But even the knights who would have preferred to hang onto their delicacies almost revered the prince, Briony was learning. At first she suspected he had arranged the parade of thanks and pledges of loyalty that came to him every time he went among the tents, but she quickly realized it was all genuine. Eneas was simply one of those leaders who shared all hardships and rewards with his troops, and who never forgot that despite the differences in birth—of which Eneas was certainly aware, and about which he could be quite old-fashioned—he acted as though the life of each man-at-arms was no less important than that of one of his most influential knights. Briony couldn’t tell whether the prince was entirely ignorant of his popularity among the rank and file—he seemed to be, but she wondered if he only pretended for the sake of modesty. Watching Eneas among the common soldiers was a sort of primer for princes—and princesses, too, Briony decided.
The strangest thing for Briony about the trip north was not seeing how much the land had changed, but realizing how much she had changed, too. Only half a year had passed since she had fled Southmarch—and just twelve months since her royal father had been taken captive—but she felt she would hardly recognize the Briony Eddon of a year before if she met her. That girl had experienced so little of the world! That Briony had never sat on the throne except while playing games with her brother when the court had finished for the day; today’s Briony had sat on that throne as ruler and had made decisions on matters of commerce and law and even war. That Briony had never been out of the castle without a retinue of guards and ladies in waiting. Today’s Briony had slept in a haymow, or in the dirt underneath a wagon in the rainy forest. The old Briony had studied swordplay for years with the same incomplete attention she had brought to doing sums and reading passages from the Book of the Trigon; the Briony who stood here now had fought for her life and had even killed a man.
But it was not simply the large experiences that had changed her, she realized, it was all the things she had seen in the last year, all the ordinary and extraordinary people she had met, players and thieves and traitors, goblins and Kallikans, as well as the situations she had been forced to endure—hunger, fear, having no roof over her head, and no friends and no money. Briony felt as though the only thing she had in common with her younger self was the name and the place they were born.
It was strange, but it was also exciting. She was writing this new Briony as a pen wrote words on a piece of sanded parchment. What would the pen write next? That was impossible to say. But for the first time in her life, despite the danger that lay ahead and the loss she had already experienced, she was content to wait to find out what the future would bring.
Although, she reminded herself, it was not as though she had much choice about it.
Qinnitan had escaped him again, but only barely.
Daikonas Vo was ill, or badly injured; otherwise, Qinnitan knew she would never have been able to outrun him for even a few moments, let alone stay ahead of him so long. But although the soldier moved as if his bones were all broken and his guts were aflame, he never stopped. Every time she looked back, every time she paused to rest, Vo was still behind her.
Why didn’t I kill him when I had the chance? Why was I such a fool, to let him live?
Because you couldn’t know what might happen, she told herself as she struggled gracelessly across the wooded Brennish hills, hungry and exhausted, unable to stop even to tend to her aching, bleeding feet. Because you wouldn’t know how to kill any man, let alone a soldier like Vo. A monster like Vo.
And that had been the real reason: he terrified her. It had taken all her courage to try to poison him with his own black bottle on the fishing boat, but that had failed. What hope did she have now?
Still, even if she hadn’t managed to poison him completely, something was definitely wrong with him: he looked like a wild creature, and when he drew close enough for her to hear him, he was often moaning and talking to himself.
Even though I didn’t kill him, she thought with sudden insight, perhaps too much of what was in that bottle made him very sick. Or perhaps it’s not having the medicine that’s made him this way.
But none of it would matter if he caught her, and even if he didn’t, Qinnitan knew she would starve if she couldn’t get far enough ahead of him to search for food.
Qinnitan’s stomach ached with hunger. She was so tired that she could barely keep her legs moving. The ground had become steeper, but every instinct forced her out of the wooded valley and straight up the slope, even though doing so would leave her visible to Vo or anyone else below. By the time she was halfway up, she could hear him crashing up the slope below her. She burst out of thick forest and onto the upper part of the grassy hillside where the trees grew more sparsely and the ground was lumpy with purple-gray shrubs, then stole a look back. Vo saw her and bared his teeth in the mask of dried blood that covered his face. It might have been a grimace of exhaustion, but to Qinnitan it was the snarl of a beast that would not give up until one of them was dead and it terrified her.
As she climbed, she pushed at several large, loose stones to send them rolling down toward him, but even in his terrible state Vo was too agile to be caught that way; each time he waited until the stone had almost reached him, then moved out of its way.
At the top of the hill, Qinnitan saw to her great surprise that a road wound along the base of the hill’s far side, several hundred yards beneath her. Perhaps that meant there was a town somewhere nearby! She scrambled downslope as fast as she could, looking back for Vo but not seeing him; when she reached the flat road, she began to run. She could manage nothing better than a pace she herself would have mocked in her childhood days on Cat’s Eye Street, but at least she knew that every step took her farther from the limping murderer Daikonas Vo.
She alternated between running and walking for what seemed like an hour at least, praying at every bend in the road to find a town or at least a village in front of her but seeing scarcely any sign of habitation at all. She saw old ax-marks on many of the trees and once a tumbled hut that might have belonged to a charcoal burner, but the ruin was deserted and no use to her.
Sundown was almost upon her and Qinnitan was stumbling with weariness when she saw the rider some distance ahead of her on the road. At first she thought it a trick of the lengthening shadows, but as she slowly drew nearer, she could see that it truly was a man on a small horse. Another few hundred steps and she could see that his mount was no horse but a mule, and that the man himself had the shaved head of some kind of Eionian priest.
“Help!” she shouted, one of the few northern words she could remember. “Help! Please!”
The man turned around in surprise and looked back, then reined up and waited for her, shaking his head. “If this be a trick, child, it will go badly for you.” He pulled a gnarled walking-staff from a loop on his saddle and waved it at her. “I will not be ambushed by thieves without making them earn the few coppers in my purse.”
Qinnitan only understood part of what he said. “Help,” she said. “Please. Hungry.”
He was not an old man, but he was not young, either, the skin of his face a net of wrinkles made by sun and wind. After a moment he reached into his bag and produced a heel of bread. “Have this,” he said. “And may Honnos bless your road. Are you on your way to Dunletter? You will not reach it walking tonight.”