Shae was dressed more warmly than she’d ever been. Between the layers of wool and the furred cloak that fell around her shoulders—this one so thick she could hardly move her head from side to side—she felt like an overstuffed fool. But Kayden, looking on from the chair in her room, seemed to approve.
“You won’t catch cold in that, I can assure you.”
Shae frowned, tried to move and flex. Everything was tight. “I don’t think I can reach my laces,” she said.
Kayden spread his legs and patted the chair between them. “Give them here.”
Just lifting her first boot up was exhausting. “Are you sure I should go?”
Kayden had the laces of the fur-lined boot in his hand. He began looping them and drawing them tight up the front of her shin. “It’s been clear since the day we met that I’d never get anywhere telling you what to do, Shae.”
She twisted at her hips, seeing how far her arms could rotate. “You know what I mean. It’s all right with you if I go, yes?”
He tightened the last stretch and carefully set the knot. “I’m getting stronger,” he said. He patted her foot to let her know he was done. “But we know I’m not strong enough yet. I can make an excuse for not going, but neither of us going looks like we don’t care. And yes, that’s bad.”
“So I can go in your place.”
Kayden patted the chair for the next one. “Right.”
Shae lifted the other boot, watched the care with which he made sure the laces were secure but not too tight. She saw, too, how he concentrated through the pain that even such fine movements were causing his arm. “I don’t know much about how things work here,” she finally said, “and I know it’s very different from where I come from. Men and women and everything. But unless I’m wrong, I can only go in your place if they believe that you and I are, well—”
“Lord and lady,” Kayden whispered. His fingers hesitated on the knot, as if he were expecting her anger.
Shae instead looked up at the bed behind him, the one that he’d tried to give to her before she’d insisted that he take it, and she would sleep on furs upon the floor. “And that’s why we share a room,” she said. “And why Aro doesn’t. Because they think you and I are … together.”
Kayden finished the knot. “Married,” he said.
Shae pulled her foot back down. She was still staring at the bed, still working to get her head around it. All they had was each other. It had been that way since Felcamp. In truth, it had probably been that way since she’d almost died on the Spire. “Like your parents,” she said. “Lord and Lady Mar.”
“I think Aro thought when he said it that maybe it would—”
Shae cut him off by reaching forward to put her finger to his lips. His eyes were wide in shock. “It’s fine,” she said. “Married. We can pretend if it’s for the best.”
There was a knock at the door, followed by Marek’s voice. “Lord Kayden? My lady? We’re ready for you.”
Kayden opened his mouth to talk, but he’d apparently been struck speechless. “I’ll be with you in a moment, Marek,” Shae called out. “Just saying goodbye to my lord.”
“Yes, my lady,” came the reply.
Kayden blinked. “We … well, usually you’d say ‘my husband.’”
“I’ll try to remember.” She held up the soulglass from Aro’s workshop, then pulled it into her fist. “You have things to do.”
He nodded. “If you get it.”
“I will.” She leaned forward and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “And then I’ll be back, my husband.”
She straightened up, smiled to see the bright redness of his cheeks and the sheer elation in his eyes as she turned back toward the door. Just before opening it, she suddenly paused and looked back. His braces were clear to see. She gestured for him to cover them up, and he quickly and sheepishly obeyed.
Satisfied, she opened the door. Oth Marek was there, filling the hall, his one eye watchful, looking past Shae to Kayden. “I’m sorry to hear you can’t join us,” he said.
“Soon enough,” Kayden said, quickly recovering some sense of himself after his surprise. “Aro Lanser is at work on something that needs my attention. And I’ve letters to draft to the king.”
“Of course,” Marek said. “My lady? It seems the extra furs we sent are suitable?”
“They’re excellent,” Shae said. As she started forward through the doorway, she stumbled. Marek reached for her, and she caught herself by crashing against him. The tall man reeled but held her up.
“I’m sorry,” she said, standing up and making a show of brushing her furs down once Marek let her go.
