the banks of the Wolf River was our final goodbye? I loved Dushka. Fucking around with Leander and Darius, or the others I’d passed a pleasant hour with here and there in the last two months, was enjoyable, but no one had my heart the way Dushka did.
I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing him ever again.
And then there were the Sons, my friends, my brothers. I didn’t think I could face going through life without ever hearing Lefric’s laughter again, or grinning at Neil as we tormented Peter by pretending there was more between the two of us than there ever would be. I didn’t want to think about life without the occasional opportunity to be fucked by Jace in that way he had of making you feel like you actually wanted to be a pup. I didn’t even know if Sebald had ever found his old lover or if he’d been captured by Tybalt and forced to be a pup again.
“I’m sure everything with the frontier is fine,” Mara said, clasping a hand on my arm and jolting me out of my spiraling thoughts. “Uncle Julius is more concerned with General Rufus’s defection than subduing the frontier at the moment.”
I turned to look at her, not minding if Mara saw my fear or my trembling heart. Leander and Darius would have been sympathetic, but they would tease me about it later. Mara would understand.
“There would have been talk at the palace if the frontier itself was the problem,” she went on. “The royal spies would have sent word back.”
“Royal spies?” I blinked at her.
It made sense that King Julius had spies on the frontier. That’s what Gomez was in the end—an agent of the king. But it didn’t make me feel better.
I told myself that I would feel better about things as soon as we reached the army camps and found out what was really going on.
I was wrong.
“Something really bad happened,” Lucius said, getting up to join the four of us at the wagon seat as we rolled into the outer edge of the camp. “Reallybad.”
He was right. Everywhere we looked, there were injured soldiers. They weren’t any sort of injury I recognized either. There were no severed limbs or stab wounds, just crushed arms and legs, bleeding heads, and men lying on the ground, clutching their torsos and moaning. A good third of them were already dead.
“All of you, get down and go to work,” Magister Flaccus ordered us. He was too stunned by what was unfolding in front of us to act superior or to call individuals out to find fault with them.
The wagon at the front of our caravan had been loaded with medical kits and supplies. Magister Flaccus gestured for all of us to grab one before fanning out into the sea of writhing, moaning soldiers.
“What happened here?” I asked a young man who sat cradling another soldier, who must have been his friend.
I wasn’t certain if the young man heard me at first. He dragged his eyes to me slowly, then sucked in a breath and blinked before I was certain he was focused on me.
“The mountain collapsed,” he said, his voice strangled.
“I beg your pardon?” I asked, crouching and reaching out to assess the injuries of the man he held.