Chapter 2 - The Road South

The carriage has not stopped shaking since we left the mountains.

I count the jolts, because counting helps to keep my mind busy from anxious thoughts. Forty-one since the last village, and the last village was barely that: a scatter of burned roofs and desecrated villages left in the wake of skirmishes along the border. The road out of Eloria is not built for comfort. It is built for war. Wide enough for supply wagons, steep enough that the horses fight it the whole way down, and lined, now, with the small ruined evidence of how far the south has already traveled up north.

Iona has not let go of the window strap since dawn.

“Do you think they will be very cruel?” she asks. Her knuckles are white on the leather.

“Yes,” I say.

She turns to look at me, stricken, and I understand a beat too late that this was one of the questions people ask when they want to be told no.

“You asked,” I reminded her.

“I did.” She laughs, a small sound, and wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist. “I did ask.”

Iona is nineteen and has never been further from Eloria than the market road, and she is here, in a cold box rattling toward a country that wants us dead, because of me. I did not ask her to come. She was my only maid back at the palace, or rather, the only maid who took time to assist me when I needed it or if my mother did. I told her she did not have to come. As soon as she heard, she immediately assisted me in packing up my belongings. In the dark the next morning she arrived anyway, and would not hear another word about it.

“You could still turn back,” I say. “At the next post. I would not think less of you.”

I say as I study her. Her mousy brown hair braided back. Her hazel eyes look at me with a warmness that makes me smile slightly.

“I know you wouldn't.” She tucks a blanket tighter around my knees. It’s a weighted blanket, and while I do not need it right now I find comfort in the gesture. “That's the trouble with you, my lady. You never think less of anyone for the sensible things. So somebody has to stay and make foolish choices”

I snort at that. “I can’t afford to be foolish.”

Across from us, Master Torsten snorts at my comment. He has not spoken in the last hour.

He travels with us as an envoy, and was ordered by my father to be an ambassador or emissary of sorts. My father’s voice at the tyrant's court, all bows and sealed letters. That is the part everyone is meant to see. But I know that his role is more than that. He is to be the chain that runs back to my father. Whatever I learn in the south, I was ordered to hand it over to Torsten, and Torsten hands it back north. He is my leash with a diplomat's smile fitted over it.

“You will send your first report within the week,” he says now, to the window, not to me. “His Majesty prefers promptness.”

“I know what he prefers.”

“Then we understand each other.” He folds his gloved hands in his lap, unhurried, a man who has never once had to hurry. “Your mother is comfortable, last I heard. Well tended. Her medicine is expected to reach her on schedule.” He pauses, precise as an arrow. “Long journeys can interrupt such things, of course. Supply lines are delicate in times of impending conflict. But there is no reason for any interruption. So long as you give me no reason.”

I look at him, and I do not let my face do anything at all. I have had a great deal of practice.

“There will be no reason,” I say as I hold back a glare, not wanting to show him getting underneath my skin.

He almost smiles. It is the first thing about him that reminds me of my father, and I hate it.

Suddenly the horse screams.

Then the carriage pitches hard to the left, stops so abruptly that Iona is thrown into my shoulder and Torsten's shoulder cracks against the door, and the world outside comes apart into sound: hooves, steel, a wet roar that does not belong to anything with a name.

“Down!” Someone bellows it from the road. Sir Ronan, I think; he has the loudest voice of the escort. “Get the girl down!”

Iona drops. Torsten presses himself flat to the seat, pale and still. I put my hand on the door and peek through the crack.

“My lady, no,” Iona breathes.

Another roar and a loud thud slams into the carriage. The door swings open.

“It’s not safe here” I say and step out. Too afraid to stay put and hide. If I am to die I want to face the threat in front of me.

The road is in chaos. Three of the escorts are down. Sir Halvard is on his back in the mud with his shield in pieces, and the thing standing over him is wrong: too many joints, a mouth like a wolf, but a body of a snow leopard, and a single horn on it’s head. It has a black hide steaming where the cold rain strikes it. As Sir Halvard rolls to the side to strike it, his blade bounces off it’s hide. Ordinary steel does nothing. Sir Ronan's sword bites into its flank, but his is a sword of Nibheis ore, which cuts through the dark beast's flesh.

“It's mine!” Dame Niamh of House Marsha shoves past him. Hers is a lesser house, and minor house in Eloria, but there is still magic in the blood of it. That is more than any common soldier here can say here. She drives her blade point-first into the frozen road, and light runs up the steel like liquid flame, blue and blinding. When she tears it free and swings, the beam goes through the beast's neck the way a hot knife cuts through butter.

The head comes away. The body takes three more steps before it understands that it is dead.

Then it is quiet, except for the horses, and Sir Halvard swearing, which means he is alive.

I climb down into the mud.

“My lady.” Niamh is breathing hard, her blade still lit. “Please. Stay in the carriage.”

I do not stay in the carriage. I walk to the dead thing in the road.

It is smaller in death. They always are; I know this from the crystal, though I have never before stood close enough to smell one up close. It smells like a storm, but also of death. Its blood steams in the cold. One eye is open. Its gaze doesn’t feel like an animal, but I cannot say what it is instead. Only that looking into it does something to the place behind my ribs.

Something aches there. Not fear. I have catalogued fear, I know what fear feels like. This is closer to the way I ache in the last hour beside my mother, when I know a thing is ending and cannot stop it. I am grieving. I am standing over a monster that would have torn Iona in two, and I am grieving for it, and I have nowhere to put that.

I don’t understand why.

And then, under the wind, I hear it.

Small. Sweet. Utterly wrong. Birdsong, high and easy, the same song I heard in the crystal. The one I could not prove.

But I am not holding the crystal now. I am standing on the open road on my own two feet, and the sound is here, in the world, threaded through the dead thing before me. I lean down, and it is already fading, the way it always fades the instant I try to pin point it.

“My lady?” Iona has come out after me, of course she has. Her hand finds my sleeve. “What is it? What's wrong?”

I open my mouth. I am so rarely able to lie, and I do not manage it now.

“I don't know,” I say. Unsure of the sadness I feel.

And I lean closer to the dead thing in the road, as though it might sing back.