26
I kept going, as fast as I could while making no noise. The night had gone as eerily silent as Hestar’s court. No more shouts, no crashing of guards through the trees. Nothing.
Too easy.
We should have set a meeting place more specific than “the forest,” but I supposed there hadn’t been time. One day, as my chances of surviving this seemed to be growing, I would once again operate on a solid plan of action. That would be sweet, indeed.
Without that luxury, I angled toward Kral’s and Karyn’s trajectories, as I’d last seen them. If I didn’t intersect with them, I’d wait for first light—which should actually be not much longer according to my time sense—and then I’d track them. Never mind that potentially thousands of imperial guards would be tracking all of us. At least we were out, against all odds.
And I was in my element.
It centered me again, to be in the forest. Even an unfamiliar one. Many of the trees were the same, and the underbrush. How did that happen, that the same kinds of plants grew on different sides of an ocean? I’d bet Dafne would know.
Once I reached where Kral should have come through, if he’d traveled in a straight line, though of course he wouldn’t have, I began circling back. He’d been to my right and Karyn beyond him. If either had been wounded but had made it to the cover of the woods, they’d likely have hunkered down somewhere. For myself, I was happy enough to keep moving, as my soaked silk and leather pants would no doubt freeze the moment I stopped.
I crept through the forest, so silently I very nearly stepped on a doe curled in the bracken for the night. She bolted, sending my heart crashing through my ribs. I listened to her passage, ears attuned for any shouts or sounds of men going in that direction.
Nothing.
I began to worry as I slipped through the trees again. Which isn’t in my nature, so I wasn’t very good at it. If Karyn had been recaptured, did I owe it to her to go back and try for another rescue? Probably, but I might not possess enough courage. Now, if something had happened to Kral . . .
I’d skin that deer once I brought it down.
Why in Danu’s clear eyes hadn’t he gone back when he could? He’d be missed by now, guards certainly would have recognized him, and he’d be branded a traitor. Even if he managed to bring down Hestar, the Domstyrr would never ratify him as Emperor. Or deify him or whatever. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. The only thing in my life that means anything to me.
Maybe he had a plan. He’d better have one.
A grunting sound came from ahead, just to the right, strumming my nerves to high alert. Human. But who?
Taking my time, I circled wide to the left, making sure plenty of forest remained open for escape. If I had to run, it would not be in any direction that would lead me back to the palace. Keeping a low profile, I crept closer to where the sound had been. There, a bit of movement in the brush, shadows upon shadows. Too dark to see much.
A whisper of steel.
My heart hammered energy through my system. Blade in hand, I readied myself. If it wasn’t Kral or Karyn, this person would die quickly. I edged in. Peeked through.
Thank Danu.
“Kral,” I called softly, my voice rough with the crashing relief. His head jerked around, and he whirled, short sword in hand.
“Thank Danu,” he breathed, echoing me, then sheathed his sword and, in two strides, seized me. His mouth came down hard on mine and I drank him in, crawling up to wrap my legs around his waist.
We were alive. We were together.
Nothing else mattered in that moment.
Except maybe Karyn’s polite cough.
Chagrined, I unwound myself from him, noting the pained expression that crossed his face, if fleetingly. The sky had begun to lighten. In the distance, a bird called, a lonely, haunting sound.
“Are you hurt?” I asked him.
“A mere scratch,” he answered, with a warm smile, his special one. “I’ll be fine.”
“He has an arrow in his back,” Karyn said. “I managed to break it off, but he won’t let me pull it out.”
“No, that’s right. Better not to. Let me see.”
“Even your cat’s eyes can’t see in the dark,” Kral grumbled, but he turned his back to me, bracing his forearms against a tree and leaning his head on them.
“Want to bet?” I retorted. “Besides, it’s not even night anymore.”
The arrow shaft stood out from his shoulder, solidly set into the meaty part of it, broken off about my forearm’s length out. “I can cut it off closer to the skin, so it won’t catch on anything. It’ll mean that we’ll have to cut it out when we get to safety. Can you get away with not using that arm if we leave the arrowhead in there?”
“Do it,” Kral grunted. “Once we get to the Hákyrling, Trond can deal with it.”
“We’re going to the Hákyrling? Brace yourself—this will hurt.” I put the edge of my sharpest blade against the wood of the shaft, holding it still with the other as I circled it, cutting a continuing groove. It would take time, but we’d get there. “Isn’t that the first place they’d look for you?”
“Do you have a better suggestion for getting out of the empire? If we’re caught, we’re dead.”
“Worse than dead,” I agreed glumly, and Kral reached a hand back to pat me on the hip.
“It didn’t happen,” he said. “That’s the important part. You’re away from it. We got you out.”
