As the coach pulled away from the border, she sagged back against the seat and closed her eyes. She’d gather her strength, consider her options, and she would come up with a way to escape and return her small Pack back to Aydori.
Where Ryder would be waiting.
Had to be waiting.
There had to be a hundred reasons why he hadn’t made it to the border in time.
The logging road wasn’t so much a road as two tracks cut ankle-deep into the forest floor, packed hard with the weight of wagons carrying away—well, if the stumps were any indication, carrying away everything of any size. Had it been a wet spring, they’d have been filled with so much muddy runoff they’d be impassable. Then again, the little Mirian knew about waging war suggested the dry spring had been part of the Imperial timetable. Feet screaming in pain, chest burning, she collapsed onto one of the larger stumps and rubbed the sweat off her face with a fold of her skirt as Tomas raced forward.
Either the coaches were still on the way and the Mage-pack hadn’t yet been dragged across the border, or they’d been and gone and the Mage-pack was on its way to Karis.
Tomas lifted his head and snarled, hair lifting along his spine, and Mirian bet on the latter. He certainly didn’t seem hap…
The sudden crack of a musket jerked her back off the stump, the sound a physical blow. She could see Tomas pivoting left, then right, then left again as another shot rang out. Closely followed by a third, and fourth. Two shooters. He couldn’t attack one without the other taking him down.
Heart pounding, Mirian dragged herself up onto the stump, on her knees first, then up onto her feet. So far, the shooters had ignored her. She was supposed to take care of the silver. With the underbrush not fully leafed, she could see a purple sleeve. Traced it back to a shoulder. Down to a belt. Along the belt to a pouch. How was she supposed to know if it was an ammo pouch?
She could light a candle. Create fire where no fire had been. Logically, then, she didn’t need the candle; she only needed to create the fire. Easier to do if the world wasn’t swaying…
No, wait, she was swaying.
Fortunately, swaying didn’t affect the fire.
Gunpowder burned. She hadn’t needed Tomas to tell her that.
The screaming from the soldier she’d found brought the second out of cover. Before she could find her focus again, Tomas was on him.
She had to blow the candle out now, but the screaming made it hard to concentrate.
Blow it out…
Blow!
Trailing smoke, but no longer wrapped in flame, the soldier flew back about twenty feet, slammed into one of the few standing trees, and slid silently down it to the ground. When he didn’t move, she turned her attention to Tomas. It took her a moment to find him. She hadn’t expected him to be on the track, running away from the border, toward the empire, as though he hadn’t been running all morning. His head was up, but she supposed he didn’t really need a scent to follow given coaches had to stay on the track.
When she stepped off the stump, her knees gave out, her legs folded, and she continued descending all the way to the ground. That was okay, the ground was soft. And from the ground, she couldn’t see the soldier she’d set on fire.
“So,” she said, brushing an insect away from her face, “what now?”
She could follow the trail the soldiers and the Mage-pack had left back to the border, back into Aydori, back all the way to the Trouge Road and Lady Berin’s body.
It took her a while to push her left boot off her swollen foot, but her right came off immediately, pulling most of the bleeding blister on her heel off with it. When the blood stopped spreading, she peeled off her stockings, tossed them aside, frowned, and nearly toppled over retrieving them. They were unwearable now, but she might need them later. Besides, she could tie them around her shoes and hang them over her shoulder. That would leave her hands free.
Because the soldiers probably had canteens. And maybe food. And they’d killed Lady Berin and captured the Mage-pack and they were the enemy and it was entirely possible that the man she’d burned wasn’t dead.
She couldn’t hear him moving. She couldn’t hear anything but a few birds and the pounding of her heart.
But she could smell burned wool. And cooked meat.
After a long moment, she stood. Picking her way carefully over brown grass and tiny yellow wildflowers, the pain of bare feet different at least than the pain while wearing her boots, she kept her eyes locked on the tree. When she bumped up against something yielding and cloth covered, she stopped walking and counted to ten, breathing shallowly through her teeth. Then she unlocked her gaze from the broken branch and looked down…
…backed up two hurried steps, turned, fell to her knees and doubled over with dry heaves as her empty stomach tried to turn inside out. His right side had been a mass of char, uniform merged with flesh. It looked like the fire had just reached his face when she’d blown it out. His hair had been singed and there were blisters climbing past a swollen eye to where half his eyebrow had been burned off. The thick piece of the broken branch protruded from just under his right ear, the thin end was just barely visible inside the left curve of his tunic’s collar, his skin stained red, the fabric not so much a darker purple as black. He might have been alive when he hit the tree, but he was dead when he hit the ground.
Burned so badly, dead was better than alive. And not just for the soldier, Mirian was honest enough to admit. If he’d still been breathing, she’d have had to…
“I’d have had to sit beside you and wait for you to die. Maybe read to you, to take your mind off the pain. I couldn’t kill someone.” She could feel hysterical giggles rising and forced them back. “Except I killed you, didn’t I? But you’re a soldier and we’re at war, so you must’ve expected to die, right?”
It was said, although not in polite company, that high-level Healer-mages could talk to the dead. Didn’t seem so hard to Mirian. Hysteria rose again, and again she forced it back. It wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t even make her feel better, so what was the point. Reaching out, her hand dirty but steady, she touched the charred fabric of his trousers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
Standing, even slowly and carefully, she had to steady herself against the tree. She’d be okay as soon as she got to where she could breathe deeply again. At school she’d learned that they burned their dead in the empire. In Aydori, they exposed the bodies and, in time, gathered the bones and returned them to the earth.
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” she said softly, not looking down.
Back where he’d been hiding, facing toward the border, guarding against whatever came after the Mage-pack, the grass around his pack hadn’t even been scorched.
“Sensible,” Mirian reminded herself, easing back down to her knees.
She pulled a pouch about a third full of dried meat and hard biscuit from his pack, slipped a cheap compass into one jacket pocket, a worn coin purse into the other. He had a folding knife, a fire-starter, and a telescope worth more than everything else in the pack combined. The shaft was rosewood bound in brass—ornamented brass—and there were extra lenses under the heavy cap. It looked nearly new. Mirian stroked the polished wood and thought about leaving it with him. It had the kind of worth that felt like stealing rather than the slightly less reprehensible scavenging.