Too long, she thought. It had been too long since she'd done this. She'd forgotten what a king was. Even a waste of a king had the power of the kingdom at his fingertips and commanded men far better than him and in that a sort of omnipotence.
She did not know where she was. The plan had been Erihon but plans were made to be cast aside and so it was. She had thought for the first day that this was the way to go and now knew that it was not and needed just to find anything at all. A town or a crossing or anything. Without which she would starve in this wilderness and then they would never find her.
She smiled. How long would he live if that happened, looking always over his shoulder? Seeing her in the shadows, waiting for her to rise against him. Knowing he hadn't caught her and fearing always that each meal was poisoned, each messenger an assassin, each banner raised against him her final arrival with an army at her back.
When really her bones rotted and turned green with mildew as the forest ate her body. All returning to what it had been.
A ghost truly in her haunting.
She crouched and looked out over that land and she thought far off she saw smoke, but she couldn't be sure. Perhaps a town or perhaps nothing but a fire, raging until it burned itself out. But it was below the cliff and she knew she needed to forget that and turn and follow it but even then she did not know where to turn. What lay before her. Walking as a blind woman with neither dog nor stick and hoping in that darkness to stumble upon that which would save her.
For she didn't want to be a ghost. She didn't want to haunt him in some abstract fashion that drove him mad. She wanted that madness to come from what the world really was for him, with her pacing and rising from those shadows. She wanted it vested in the truth. At that last moment when his fear tore him apart she wanted it to become real as she came down on that city and dragged him into the streets before all so that they'd know what happened to those who stole the throne.
Your boy, something deep within her whispered. He's still your boy.
She closed her eyes and the roots beneath her feet felt like her husband's bones, scattered in that pit where his labored breath had stopped and the silence had been horrible and complete and she'd known she was screaming but could not hear herself.
No, she did not want to be a ghost. For it was far better to haunt him like a demon, a twisted black shape in the night, running its talons along the stones of the hallway as it walked to the door and hunched outside, a curved black blade in hand, ready to right the scales of the world. For those scales were weighted with nothing but death and only death could put them even again.
Your boy, that voice said.
Faint and drifting and unreal.
Your boy.
She could hear it but she could feel that she was losing it. Like something once known but now not hard enough for what the world had become and slowly within her everything cracking and breaking and perhaps all that was real and true eventually lost to these ravaging fires that tore like a storm at her soul and consumed all that was and against which nothing could stand. Perhaps the foundations of men and women and the very world alike and all destined in the end for the same madness.
She followed all day and the next the top of the cliff. Always with the fall below her to remind her what she was. She caught a rabbit in a snare and ate it and tore roots from the earth. Eating leaves that she could not remember if they were poisonous or not but did not think so. Just one at first and then two hours later when she was still alive the rest.
The fire still burned in the woods and never changed and she knew it wasn't one fire, but many. The smoke of chimneys and a town and a mill and what all else they'd built there in the forest. She could not descend this long cliff but she could follow it and she looked always for the way down. It was a small hope but she needed something and she clung to it.
It was on the third day that she knew she was being followed. They were careful but she had been stalked many times and she could sense it above all else. A deep coldness within her. She had been asleep and she woke suddenly and she could hear them. She thought there were three but it could have been more. She was huddled in the hollow of a tree and they could not find her and she listened to them walking in the light rain and trying to be dead silent so that they'd be on her before she heard them.
She did not breathe and it was an eternity. They passed her and worked their way on, but soon she heard them slowing and understood what they were. More than just soldiers walking in the woods on blind hope. They had lost the trail and knew what the absence meant and they began to circle back.
They did not find her that night. She moved her position and was careful not to leave a trail and lay in the branches of a sprawling tree looking down at where she had been in the hollow. She thought once that a dark shape moved through between her and that place but she could not be sure. It was only there for a moment in shadow and then gone. A rainslicked cloak. A flash as lightning played in the clouds, features harsh and cold. Then nothing.
She left that morning before the sun and went down a thin trail along the face of the cliff. Climbing down until the rock rose ten meters over her head. The stone walkway just as wide as both of her feet together. Clinging to the edge with dirt and small stones skittering and falling and disappearing into the darkness. Below that horrible emptiness. But she could see ahead of her a small open area that protruded out into the air like some natural balcony and she thought it was the edge of a cave.
Perhaps this trail not as natural as it appeared, but carved by those ancient and long dead. Or perhaps those dead ones had just found it and used it. Like so much of the world it was impossible to know. But she did not think she was the first to traverse it and she knew she had to leave the forest. Here the stone hid the signs of her passage in a way dirt and soil never could.
Reaching the bottom of the trail she stepped on the wide ledge and felt the world move around her. Suddenly one misstep would not send her gasping and clutching into nothingness. She settled herself back against the wall where she would not be seen from above and breathed and looked it over.
A yawning cave mouth. The old remains of a fire on the surface of the ledge, scarring black onto this gray stone. Markings on the walls of the inside of the cave, just lines and figures. Crude and telling in that crudeness. She saw no other way out, not up or down. The trail that may have been carved ended here and nothing fell away below it except the smooth stone and the trees and the river in miniature below.
She wondered what those trees would look like as they rushed up to meet her, if the speed of her fall would seem to increase or if the nearby wall screaming past would swallow that illusion. But then she saw that dark and mutated shape again, felt the crushing wrench of a heart refusing to beat in a chest with the air ripped out, and she stepped back into the cave.
It was a place to live, she thought. They would not come down the same path or it would be too easy for her to knock them from the cliff face and send them crashing into that far-off forest. But it was also a place she couldn't live, for it was an empty stone cave with nothing for food, for water. They could camp at the top with their swords standing in the dirt and wait for her to come back up and she would either starve here or go up to them.