7.

 

He lost Zean outside the town as he walked toward his horse, Aerala, Liaya and Kae behind him. It was sudden, a painful clench of his stomach, made worse by a sudden spasm in his legs. Bueralan fell forward onto his knees, his head pressed against the black bars, and hoped that no one around noticed his obvious illness. He wanted to throw up and he felt a sense of delirium in repressing it, as if his consciousness was being hurtled around the border of Leera and the Mountains of Ger. He was startled, momentarily, by a voice, a mother’s voice, who said, “Don’t panic.” But she was not talking to him, he knew. She could not sense him. She said, “The darkness is not your enemy.” He took a deep breath and felt his stomach settle, aware that he was reaching the end of his ability to keep the blood and meat within him. “Soon you will join the others,” the mother’s voice said, before falling silent.

If Bueralan could reach Zean again, he might be able to talk to him, might be able to advise him … to what? Even captured, he would not suggest that Dark come to the Leeran Army and rescue him. Bueralan did not believe a ransom would work—that, if nothing else, Orlan was right about—and neither did he think a desperate act of violence and liberation was likely to succeed. Both were futile. Nor would he tell Zean to go to Ranan, either: whatever loyalty Samuel Orlan’s neutrality kept, the killing that he wanted was one the old man would have to do himself, and one he would have to bear the burden of afterward. Dead children bore their own weight, heavier than dead friends. No, if he could reach out to Zean and speak to him as the mother did to the Leeran soldiers, he would tell Zean to stop his horse, to pull hard on the reins, to pull the horse’s head back, to stop the ride he and the others were taking, to not pass the grisly fence of the border, to go quiet and to wait for him.

“You must not panic,” the mother’s voice said, suddenly.

Bueralan saw darkness.

A deep, impenetrable darkness, a darkness that felt as if it were smothering him.

He opened his eyes and saw the black bars of his cage, the broad back of the cart driver, and the mounted soldiers around him.

Closing his eyes, Bueralan tried to focus on Zean, again. He had almost reconnected to Zean, had been able to see him, hunched low in his saddle, his face set in a grim mask of determination. Bueralan knew that look. He had seen it the first night that the two of them, as children, had been introduced. Zean had stood beside a low, stone table, beside an ugly, short-bladed knife that his father would use to cut deep into the palm of the boy he had purchased, followed by his only son. It was a look that Bueralan mirrored as he focused on the bond he had with Dark, on the bond he had with Zean in particular, to use what little of the blood magic was in him in a way similar to how the mother was using it to talk to the Leeran soldiers.

Zean would be using the back roads, Bueralan assumed. Orlan had known the bandit trails, hunter traps and switchbacks down the mountain and into Leera, and had taken delight in showing them to Dark as a way to win their trust. If they wanted to skirt the army first, to see exactly where Bueralan was, where the general was, then they would have to use them. The risk was that the Leeran soldiers, the Faithful, would not bring Zean and the others in as they had with Bueralan and Orlan, and the saboteur was not sure what choice his blood brother would make in regard to that.

He could see Zean now, riding point, Liaya and Kae following, Aerala at the rear. The sight of them gave him no answer to the question of how they’d approach, and in truth, Bueralan did not know if they had crossed the border yet. They would be close to it, either way. He still had time—enough time, he believed, until the cart slid across dirt and rock in the road and caused his cage to slide, his stomach lurching with it, a heavy lump of bile rising in his throat.

His fingers dug into the bars and he used his weight to steady it, but without luck. After the lurch, the road rose, the start of an incline up to Mireea and Bueralan overcompensated for the way he wanted to lean and the cage, finally, tipped.

His stomach fell with it.

When he hit the ground, the blood and meat came up, painfully, out to the side of the cage, and over himself.