Exile Page 5

  “But shouldn’t we stay? Won’t someone return here to check the trap for game?”

  He took her by the arm. “It’s already been sprung, Aurelia.”

  Oh. She looked down, this time noting the tight clench of silver teeth. But that did not mean the trap had been abandoned. “It’s not rusted. Shouldn’t we wait at least a day?”

  “No.” He was walking now, pulling her along. Was she imagining it, or was he moving at a faster pace than he had been before? Her breath began to swish in and out.

  Perhaps the trap was a sign they were nearing the forest’s edge. Perhaps Robert was right, and stopping would only prolong the time the two of them remained in the Asyan. Isolated from civilization. And its clutches.

  I should not think that way. She dropped her gaze once again to the foliage in front of her.

  What was left of the day rushed past in a blur. The morning mist had burned off at noon, but her skin felt damp, the hurried pace and late afternoon heat making her sweat between her shoulder blades. She felt dirty and disheveled and as tattered as her riding skirt. Her ankle had healed, but her hem had paid the toll in the service of bandages. By the time she and Robert stopped to set up camp, Aurelia was worn out. And the monotonous chore of collecting firewood loomed before her.

  Robert, meanwhile, picked up his already rapid pace. He cleared away brush, cut two piles of spruce boughs, and set up a campfire ring before she had managed to gather three decent pieces of fuel.

  Then he reached for his bow, a smooth shaft he had carved and shaped from a fallen hazel sapling he had found by a creek.

  A queer tightness settled in her stomach. “Robert, it’s near dark.”

  “Dusk is the best time for hunting.” He did not look at her.

  His averted eyes and frenzied pace made her think something was wrong—had been wrong ever since the trap. “Not tonight,” she said.

  He removed his self-made quiver from the pack, then dropped the bag at her feet. “Tonight.”

  “If you would stay here and teach me how to shoot, we could catch twice as much game,” she pointed out logically.

  “We don’t have time for that.”

  “Why not?” She dropped a third piece of wood on the pile.

  “Aurelia, it takes more than one lesson to master a bow. There are a million ways for you to be more helpful.” He eyed her paltry stack of firewood.

  “Well, if you would take the time to teach me some of them, I might learn,” she snapped.

  “Aurelia”—he hooked the bow over his shoulder—“this is a matter of survival.”

  Her frustration boiled into bluntness. “Whose survival? I’m the one everyone wants to kill. Why shouldn’t I be able to defend myself?”

  Something shifted behind Robert’s eyes. His hand flexed on his sword hilt. A habit. One he always seemed to use these days before ducking out of a conversation. “The ability to shoot is not self-defense.”

  She flicked a hand at him. “Look at you! You’ve been trained to fight since you were born. You have a weapon for everything. A knife to slit a rabbit’s throat. An arrow to bring down a deer. Goodness knows what you can hit with a rifle! And you can use a sword to—”

  “Kill my best friend.”

  Silence reigned.

  Too late she recognized the emotion behind his eyes as pain.

  Robert tugged the knife from his boot and flung the blade into the earth in front of her. “Have it,” he said. “But if you think I’m going to train you to kill someone, Aurelia, you could not be more wrong.”

  She did not know him. The thought stabbed through her as he tossed the sheath beside the hilt, then spun and left the clearing. Who was this young man who had almost singlehandedly brought her out of the flames and back from the edge of insanity?

  And who was she? Before the attacks, she had thought of herself as intelligent, confident, caring. Had all these traits been reduced to ash?

  She had not meant to hurt him just now. Aurelia retrieved the knife from the ground and stared at the sharp edges. She had meant to say that he could use his sword to save lives. He had done so—saved her and the king—by defeating Chris. But she had failed to fully comprehend what that act had meant to Robert. Perhaps she could not. Perhaps that was what he had just tried to tell her: that she couldn’t understand that type of guilt because she had never wielded the weapon that had killed someone she loved.

