Or… almost alone.
“You’re finally going to let me ride on your blessed mount?” Hanish asked. He stood beside her as she made last-minute checks to her straps, harness, and supply satchels.
I never stopped you. You were just nervous. You don’t like it that he can see you.
It was true. Po’s eyes did follow Hanish. He was not a particularly curious creature, but he seemed to recognize something unusual in Hanish’s presence. He squinted one eye and then the other when looking at him, as if testing something about his vision. There was no aggression in it, though. Corinn sensed that the dragon recognized that Hanish was somehow a part of her, that they were related to him through the magic that had shaped them.
She hugged everyone. She held Shen’s face in her palms and stared at it a long time, and she had Hanish and Barad explain to her that there was absolutely no blame on her for bringing the Santoth to Acacia. That was Corinn’s responsibility. Shen should never feel another moment of guilt for it.
In parting with Aaden, she slipped the folded and sealed note into his hands. She told him not to rush to open it. Read when he was ready. Wait as long as he wished.
She pressed Aliver’s hand in hers and asked him to speak the truth of her to Mena when he reached her. Let her know that in the end, at least, she tried to be somebody Maeben on earth would be proud of. And then, before emotion could get the better of her, she mounted Po and they leaped into the air. She did not look back until she was some distance away.
“So what do we do first?” Hanish asked.
First, we find the Santoth. Who knows what they’ve gotten up to, or how cross they’ll be now that they know Calfa Ven does not contain what they seek.
“And then?”
And then we destroy them. If it’s possible, we destroy them. We make things right again.
Hanish, with his arms around her waist and lips close to her ear, said, “All right. Let’s do that.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Rialus worried to no end about the frostbite that damaged the tip of his nose and the skin of his cheeks. It did not go deep, but he feared that Devoth or Sabeer or Allek-annoying Allek-would notice it and question him. To him, the dead flesh, which went red and painful and peeling as it warmed in his room, wrote his whole escapade right there on his face. He would cave at the first query. Where had he been that first day of battle? Why had somebody seen him trekking across the snow? Was that where he got that frost damage to his skin? Had he really thought he could desert them, and that his people would want him back?
It all felt like such a great folly. Shuffling away from the enormous torches that were the burning towers; stumbling into the dark; fearful every moment of discovery; and then, eventually, alone in the howling arctic night. How foolish. And then he had been found, bundled into the Acacian camp, surrounded, interrogated. As cold and as miserable as he had been, joy had sputtered to life, a single candle flame of heat and light within him. How foolish. He had spoken to Princess Mena in the flesh, offering his pathetic bits of information, thinking he was saved. He was with Acacians again. He was with his people! How foolish. Scarcely an hour of hope, and then back to the ice again, sent away by people who loved him not, back into the jaws of his enemy.
He would have liked to believe it was a nightmare, except that the proof of its reality was right there in the bits of flesh that Fingel trimmed away from his face, right there in the wounds she treated with an alcohol ointment that kicked his eyes back into his head with the scorching pain of touch. He could not tell if she enjoyed hurting him. She worked, actually, as if the pain did not occur to her at all.
“Fool Rialus!” he said. “Why even have your face tended? Let it fester and go green and kill you. Death, you know, is your only way out of this misery.”
Fingel said nothing. She hardly ever said anything. Finished with her work, she turned away with the warm water, bloody towels, and shears. She put them down and then checked the small pot of broth she had brewing over a shallow pitch fire.
“They wouldn’t have me, Fingel,” Rialus said. He could not tell if she listened to him at all, so unresponsive was she to his words. He spoke anyway, a habit he took some comfort in, which soothed his occasional stutter right out of his voice. “I tried, but they wouldn’t have me. They sent me back. Told me to bring them more. To them I’m nothing but a traitor.” He watched the shape of her back as she worked. Even bundled under several layers of clothing, he could still make out her figure. He had studied it often enough, and thought of it many a time in erotic fantasies. Why had he never forced her? Because I’m afraid of what that would mean about me. It would mark the end of anything worthwhile in me.
“I wonder if you would kill me if I asked you to. It would be your last act as my slave. I could write a note explaining that I had ordered you to do it, so that you wouldn’t get punished. I wonder if you would.”
And yet he did not make the simple changes to his phrasing that would have made the question the young woman had to answer. Instead he looked at his damaged face in his hand mirror. He slurped the meat broth Fingel had made for him. He waited for the summons he dreaded and anticipated.
I t did not come. Not that day, at least. Not during the following evening, nor in the dark of that night. His station remained immobile, steaming away like a behemoth at rest. He heard movement outside, all the normal sounds. Men shouting, laborers at work. Beasts bellowing. A few times he heard the distinctive chattering of freketes in flight. They seemed louder than usual, more agitated. And yet hour after hour passed without the expected knock on his door or the shout that would call him to explain himself.
On the morning of the second day since the battle, Rialus could not help asking Fingel what was happening outside. She had just returned from some errand. Stripping off layers, she said, “Nothing.”
“Nothing? Where’s Devoth? Why haven’t they called for me?”
He knew she would not answer these questions. He followed them with others that she did not answer either. Eventually, he could not take her silence anymore. He pulled on his furs, yanked tight his hood, and shoved his hands into his mittens. He went out to find the people he most feared finding.
Devoth and the other clan leaders sat at council in the large station outfitted for the purpose. The human guards at the entrance barely noticed as Rialus walked past them. They seemed preoccupied. They talked among themselves. Argued actually. Rialus slipped inside.
The council was in full swing, crowded and contentious. Several Auldek were talking at once, each of them vying to be the center of discussion and none of them managing it.
“I told you we were too many,” Calrach said. When nobody listened, he slammed his palm on the table. “You forget that we Numrek did this journey before, fought these Acacians before. I told you it was foolish to display the whole army in front of them. Now you see why. We can do nothing with so many against so few! We should be more selective.”
To this, Skahill offered the slight that the Numrek had made this crossing before, but they did so like thieves in the night, with no one to oppose them until they were welcomed as guests, given a fortress and a steaming chamber to feast in. Considering that, what did Calrach know about how to fight the war they were fighting, up here, on the ice? “You want to be more selective. Perhaps we should send the Numrek to do battle by yourselves, all eleven of you. Will that shut your mouth?”
“I would do it with joy,” Calrach ground through his teeth, no sign in his visage of the joy he spoke of. “Not everyone is so afraid to die as you.”
“Afraid! Anets were in the front lines. We pleaded for the cowards to fight us.”