“Why did you?” I asked quietly. Karyn moved away, giving us privacy, crunching too loudly in a pair of guard boots whose previous owner must be dead. Better than losing toes to frostbite.
“I promised.” He sounded bleak.
“I only asked you to get me out, not to throw everything away by coming with me. I just hope you have a plan for how you’ll go back.”
“No.” He laughed, not exactly bitter, but hollow. “There’s no going back. But I made other promises, to you, to Harlan, to Jenna, both implicit and explicit. I decided to start keeping some of them.”
“I don’t get it. Being Emperor was all you ever wanted.”
“I thought so. But being away so long, seeing Harlan again, seeing him happy, seeing my home, my mother, through your eyes . . . None of it looked the same anymore. You once told me that some things are worth more than all the wealth in the world, worth more than power.” He took a long breath, let it out again. “I realized you were right. I want more.”
The one time the man listens to me. “You could have gone for a less drastic choice,” I told him. “You didn’t have to throw away your entire life.”
“You said you loved me. You called me the great passion of your life. Were you lying?”
Just great. One day I would learn to mind my tongue. “No. I also said that we had no future together, if you’ll recall.”
“No future together in Dasnaria,” he corrected.
The blade cut through the arrow, the shaft coming off in my hand. I stared at it stupidly. “What are you saying, Kral?”
He turned, backed me against a tree. “When you asked your questions, I told you that the promise of becoming Emperor had been the only thing that has kept me going day after desolate day. I realized this wasn’t true anymore. Even when I was angriest, the most frustrated with you, I looked forward to seeing you, arguing with you, touching you. You’re mine. You’re also the only person in the world, in my entire life, who’s said they loved me. I’m not letting go of that. You’re mine, and I plan to be yours.”
“Where? How? We’re impossible together and you have some fantasy that we’ll settle down in some little cottage and raise babies? We’d both go insane from boredom inside a year.”
“We’ll figure something out.” He kissed me. “Stop arguing. You know I’m more stubborn than you are.”
“What about Karyn?”
“Annulled by the Emperor,” she reminded me from the log she’d chosen. Not all that much privacy. “You can have him. You two are like something out of a Dasnarian ballad, star-crossed lovers, epic drama. At the end you’ll either die in each other’s arms or kill each other. I suppose both could happen,” she added.
“With that decided,” Kral said, releasing me, “we should go. There should be horses waiting for us not far from here.”
“There should?” I tried to wrap my brain around that, as Karyn stood to join us.
“I sent word to men loyal to me. They’ll get us to the Hákyrling, which will be ready. I plan my rescues,” he emphasized with a sly grin.
“Shut up,” I muttered. “It could have worked.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?”
“I didn’t think you’d help. You warned me umpty-million times that you couldn’t and wouldn’t.”
“I wasn’t going to let Karyn burn.”
“Thank you,” Karyn said in a fervent tone.
“Let’s fight about it later.” I scanned the quiet woods, no sound but the faint calls of that one bird. “Were you two pursued into the forest?”
“No. Once we made the perimeter, the guard fell back. We haven’t seen any since.”
“That makes no sense. This was way too easy. I don’t like it.”
“I have an arrow in my back and you call this easy?”
“Yes. And you told me I could bitch about this once we were safely away. Crossing that outer ring of guard posts—I wasn’t going to make it. An armored guard had me dead to rights, but he saluted and stepped aside. And now no one is chasing any of us. I don’t like this.”
“Maybe they don’t know who we were and decided to let us go,” Karyn put in. “Aren’t they mainly concerned with keeping people out of the Imperial Palace?”
“If they didn’t know who we were last night, they know it now,” I said darkly. “Why aren’t Hestar’s people combing the countryside for us?”
“Probably he’s just as happy to have me gone,” Kral replied. “I was but one more threat to his power. Now he can declare me as banished as Harlan. Can’t you just be glad of it?”
“No, because I have a suspicious nature,” I retorted. “See what you’d have to live with?”
“I look forward to it,” he replied, sounding like he meant it. “That alone will keep me from going out of my mind with boredom.”
Karyn snickered.
We made it to the road a few hours later, then only had to walk the edge of it from the cover of the woods for another hour before coming across Kral’s men, hiding in wait for us.
They gave us hot food, warm mjed, and dry cloaks. We traveled in the colors and under the banner of a noble house local to the area.
And made it to Jofarrstyr by nightfall without incident.
Too easy, my mind whispered, along with other snaking thoughts that I couldn’t quite pin down. But I didn’t say it aloud.