  Her eyes scrambled after his figure slipping away into the dusk. Yes, her thoughts argued. Yes, she could understand guilt. Safety was an illusion. And she trusted the instincts that said he should not be out there alone. Not tonight. She would never forgive herself if something happened to him because she had chased him away.

  Returning the knife to its sheath and tucking the weapon under her skirt band, Aurelia shot a quick glance at Horizon, decided the stallion could take care of himself, and set off after Robert. At first she tried to hang back thirty or forty paces. She knew better than to announce her presence, not wanting to hear his refusals. She just ... needed to know he was safe.

  The forest was different at dusk, the palette of greens and browns fading to gray. Scurrying footsteps and the flash of a furry tail indicated that nature’s creatures had come out from their hiding places. The air itself had changed. It felt clean, clear, easier to move through than the mist-heavy dawn and the weary stretch of afternoon heat trapped beneath the spruce canopy. She had not even considered walking at night since the terror of her escape, but to Aurelia’s surprise, the feeling beneath her speeding pulse was not fear.

  Thrill. The startling, forgotten joy of taking a risk.

  And Robert was there ahead of her.

  Then he was not. Her heart thudded in her ears as she hurried forward to the spruce trunk where she had last seen him. It occurred to her then, and only then, that she could not find her way back to the campsite. She had no compass, and her inexpert eyes were useless in tracking a path through the foliage, especially in the dimming light.

  The sleeve of a buckskin jacket appeared again in her line of vision, and she exhaled. Fool, her conscience scolded. What will you do when night truly falls, and you can no longer see him?

  She put off the dilemma and followed closer, determined to pay heed to her surroundings. They were not all foreign. That clearing there, with the large boulder—Robert had thought about using it for a campsite. And the bird’s nest over there—he had snagged feathers from it for his arrows. He’s retracing our steps from this afternoon. Why?

  The answer came as the grays of dusk shifted to a darker spectrum. Robert paused beside a stream, crouching for a minute over a patch of earth. Aurelia waited, impatiently rubbing her thumb along the knife sheath tucked in her waistband, then crept forward, doubtful she would be able to read whatever sign had held his attention. But the earth here was damp, and the track formed in the mud was astoundingly clear. Five perfect curves of a paw, and matching V-like formations. The claws of a cat.

  A chill started in Aurelia’s feet, climbed her legs and spine, and crawled over her shoulders to raise the flesh on her arms. This must be the reason Robert had hurried her away from the trap. But why was he following the tracks now? Why would he go after a mountain lion? The meat could not be worth the danger.

  Still trying to protect me. Can’t he see it’s his presence that does that?

  Her pulse galloped. The latter thought had come without intent, but as soon as it formed, she acknowledged its validity. Not once in the past month had he gone to sleep before she had or woken after her. Even in the middle of the night when she had jolted awake, he seemed to sense her distress from across the clearing and to wake as well. Not once had he questioned his place at her side. Not once had he mentioned that his life also had been in peril that night of the deadly flames. Could he possibly be foolish enough to risk himself now, when she needed him on the most basic level?

  She did need him.

  Aurelia inhaled the truth just as he slipped through a wall of thick
brush and sank out of sight into the darkness. She hurried forward, stumbled over a branch that was stretched out oddly on the ground, then launched forth again. She had to stop him from this insane hunt and explain her own fears. He had been so adamant about wanting to protect her. Surely, he could understand her need to have him safe.

  She reached the wall of brush and peered down a small slope into a thicket, a soft bed of needles surrounded by dense spruce. It took a moment to make out Robert’s figure amid the shadows, his arrow drawn.

  A sound rustled. Aurelia’s mind spiraled in panic as a deadly mountain lion burst from the trees, its form a stunning blaze of speed and muscle. The arrow from Robert’s bow plunged into the golden chest, but the cat did not die. Then a loud gunshot ripped through the air. A wild cry rent the dusk, and the cat twisted in mid-flight, then fell to its side. A second shot, from another direction, ensured the creature no further agony.

  And a sword blade flashed at the thicket’s edge, then settled, shimmering and silver, into the hollow at Robert’s throat.

