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September 349 M.E.
Robert spent the night of the Equinox at the edge of the old battlefield, surrounded by graves and ghosts. The graves had begun to settle after a year and a half, and grass had grown on them. But they still stood out pale on Yusipova’s Fields, in the light of the waning moon.
These were the Loshadnarodski graves. Most of the Myrcians were buried closer to the river, where someone had started building a big stone cairn for them. Perhaps the builders were the people of Mertun, just downstream on the opposite bank. But Mertun was a ruin now, and full of its own ghosts.
He could remember riding through this area five years ago on his very first mission. William Aitken had been here, too, and they had nearly died just over the next line of wooded hills, on the far side of the border. They had only survived because the man they were supposed to be saving had killed the woman who was about to kill them.
Here he was again, back at the border. And as it happened, he was here to hunt another woman.
Down by the half-finished cairn, he could see the glow of the campfire. The phantom, hooded figures of the Loshadnarodski scouts slid in and out of the shadows as they moved around, preparing food and setting up tents. His quarry was there with them, enjoying a meal and thinking she was safe.
Robert didn’t have a fire or hot food. He had a little flask of whiskey to make himself feel warm, a waterskin, and some dried venison. Alicia had sent him off with a bottle of expensive wine and some pastries from the same bakery that had made their wedding cake. But those were long gone now.
He still couldn’t quite believe that three weeks earlier, he had come back to the capital with his new bride after a magysk honeymoon. The queen had loaned them one of her family’s properties in the crown lands, and Princess Elwyn, who had been Alicia’s maid of honor, had given them a lovely little carriage with a matched pair of night-black horses. Robert was a long way from wedded bliss and court life now. And it had been days since he had seen a road suitable for light pleasure carriages. All of that existed in a different world.
If things went well tomorrow, he would soon be back in that world. If things went poorly—if this woman he was chasing turned out to be more skillful than he had anticipated—then the queen would be delivering a certain letter to Alicia. He found comfort in knowing that the queen would do it herself, just as she had promised. The two most important women in his life would mourn him together—the wife he had recently grown to love, and the queen he had dedicated himself to serve nine years ago.
Who was more important? Queen Rohesia or his wife? The question had troubled him occasionally during the few quiet moments of this long, desperate chase. Alicia had said, “I know you have your job, darling, and I would never ask you to quit.” But she didn’t really know what his job entailed. Even when he had tried to explain it to her, she had persisted in thinking it was something fine and noble and chivalrous. She sounded a bit like his teenage self sometimes, in fact. Which was fair, since she was 19.
But what would he do if she ever demanded he quit taking these missions? What if he had to choose? He didn’t know what he would do then. Would the queen understand? What would she do if she didn’t have someone like him to take on missions like this, when everyone else let her down?
He dozed lightly, flitting between dreams of Alicia and dreams of the young queen when he had first known her, back when he was younger than Alicia was now. Younger and so much more naïve about the world.
Before dawn, when there was barely a hint of lighter blue above the hills that marked the border, he saw movement down at the scout camp, and he was instantly wide awake. Silently, he rose to his feet and retreated into the deeper pine-scented darkness, where he retrieved his horse.
Most of the scouts weren’t even awake, but he could see his quarry moving by the river, packing her saddlebags and mounting her own horse. She bade farewell to one sentry and then rode on up the river road and around the bend into Loshadnarod.
Robert followed, but he kept to the hillsides, away from the river. He only saw her occasionally, through gaps in the trees or at the end of narrow ravines. But he knew she was there. He could hear her whistling some kind of hymn—the Loshadnarodskis always loved their hymns. She was over the border now. Why wouldn’t she feel at home?
They rounded another bend in the river, and above the tops of the trees, he saw a high cliff of sheer gray rock. This was Reunion Vale, a storied and sacred place for the people of the Raskolnik church. Until five years ago, there had been a matching cliff on this northern bank of the river. But it was gone now, thanks to Robert and William and Grigory Sobol, the man they had been sent up here to save. They had blown up a dam, saving thousands of lives. But they had destroyed the symmetry of the pass.
