‘When? What are you talking about?’
‘Seventy, maybe eighty Twinmoons ago, in Estrad.’ Versen coughed again and rolled onto his back to allow Brexan to finish cutting the bonds holding his wrists. ‘He raped her all night – she was young, just a kid. She’s been giving that scar to every ass-grabbing drunk in Greentree Tavern ever since. She doesn’t talk about it, but that’s him. We have to find him again.’
They were lost at sea. The Ronan coast was at least an aven east under full sail. There was no way they were going to survive – and all Versen could think of was avenging one of his friends. She could have kissed him at that moment, but instead agreed, ‘All right. We will. We’ll find him again.’
Then Versen was suddenly lucid. Treading water awkwardly in his tunic and boots, his face turned the colour of parchment.
‘The almor’s in the water,’ he said.
Carpello cursed. How was he going to tell Prince Malagon they had lost the prisoners? Please, by all the fustinating gods of the Northern Forest, let them reach Orindale first, before that black-hearted horsecock and his gargantuan floating palace. Carpello would pass the bad news on to someone else – an admiral, maybe, or one of the generals. They died at sea. It was simple. They committed suicide, jumped overboard to their deaths. That’s what it was, after all, suicide: they had no hope of surviving, leaping into the ocean this far from shore. They were probably dead already.
‘Come about, Captain Yarry!’ he shouted urgently, ‘come about! We need to find the bodies.’
Ignoring the blood running from his thigh, Karn grunted agreement.
‘Sir?’ the captain asked, ‘come about, sir? On this tack, sir, and with this wind it will be a half-aven before we’ll be back at the spot where they went in.’ Captain Yarry looked around at his crew, who were all nodding. ‘They’re dead, sir. It’s too far to swim to shore, sir, and that foul demon following us will have had them by now, even if the water hasn’t killed them. They are dead, sir.’
‘Come about, Captain, or I will have you executed for mutiny.’ Carpello held a folded piece of sailcloth against his bloody midsection. ‘You may be captain, but this is my ship, and we will come about this instant!’
Yarry ran one hand through his unruly hair and gave the order. The cry echoed along the deck and up into the rigging and the Falkan Dancer slowly lumbered to port, her bow coming around gradually until it cut through the swells, a knife’s edge leading them back towards Strandson.
Three avens later, as the sun dipped below the horizon, Carpello resigned himself to the fact that he – they – had failed. The Seron had been particularly vigilant in their efforts, as if they knew it would be worse for them if they returned to Orindale without the prisoners or the key. Seron were assumed to be soulless and without minds of their own, but these three appeared to understand quite coherently that losing the Ronan partisans would mean death for them. Even as the sun faded in the west, they maintained their watch, squinting to improve their vision through the waning twilight.
Carpello shuddered as he imagined his own meeting with the dark prince. He had been praying for avens that Lahp and his platoon had managed to find Gilmour and retrieve the wretched stone. Although the bleeding had stopped, his abdomen burned; he spat into the waves and hoped out loud that Brexan had died slowly and unpleasantly, knowing she had failed.
‘Captain Yarry,’ he called softly, ‘back to Orindale.’
The Seron shared a look, as if they could not believe the merchant would call off the search, then secured their weapons, pulled off their boots and dived headfirst into the sea.
‘Rutting dogs,’ Carpello Jax shouted: there behind the ship, the three Seron warriors bobbed in the waves for a moment before beginning to swim towards the Ronan coast. ‘They’ll succeed or they’ll die,’ the fat trader mused. ‘It’s that simple.’ He watched them disappear into the half-light then called, ‘Full sail to Orindale, Captain Yarry.’
BOOK IV
The River
MEYERS’ VALE
When Mark and Brynne awakened from their coma they were both delirious. Garec was worried that the wraith intrusion had done them irreparable harm – it had affected Sallax so badly – but their bodies showed no signs of injury, either from Garec’s arrows or from the spirit army attack. They were both drained, exhausted, and went without murmur when Garec suggested they lie down for a bit; when he checked on them at midday, he found them sleeping comfortably, unperturbed by nightmares or subconscious visions of prowling spectres.
At dawn the next day Garec and Steven gave Lahp his funeral rites, burning the body on a pyre alongside the riverbank. Watching the flames lick at the dead soldier’s body, Garec knew Gilmour had been wrong about the Seron. They were not animals. Malagon had attempted to create an army of mindless killers, tearing their very souls away to leave them empty and his to command – but he had not entirely succeeded. Lahp was the proof. His kindness, and his desire to help them, even giving his life for them: this showed unquestionably that Malagon’s Seron warriors were more capable of compassion than anyone had known.
Garec had drawn strength from Steven’s iron-willed refusal to give up the fight during their battle with the wraiths. Their tandem engagement with the spirit attackers had been like an elaborate dance, and Garec, empowered by Steven’s shared magic, had brought death to the dead with fluid grace. He doubted he would ever achieve that level of perfection again. Garec had often wondered what made a sorcerer different. The control he had whilst battling the wraith army verged on sorcery; the walls, the floorboards, even the air itself had seemed to obey his every command. He had worked magic.
The Ronan bowman wiped a smear of mud from his boots – Steven’s boots – and shook his head. He wasn’t that skilled; the magic had worked him.
Magic. Garec stared at the staff in Steven’s hands. That simple stick had saved their lives several times now, and still none of them had the faintest idea where its power came from; not even Gilmour had been able to explain. Would it be enough to save Eldarn? Watching the thin, pale-skinned foreigner kick a smouldering branch back into the pyre, Garec thought their cause might not be lost, even though Gilmour was gone. Perhaps Steven wielded enough magic to protect them from Nerak, to ensure their safe passage into Welstar Palace, and to secure the far portal and retrieve Lessek’s Key.
He sighed: wishful thinking. There was more to it than just bringing the stone back to Gorsk. They had no choice but to go in search of the missing Larion Senator, Kantu. They had to go to Praga.
As if reading his mind, Steven flashed the Ronan a sad smile, tossed his mysterious staff onto the ground and asked, ‘Well, shall we build a boat?’
It didn’t take long for their crude but sturdy vessel to take shape. Thanking God for the trapper’s well-kept tools, Steven directed Garec to start hewing down a number of the huge pines that surrounded the cabin. They stripped each trunk of its branches and sawed them into sections five paces long. By evening the two men had assembled forty-five logs and started lashing the heaviest of these together to form their raft. The amateur shipwrights alternated sections, end-to-end, by thickness, to account for the gradual taper in each section’s girth: the result was a relatively flat and surprisingly strong base for their journey downstream to Orindale.
By the time they got back to the cabin, they were exhausted but well satisfied with their day’s work, and much of their aches and pains faded at the scent of a spicy stew: their companions had finally awakened and busied themselves at the cooking fire.
The following morning, Mark and Brynne joined them outside. Garec watched the pair closely, and after a couple of avens he decided they were back to normal. He sighed with relief: his gamble had indeed paid off. The decision to fire on his friends had been made in an instant. It had been his only moment of hesitation in that battle, but the anguished wait to ensure he’d done the right thing felt like it had lasted a lifetime. Steven hadn’t seen what he’d done, and his friends didn’t remember. He thanked the gods of the Northern Forest profusely, then returned to work hauling and lashing logs together.