We hid until full darkness, then snuck out to one of the lower-rank pavilions and walked onto a boat piloted by sailors from the Hákyrling. As Kral had promised, the ship was ready. The moment we boarded, men below put out long oars as they had when they rowed us through the Sentinels on the way to Nahanau, forever ago. With no lamps lit, the only sound the dipping of the oars and the men’s soft grunting as they worked, we glided out of the harbor.
I stood at the rail, snowflakes falling thick around me, watching the few lit lanterns in the harbor grow smaller. Jens stood ready to pilot the ship, Kral beside him, Trond having dispatched the arrowhead with relative ease. Sailors crawled in the rigging, prepared to set sail once we left the calm waters and hit open sea. Everything was falling into place.
Too easy.
Karyn stepped up beside me, golden hair in a long braid over her shoulder, warm cloak wrapping her. “Good-bye, Dasnaria,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her.
“Are you—why?”
“You have to leave your home, without even saying good-bye to any of your friends and family. I know nothing can make up for that, but if I can do anything for you, you have only to ask.”
She cast me a puzzled look. “You risked your life to save mine. I think that makes us even.”
“Your life wouldn’t have been in danger if not for me,” I countered. “I wish I hadn’t goaded Kral to offer you an out from your marriage.” It gnawed at me that maybe my motives hadn’t been as pure as I’d convinced myself. I’d never been a jealous or possessive lover, but I hadn’t liked Kral belonging to someone else. Now he’d given up everything to be with me, the crazy idiot, and I had no idea what to do with him.
“I’m glad you did. You were right. I would have lived there in my childhood home for the rest of my life, never knowing the joys of the marriage bed, children, anything beyond those lands. Maybe hlyti guided you in this. It was meant to be.”
“You Dasnarians are a fatalistic lot.”
“Are we? You’re the first person I’ve ever met who wasn’t Dasnarian. Are all your people like you?”
I didn’t have to give that much thought. “No. That is, it depends. There are lots of women fighters like me, scouts. But otherwise—not really.”
She giggled. “That doesn’t surprise me. You strike me as an . . . unusual woman.”
“Do you mind, about Kral?” I took the plunge in asking her, feeling that I really should attempt to be generous. “I think he’d honor the marriage, no matter what Dasnarian law says, if you asked him to.”
She gave me an incredulous look. “When all the while I’d know he pined for you? No, thank you. I have a chance for a real marriage now. I don’t want one with a man desperately in love with another woman.” She shuddered delicately.
“I don’t think he’s in love with me.” He certainly hadn’t said so outright. The concept of Kral in love seemed . . . bizarre and impossible. I imagined him mouthing impassioned words, like the minstrels did, and snorted.
“Jepp.” Karyn faced me, very serious. “I might not have lived with Kral, but I know him quite well. The first time I met him, he told me of his sole ambition, to become Emperor. He wanted me to know before I agreed to the wedding. A great risk on his part, as I could have revealed what he said, but it meant that much to him, to take that chance. For years, he schemed to that end.
“Then he gave it up without hesitation for you. After the guards took you away, he was like a crazed man. He pretended to accompany me back to my cell, saying he’d see me safely imprisoned, then the moment we were alone, he killed all of my guards. You should have seen his face—terrifying to behold. The rest of it . . . he clicked through one step after the other. I knew nothing would stop him. Even when he had me wait in the boat and told me if he didn’t return in an hour to row myself to shore, I knew he wouldn’t fail. With the fire burning in him, it simply wasn’t possible. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”
The ship lurched as the hard crosswise current of open sea caught us. Men above passed shouts, the lines creaking and the sails flapping, then snapping full bellied.
I glanced back to find Kral watching me with his usual intensity. They’d lit a lantern, now that we were away, and the flickering light cast sharp shadows across his face. No, he would never be the romantic, but then neither would I. If he expected me to have babies, well . . . we’d have to fight about that one. The prospect made me oddly cheerful. A rousing argument with my Dasnarian lover made for far better fun than easy times with anyone else I’d known.
I smiled at him and cocked my head in question toward his cabin. He nodded once, long and slow.
Karyn followed the exchange and laughed. “If that’s not love, I don’t know what is,” she repeated, sounding wistful. “Maybe hlyti is guiding me to mine. Perhaps he’s in your Thirteen Kingdoms, wondering where I am.”
“If we can get back, I’ll help you look. We’ll introduce you to every eligible man—or woman, maybe you’ll discover—we can find, I promise. Like I said, anything you need, just ask.”
“Will you teach me to use knives like you do?”
“Absolutely.”
She gazed back at the sprawl of Jofarrstyr along the coastline, the thousands of flickering lamps. “I feel bad about them, all the ones still stuck there.”
“I do, too.” I thought of Inga, saying she was needed, offering to set up an exchange of information. It might be possible. Suddenly more things seemed possible than before. “Maybe we’ll think of something.”