“Everything all right?” Kayden asked from the room.
“Fine now.” She tried to look as sheepish as Kayden had been moments earlier. “It’ll just take me a minute to get used to the new boots.” She gestured for Marek to lead the way down the hall.
When the captain of the guard turned away, Shae reached back to close the door to the room. “I’m in good hands,” she said, smiling as she tossed Kayden the soulglass that she’d stolen from Marek’s pocket and replaced with the one of her own. “Tell Aro good luck.”
*
It was bitter cold on the mountainside, and for once Shae was entirely, unquestionably grateful for the thick Aionian clothes. Movement be damned, she was certain she’d be a block of ice under the heavy grey sky without each and every piece of it.
Not that each step wasn’t exhausting as a result. Between the weight of all the extra layers, the steepness of the trail they followed, the thickness of the snow through which they pushed, and her increasing sense that there was simply less air in the mountains, Shae felt certain she’d sleep as hard tonight as she had on the night she took Aro’s gold-flock stew. She’d sleep, she thought, like the dead.
Marek, for all his years, seemed entirely unaffected by the climb and the cold. She wasn’t sure if she admired or hated him for that.
The captain of the guard was crouched up against a snowcapped boulder ahead of her, where the path they’d been following made a switchback on its way up the slope. His spear was set against the rock beside him. He looked to be waiting for her to catch up.
She took a deep breath—the air cold even through the wool wrap around her face—and pushed forward, trying hard not to look as tired as she was, trying not to look like she was relying too heavily on using her own spear as a walking stick.
He pulled down his face wrap when she got close. “A long way up,” he said.
Shae nodded, leaning on the spear and not yet trusting herself to talk without panting.
“Path goes on up that way,” he said, pointing to where it continued climbing up behind her. “But I’m thinking we might go around this way.”
She followed his nod around the boulder, but there wasn’t much to see. The hillside was dangerously steep, and it turned away out of sight after only a few paces. There was a reason that the path had switchbacked here. “Why?” she asked.
Marek pointed down at footprints in the snow beside him. “This,” he said.
To her shame, it took her exhausted mind a moment to recognize that the tracks weren’t theirs. Nor were they human. “Animal,” she said, hoping that the surety of her tone would make up for her complete ignorance of what kind of animal could live in such a craggy, cold world.
“Mountain goat,” Marek said. “Wouldn’t want to pass up a meal like that. A welcome prize for our new lord.”
Now that she knew what to look for—and had a bit of breath back in her lungs—Shae squatted down to look closer at the tracks. They were hardly filled in, despite the occasional wind that had been pushing skiffs of snow across the path as they’d climbed. “Fresh. It can’t be far.”
Marek smiled. “Good eye.”
Shae thought of what Aro might say about having two, but she kept it to herself as the older man stood and looked around the boulder with his remaining one. “Let’s get it,” she said.
Marek nodded. “Hard to see it, but there really is a thin path around the knee of the mountain here. That’s what the goat’s on. Widens out around the other side. Follow me. We need to be careful.”
Pulling his wrap back up, Marek stood. Probing the snow ahead with his spear, he cautiously picked his steps as he followed the goat’s trail—slow enough that Shae, to her body’s relief, had no trouble keeping up.
The path was hardly as wide as her shoulders, and the downside was a worryingly precipitous slide of snow and ice and rock down toward the alumen-strewn valley, but Marek was indeed careful. Keeping her focus on matching each footstep that he formed in the snow, she made it around the turn of the slope.
The rise ahead was indeed less steep, and Shae found herself looking down the widening valley as it opened up to view from this height. It looked so pristine, she thought. Untouched and unspoiled. For all that she missed her seas and warm winds, she was beginning to recognize a kind of beauty in such sights. It was easy to picture chimney smoke rising from a cabin beside a little farm. Somewhere on the flats by the river that ran east to still more open, free lands. A good place, if it wasn’t beyond the walls in the lands of the alumen.
