“It’s not safe,” Penn informs me flatly. “You’re not to go anywhere unattended until we’re well within Dyved’s borders.”
“Then however will I tell the Reavers where best to ambush you?”
He stares at me, unamused.
“I need…” I shift on my feet. The pressing urge in my abdomen has passed discomfort and reached desperate. “I need a moment of privacy.” My voice goes so cold, I’m surprised the air between us doesn’t frost. “If you don’t mind,Your Highness.”
His jaw tightens, but he does not otherwise indulge my goading remark with a reply. He steps out of my path—but, before he does, he reaches into his cloak pocket and extracts a hollow shaft of wood dangling from a thin leather cord. It is no longer than my middle finger, with several small holes carved on one side to let the air escape. A rudimentary reed whistle. He presses it into the palm of my hand and closes my fingers around it.
“For emergencies.” His grip tightens. “You find yourself in trouble…three sharp blasts, and we’ll come running.”
“Okay,” I whisper, still staring down at my hand holding the whistle, his hand holding mine.
“You take longer than five minutes, we’ll come running anyway.”
“Okay,” I repeat.
“Don’t go far.”
His hand vanishes. I practically bolt into the woods. I wait until I am a good distance away, far out of sight, before I stop to slip the leather cord over my head, lifting my hair so it can lie flat against my neck. Beneath my cloak, the whistle falls down to rest directly over my Remnant mark.
Four and a half minutes later, I walk back to the waiting men. I avoid Penn’s eyes as he boosts me back into the saddle. We do not speak again—not as his arm wraps around my middle, not as my back fits itself against his chest in what has become a familiar position, not as we continue our journey northward through theendless range of frosted peaks. But every so often, I reach up to hold the whistle at my neck and wonder why it feels so soothing tucked in the palm of my hand.
We make campat dusk in a narrow glen where natural hot springs bubble from beneath the mountains. The air that wafts off the pools’ steaming surfaces smells faintly of sulfur, but it keeps the worst of the evening chill at bay. I cast a silent call of thanks to Edwynna when I find a pair of lightweight leather gloves in one of my cloak’s many pockets and pull them on, grateful for another layer of insulation.
I don’t mind sleeping under the stars. Especially if the alternative is another cave. After the cyntroedi incident, I am not eager to head back into the bowels of the earth. I doubt the men are, either.
Mabon and Uther deal with the horses as Jac and I set up the camp. There isn’t much to do. We retrieve the bedrolls and blankets from the saddlebags, then build a fire—low and smokeless, so as not to draw any unwanted attention.
“Never use more than two or three logs out here in the wild, Ace. Your fire gets higher than that…Well, you might as well send up a smoke signal to everyone within striking distance saying, ‘Come murder us in our sleep,’ ” Jac tells me, poking at the embers with a slim branch. “We wouldn’t want to make things too easy for the Reaver trash on our trail.”
“Do you think they’re close by?”
He shrugs. “They’re not trackers so much as opportunists. They take what comes across their path. That said, this isn’t their typical play. It’s personal for them.”
“Personal how?”
“Reavers hate the fae. Always have. As their closest neighbor,Dyved bears the brunt of that prejudice. They don’t just want us to yield our borderlands. They want us to yield in general—some deranged declaration of mortal supremacy.”
There are similar factions in the Midlands. I’ve seen them in the port cities—the culling priests, clad in their bone-white robes, preaching on the foul sins of maegic to anyone who’ll listen. They make it their life’s mission to report halflings to be hunted down and hanged. Once they brought their poisonous hatred to Seahaven’s shores, Eli stopped letting me tag along on his trips to Bellmere.
When I mention the priests to Jac, he merely shakes his head. “Reavers aren’t unique in their hatred of us, but they are unique in the brutal way they demonstrate it. You remember what we told you last night? Our unit”—he jerks his chin toward Mabon and Uther—“has skirmished with this particular clan a few times now. They’ve been encroaching on Dyved’s borders. Testing our resolve, seeing how far they can push us before we retaliate.”
I nod as I tidy our pile of kindling.
“They pushed a bit too far about a fortnight ago and lost a handful of their men to our best archers as a result of that miscalculation. We sent back their bodies for burial—but also as a warning.”
I glance up, paling at his casual admittance to killing.
He notices. His shrug is light, unbothered. “Cost of war, Ace. They knew when they started playing with fire, there was a chance they’d get burned. They’re lucky we didn’t do worse. Could’ve taken their actions as provocation for a full invasion. Snatched up that gods-awful ice shelf they call home likethat”—he snaps his thumb sharply—“and slaughtered every last one of them.”
If he’s trying to comfort me, he is not succeeding.
“Needless to say,” Jac carries on, “they were none too pleasedto have their plans foiled and their top fighters eliminated. They still want a chunk of our land, but they can’t afford to lose any more men. So, they’re stuck.” He pauses. His eyes are solemn as they hold mine. “That all changes if they find something to negotiate with. Something Dyved wants badly enough to yield. Say…the sole heir to their throne, for instance.”
My heart skips a beat.
They are coming for Penn.