  Chapter Five

  THE FORTRESS

  HE HEARD THE SCRAPE OF STEEL—THE ROUGH SWISH of warning. Close enough and loud enough for him to draw his own sword in defense. But his fingers failed to react.

  His mind refused to lift the blade.

  An instant later the choice seemed never to have existed. The sharp tip of an enemy sword pricked his throat. “Poaching,” snarled a thin, masculine voice, “is a criminal offense.” Then long fingers dug into Robert’s shoulder, yanking him to his feet, and a circle of raised muskets emerged from the brush. All pointed at him.

  “No!” a sharp female voice rang through the clearing.

  What was she doing here?

  Aurelia emerged from the trees, her face smeared with dirt, hair tangled, bare arms exposed by ragged sleeves. Nothing remained to attest to her title, save the anger firing from her dark eyes.

  “Release him,” she ordered.

  Every man in the thicket flinched. Regret coursed its way through Robert’s thoughts. Why would a band of armed men be traveling without the insignia of a local lord? Unless they were outlaws? He had seen the strangers’ tracks that afternoon by the trap and known what they were hunting. But he had not told Aurelia because he had not wished to raise her hopes for rescue ... until he could ensure that the hunters were no threat. Naturally his plans had ended in disaster.

  A round of murmurs shifted through the clearing.

  The clawlike grip on Robert’s shoulder tightened. “Ye’re trespassing,” the sword-bearer’s thin voice accused.

  “We are not,” she snapped.

  Even if she weren’t the crown princess, I suspect we’d have as much legal right here as you. Robert tried to speak, but as soon as he opened his mouth, a hilt clubbed him in the head.

  The forest spun, and hands ripped Robert’s scabbard from his waist. A strange lightness flooded his veins, as though a poison held too close had been removed from his soul.

  By the time he regained his vision, a large broad-shouldered man with a sprinkling of pox scars on his jaw had stepped toward Aurelia. He wore no crest or uniform to distinguish himself from the other rough-clad men, but his stance identified him as their leader. He held one palm out to the side in a gesture of cessation. “Ye’re in the forest, aren’t ye?” he addressed her.

  Her eyes were on Robert, something strange in their dark depths.

  She lifted her chin and turned to the pock-faced leader. “We request,” she said, without a hint of petition in her tone, “your hospitality.”

  “Ha!” smirked the lanky sword-bearer. “Ye don’t think ye’ll get off that easy.”

  “Hold yer tongue, Jeynolds,” the leader glowered, then turned to the rest of his men. His deep voice penetrated the darkness. “We’ll make camp, then take them both to the Fortress.”

  The fog of confusion followed Robert into the night. His head continued to throb, and he found himself unable to sort through Jeynolds’s high-pitched snarl, the leader’s brusque orders, and Aurelia’s commanding tone. At last, upon the hard ground and without intention, he slept.

  Then, at dawn, came the familiar whistle of his stallion. It made no sense that Horizon should be there, but when Robert tried to ask for an explanation, Jeynolds’s sword demanded he prepare to march. Aurelia, gripping the stallion’s lead rope, sent a forced smile across the campsite. No further explanation was necessary. Somehow she must have convinced the outlaws to help her track Horizon, though judging by the way they were all keeping their distance from the sharp hooves, none of them was much of a horseman.

  An instant later, those hooves were in the air, the stallion’s scream shredding Robert’s eardrums as two outlaws, bearing the corpse of the dead mountain lion swinging from a branch upon their shoulders, stepped into the clearing.

  Fools! Robert lurched forward.

  Only to find Jeynolds’s blade at his throat.

  Aurelia had let the rope slide through her fingers as the stallion reared, and now she took a step away from the thrashing hooves. “Put the corpse down!” she shouted.

  “No.” The leader’s firm voice took over. “It’s coming with us. Take the cat out of the clearing, and carry it ahead of us downwind.”

  The men obeyed at once, and the stallion’s screams subsided.

