“So what are people saying?” I asked as we passed through the cloistered walkway and entered the cluster of houses.
She glanced sideways at me. “I’ve never known people to be this furious in my entire life. Not even when the old wars were lost, not when there was a famine, never.”
I blew out a breath that frosted in the air around me and shoved a hand through my cold, snowy hair. It was the Dying Winter all over again, but I didn’t know when the match would be lit that sent the Old Realm into a conflagration.
As we reached our house, the other thing that had struck me from the conversation in the palace hit me.
“Only one of the bridges through the mountain pass was destroyed,” I said, a surge of hope hitting me so hard it was painful. “The others are still there.”
“The other two are unsafe,” Mara reminded me as we removed our coats, shook the snow out, and hung them.
“Unsafe for goods or an army to cross them,” I corrected her. “A single person walking might not send the whole thing crumbling.”
Mara whipped to face me, her eyes wide. “You aren’t thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”
“What’s this about bridges?” Darius asked, glancing up from where he and Leander sat at the table, apparently studying. It was proof that there was little to do in these dangerous times that the twins were studying instead of causing trouble.
I finished hanging my coat then walked deeper into the room. I noticed once I got that far into the common room that Lucius was curled into a ball on the sofa, staring at nothing, like he’d taken to doing sometimes since Augustus’s death.
“We’ve just come from the palace,” I said.
That made Lucius snap to attention. Leander and Darius put down their pencils and turned to me and Mara.
“The king has a wounded foot, and he remembered me from the harvest festival and called for me to treat it,” I went on. Though now I was certain that Mara had manipulated things so that I could be a catalyst for information in some way. “While we were there, I learned that only one of the bridges through the mountain pass was destroyed. The other two were badly damaged, but they’re still in place.”
“So?” Darius asked with a shrug. “There were avalanches too. All along the entire pass, not just near the bridges, if what all those poor soldiers said was true.”
“They wouldn’t lie,” Lucius barked, standing and glaring at Darius, as if he’d insulted the honor of the dead. “Why would they lie?”
“I know they were telling the truth,” I said, reaching out a hand as if to calm Lucius. “I’ve no doubt the entire mountain pass is buried under rubble right now.”
I took a deep breath, the blood in my veins feeling as though it were filled with sparks.
“But rubble can be climbed over. It would have to be cleared for merchant carts and armies, but a single man could climb over the boulders and find a way across that one chasm where the bridge was destroyed. A lone person could make it across the damaged bridges in one piece, without falling to his death.”
Leander stood slowly, his eyes wide. “Conrad, you can’t be saying what I think you’re saying.”
I felt more energized than I had in months, and Dushka felt closer than he had since I’d seen the smoke of the burning bridge over the mountain peaks.
“I am,” I said. “I’m going to go home, even if I have to climb over the mountains to do it.”
ChapterNine
Saying I was going to go home, even if I had to literally climb mountains to do it was one thing. Doing it was something else entirely.
I wasn’t a complete idiot. If I so much as thought about trying to struggle through the destroyed mountain pass in the middle of winter, with snow and storms swirling around me nearly every day, I would die before I made it from Aktau to the foothills. Winter was bad enough in the plains and forests of the frontier. It would be suicide to attempt to cross the mountains in the dead of winter.
Which meant I had months before I would even be able to try to get home.
Which also meant I had months to plan. Along with studying healing and taking my turns in the infirmary, I sought out every bit of information I could about how the mountains were crossed before the pass had been constructed, and about the construction of the pass itself. I pored through whatever books I could find about mountain climbing, or books that made mention of climbing. I made lists of supplies I would need and estimates of how much food I would need to take with me.
When the spring came, the weather warmed, and the snows melted, I would be ready.
In the meantime, I was stuck in a terrified and tumultuous city in the dead of winter, surrounded by snow and uncertainty.
And then Solstice was cancelled.
I just happened to be serving in the infirmary at the same time as Leander and Darius, which wasn’t always the case, days before Solstice when everything was tipped on its head.