He had heard from scouting reports that the Loshadnarodskis were still working to remove the last of the debris that had choked the road here. That meant he had only a few miles left to intercept his quarry. Once she reached the worksite, he might lose her again, the way he had almost lost her when she had crept away from Dunstan in the middle of the night.
She was clever—he had to give her that. Presumably she had been in this business for a while now. Maybe she had even been trained by Nadya Lebedeva, the scout commander that Grigory Sobol had killed not far from this very spot. She was no novice—that was for sure.
The daring of her mission still took his breath away. Most Loshadnarodskis didn’t speak very good Myrcian. But she had done well enough to make people think she was Immani. Most Raskolniks were terribly prudish. But she had seduced Lukas Ostensen, Duke of Severn with wine and her sultry dancing. Mostly with wine, actually—at least according to the story as the king had recounted it to Robert.
The woman had made off with the Myrcia’s latest war plan. She had a map that showed which outposts would be abandoned, and which areas of the frontier were no longer going to be patrolled as Myrcia slowly extricated itself from this long and pointless war. She had stolen, in other words, a perfect guide for a devastating invasion of Myrcia. She had to be stopped, and those plans had to be retrieved.
He could see the road curve again up ahead. He turned his horse to intercept the woman at that spot and spurred to a trot, dashing between moss-covered old trees and dodging big, spreading ferns.
She must have heard him coming. There was no way she couldn’t. She stood in her stirrups, looking around. He already had an arrow nocked as he closed the distance, steering his horse with his knees in the Loshadnarodski fashion.
The first shot missed by barely a hand’s breadth. It was close enough she might have felt the breeze of it, and the fletching must have brushed the shaggy fur in her big black cap. Not even bothering to look for him again, she spurred her horse to a gallop.
That surprised him—it was a fatal error. She ought to have drawn her own bow, or maybe dismounted and taken shelter in the trees. But riding off down a straight, wide road was practically suicide. Perhaps the arrow out of nowhere had rattled her badly, coming when she thought she was safe.
Robert didn’t care why she had made the mistake. He just drew another arrow and sent it straight into her back. Followed by another two in rapid succession. By the time the third hit her, she was reeling in the saddle, and she tumbled off her horse onto the ground.
Quickly, he rode up and dismounted. She was moaning and struggling to rise, so he knocked her on the back of the head with the hilt of his knife and then stuffed a rag in her mouth to gag her. He tied her horse to his, threw her over her saddle, and hurried back into the trees before someone could come along the road and see them.
A hundred yards away, in a little clearing, he finally stopped and lowered her to the ground. Her hat had come off, and her dark hair fell loose around her ashen face.
She was young. Very young. Younger than Alicia, probably. Maybe as young as he had been the first time he had come to this place, just beyond the west side of Reunion Vale.
He removed the gag, but she couldn’t seem to speak. She moved her lips silently, then tried to reach down the front of her tunic. There was a chain hanging there, and Robert helped her pull it out. At the end was a little wooden bird, painted with dots of color—a Ptitska. She held it to her lips, whispered one last inaudible prayer, and died.
For a few moments, he stayed there at her side, looking at her lifeless eyes, before he retrieved the plans and put them in his own bags. He would burn them once he was back over the border. Then he came back and hurriedly covered her body with leaves and fallen branches.
He supposed that he ought to feel something about her death. If he were her age, he might have felt guilty. Or at least sad. But all he could think about was the road ahead, as he went back to Formacaster. He would report this mission, and he would tell the queen and Alicia the broad outlines of what he had done.
He would never tell them how young the girl had been, though. They wouldn’t understand. Not that they would blame him at all. But they would try to be sympathetic. They would assume he was bothered. But he wasn’t. To his own surprise, he felt nothing at all for this girl.
She was dead, and he was still alive. He had accomplished his mission, exactly as the queen expected, and now it was time to go home.