He is already gone.
I do asPenn bids, riding back through the woods to the passage that leads up toward the summit. I don’t want to, but I do. Because he asked. Because…he pleaded.
I need you to go.
I need you to stay safe.
And so I go. But I leave my heart behind in that blood-drenched camp. Back with Jac and Mabon and Uther, the soldiers who have forced themselves inside its chambers, becoming friends despite all odds. Back with Penn, the man who has saved me again and again, even when I’ve punished him for it.
With each of Onyx’s hoofbeats, my conscience screams out that I am a coward for running, for leaving them behind when they are so vastly outnumbered. There were so many Reavers. A never-ending wave pouring from those trees.
What can four men possibly do against forty?
The odds are too grim to dwell on. The outcomes too painful to contemplate.
I hear the screams of pain before Onyx carries me out of earshot and wonder from which side they come. There are other sounds as well. The clash of steel, the twang of crossbow bolts. Strangest of all, a dull, distant roar that carries on the wind, the origin of which I cannot pinpoint. Perhaps my ears are playing tricks, fear conjuring phantom sounds as I flee into the forest.
I do not make it to the ridge.
When Penn sent me barreling through the trees, he did not know a second contingent of Reavers had closed ranks from behind, blocking the pass to prevent us from backtracking up the mountain. I spot them only a moment before they spot me—a group of men clad in leather and fur, their skin decorated with afamiliar dark metal. Iron. Bolts and rings of it, piercing through lobes and brows, puncturing nostrils and nipples and lips. Their bare chests and pale faces are streaked with black paint, which gives them an otherworldly look, despite the rounded human ears that jut from their skulls.
The Reavers’ outer appearance is a visceral representation of the inner hatred they harbor for halflings. For all maegical beings. Jac said they choose to carve out an existence in the wild reaches of the Cimmerians rather than pledge loyalty to a fae kingdom like Dyved. Their ancestors not only participated in the Cull but reveled in the bloodshed, hunting down halflings and high fae alike purely for the sport of it.
There is little doubt about what they will do if they catch me. Penn, they will perhaps keep alive to use for negotiation, for torture, for things too gruesome to imagine. But the rest of us are marked for a much swifter end.
When I see the blockaded pass, I do not even consider trying to fight. I do not reach for the bow slung across my back. For though this company is smaller than the one back at the camp, there are still far too many of them to take on. More men than I have arrows for in my quiver. More than I can ever hope to survive on my own.
I tug the reins sharply right. Onyx responds straightaway, changing directions without so much as a stumble, but no amount of haste can save us. I hear the guttural cries—“There! Get the point bitch!”—as they spot me in the trees, their words a clipped, distorted dialect of the common tongue. The alarm rises. Booted feet thunder in pursuit.
They aren’t on horseback, but they are fast and they know these woods in a way I do not. I ride blindly through the thick pines, picking directions at random, searching for a place to hide, if not escape. The wind begins to howl as I am brought up shortagain and again—by a sharp crevasse in the earth too wide to jump, by a sheer rock face too tall to scale, by a half-frozen river too deep to ford. My hair whips across my cheeks. At my chest the Remnant burns, the cold bite of fear tingeing every breath I haul in and out of my lungs.
Above the building gale, I hear the Reavers closing in, narrowing some of the distance between us each time I hit another dead end, their feet snapping twigs, their yells an urgent volley. My panic rises sharply and the wind with it, wailing like a wild beast caught in a snare. Onyx whinnies, eye whites rolling. I stroke his neck to soothe him, though my own nerves are fraying.
Is this my doing? Have I called this screaming gale down from the skies somehow, as Penn insisted I could?
Even if I have, there is no opportunity to wonder how. Not with the painted warriors closing in on me. Even now, I can hear them thrashing through the underbrush.
Not far.
Not far at all.
I press my heels inward, guiding Onyx away from the ice-jammed river. We gallop along the bank, looking for a place to cross, but it only widens as we follow it down the mountain, the surface half-solid with flows of pulpy water. Every hoofbeat carries us farther from the Widow’s Notch, where we were supposed to find solace. Farther from the clearing, where my companions battle for their lives.
If they are still alive to battle.
I banish the thought as soon as it occurs.
We ride on, following the water down the summit. A light snow begins to fall. Or so I think at first. I soon realize they are not snowflakes drifting down upon us but ashes, carried on the air currents I’ve stoked into a frenzy with my panic. Confusionflares briefly, but as I stare at the falling embers, awareness dawns with breath-snatching swiftness.
That roar I’d heard as I left the battle had been no trick of the senses. It was the all-consuming crackle of a great, blazing fire. Even now, half a league away, I can hear it if I strain my ears—a steady bass note beneath the wind’s caterwaul.
I chance a glance back over my shoulder and my eyes widen. When we first arrived in the valley less than an hour ago, it looked idyllic—a snowy stretch of pines and firs illuminated in weak sunshine. A rare cloudless day on the range.
How quickly the world has changed. The sky is now dark—not with storm clouds, but with smoke. Black billows up from between the trees at the center of the sloping woods that stretch above me, where the inferno burns brightest.
The campsite.
It has to be.