  The scarred leader frowned, though his eyes were low, making it impossible to tell which of the incident’s participants were the objects of his fury. “Formation,” he growled at the forest floor.

  Like ghosts, the remaining band members shuffled around the captives. Two to their left. Two to their right. One up ahead a little ways, with three more beyond view. Though all had drifted so far into the trees that if Robert had not seen the dispersal, he would have been pressed to spot any of the men. No wonder he had had such a hard time tracking them the night before. They moved without sound.

  Of all the outlaws, only Jeynolds remained in the clearing, his blade still out.

  Robert’s hand reached reflexively for his own sword hilt and closed on empty air.

  Jeynolds shoved him forward with unnecessary force.

  Robert moved. His head had cleared from the clubbing, and he had no desire to incur a second one. The forest floor shifted beneath his feet, and time began to stretch. Focus, he ordered himself. Prepare yourself for whatever is coming.

  He peered more intently through the trees at the silent men. All armed. All except Jeynolds with a rifle in hand. At first, those were the only observations Robert could note, but as the journey lengthened, his eyes began to pry further details from the shadows. The weapons were all held in the same position. The men moved at the same pace. When they paused, they stood with their feet apart. In the same stance. At rest. Like the palace guard.

  No. These were not the same men who had tried to murder Aurelia. They could not be members of the royal guard, or she would have recognized them. And hired assassins would not be out hunting mountain lions.

  Though Horizon did not seem impressed by this fact. The stallion had slowed his pace and was walking with an uneven gait, lifting his hooves high and kicking at the underbrush. Aurelia moved up close to the horse’s neck.

  Just then a second cluster of outlaws drifted out of the trees. Also armed.

  A stocky, mid-size man stepped forward as if to exchange greetings. But the pock-faced leader shook his head, lifting his chin in the direction of the bay stallion pawing the earth at Aurelia’s feet. The newcomer looked, his face muscles stiffening, then his head turned back to the scarred man, and a long gaze transpired between them. No gestures were made. No hands shaken. The second band of men dissipated into the forest, leaving only the same eerie quiet broken by the remnants of Horizon’s distress.

  So there were more than a dozen outlaws. That should not be a surprise, but the control exhibited by each band’s leader to hold the other men to silence—there was nothing normal about that. It required training. Intense organized training. Not the kind fo
und among criminals.

  His senses now alert, Robert kept an eye on the stallion as the party proceeded. He was more prepared for—and disturbed by—the appearance of a third band of men. Then a fourth.

  Patrolling.

  And then the houses began to appear. Small timber constructs gathered together along worn footpaths and eventually an actual road with wagon tracks. Women bustled forth, carrying wood. Most of them paid no heed to the party at all, but their children rushed up to the armed men, words of horror and excitement sweeping from young mouths to ask about the mountain lion’s corpse that had already passed their way. The stern expressions on some of the band members’ faces creased into smiles, and one man laughed as he ran a hand through the ruddy curls of a young boy whose features matched his own.

  These people lived here, then, amid the forest. Though none of the maps Robert had studied revealed any villages in the depths of the Asyan. Perhaps these men were a valid city guard. But no—even a local guard was required to identify itself. And no village could afford to hire the number of men he had seen this morning.

  There was something just beyond his grasp.

  And then the answer materialized. Ahead, the forest gave way to a giant man-made structure. Walls of thick, solid spruce rose from the earth, their massive strength as intimidating as any stone barrier or gated portcullis. The roof arched in a steep slanted V, then stretched out behind and to the sides, covering not only the main building but what appeared to be stables as large as those at Midbury. And in front of the entire complex stretched a field, carved in the heart of the forest....

  And crawling with soldiers. Not a city guard. Not outlaws. A private army. More than a thousand men.

  Someone had gathered them here, trained them, and given them a reason to stay.

  What would the king think if he knew how many men stood here, weapons in hand, three hundred miles from the capital? There were laws—clear, strict laws limiting private guards to specific charges. And numbers. Lest any one lord gain too much power over another, much less the crown.