But for what?
A life with Kayden? What could she have with a man? What did she even feel for him? She’d kissed him, not knowing what to expect. It hadn’t been horrible. It had just been … confusing. She felt like she was at war with herself.
Shae was so lost in her thoughts for the moment that she nearly ran into Marek, who had stopped and crouched in the snow. She got down, too, and followed the focus of his gaze.
The goat. Perhaps fifty yards ahead. She was amazed Marek had seen it. The animal’s pale white coat was a perfect match to the snowfield on which it stood, and it had its nose down in the snow, digging for some unseen vegetation underneath.
“By rights, the first throw is yours, Lady Shaesara,” Marek whispered. His hand tightened on his spear. “But I can take it, if you like.”
Shae stared out at the goat for a moment, then looked around at the movement of the wind. She shook her head. “I’ll take it,” she said. “A prize for my lord, as you said.”
He seemed surprised at that, but he was clearly in no position to object. “Keep small,” he said.
Shae nodded, then set her spear in the snow.
“What’re you doing?” Marek whispered, looking at the weapon.
She looked back at it, then smiled at him. “I’d rather use my fangs,” she said, and then she started forward, proud to be leaving him in complete confusion.
Shae had never hunted a mountain goat in snow, of course, but she’d taken enough animals like it—in jungles, on beaches—to know the soundness of his advice to keep small. Small and slow and ready.
So she stayed as close to the ground as she could, moving through the snow in a low crouch. And all the while, she kept her eyes locked on the grazing goat, ready to freeze into stillness at even the slightest twitch that the animal made. Just a bump in the snow, she thought. Just a bump in the snow.
As she got closer, she watched the twinkling of the flakes drifting in the air, assured herself that the wind wasn’t shifting to send her scent at the animal. Few things could spook an animal like smell.
Closer still, she paused—a bump in the snow—watching the goat closely as she worked one hand out of its glove. The cold air bit at her exposed skin, but it was a necessary evil. She certainly wasn’t going to work a fang in mittens.
Despite all the layers of clothes Kayden had made her wear, she’d made sure that the two halves of her blowreed were at her hip as they’d always been. With practiced fingers, she pulled the hollow tubes loose now, seeing in her mind the dark burgundy wood, the leather straps, the red-dyed threads, as she blindly fitted the two parts together.
The goat snuffed at the snow, pawing at a patch of ice.
The blowreed in one piece now, Shae brought her exposed fingers up under the wool over her mouth and breathed onto them, trying to maintain feeling in the tips for just a bit longer.
Then she reached down into her belt pouch, felt along an edge until she found one of the tiny feather-backed metal darts that had been coated with the secretions of a blue-and-white lizard a world away from this barren landscape. She pulled it free, slipped it into the back of the blowreed.
Ready.
She moved forward only a few more paces, checking and rechecking the drift of the wind. Then she pulled the wool away from her mouth. She took a deep breath, lifted the reed to her mouth, and in a single burst threw the air from her lungs into the tube.
The fang slipped through the air in silence. The animal suspected nothing.
The goat spurred when the fang slipped into its neck, jumping out of the snow like it had been booted from beneath. Shae watched it kick three times across the snow, shaking its head, before it buckled and sank down into the cold.
Smiling, she undid the blowreed and reattached the two pieces to her belt. Then she pulled her glove back on, using her teeth to help get it into place, before covering her face once more.
She stood, looking back in pride to Marek, expecting him to be in awe at what she’d done.
But he wasn’t looking at her. He was standing, and he was staring down the long valley to the east, where she had imagined a little cabin sitting by a lazy stream.
Shae turned and looked again. The valley wasn’t empty.
Not anymore.
In the distance, just at the edge of her sight, things were moving. A line of men, but, of course, that couldn’t be right.
And then a shadow passed over them, making the pale-blue light of their eyes seem to twinkle along the horizon.
Alumen. Hundreds of them.