Without a word, he turned his horse to the west, to follow the path his king’s army would have taken.
“That’s the wrong way.” Abby sat her mount in the middle of the crossroads, making no move to follow him.
“Robert’s men travel this direction.” West, to their own peril.
“That may be true, but even if it is, your friend isn’t with them. He’s this way. Or—” She shrugged, her face seeming to pale as she continued. “His wristband is this direction, anyway.”
East. Away from where he knew the ambush awaited.
“Yer sure of this. There can be no mistake?”
“Absolutely positive. If you want to find the wristband, we have to travel in this direction.”
She waited for him, moving not a muscle, trust shining in her eyes even as indecision rumbled in his gut, an unfamiliar, worthless emotion he had no use for.
East to find the wristband Dair always wore, or west to join his king.
One direction might well be an exercise in futility. The wristband could have fallen from Dair’s arm. Or—and this thought set his stomach to a full churn—the band could still be on his kinsman’s body. His lifeless body.
The other direction required risking not only his own life but that of his beloved Soulmate as well, and in the end it was possible he’d neither find his kinsmen nor reach his king in time to warn him of what awaited.
And if he did?
He could hear Pol’s voice floating through his mind as clearly as if the Faerie Prince stood at his side.
You cannot change the outcome of history. You may only alter the circumstances.
Certainly he had the power to ignore the edict, but at what price? If he was successful in his quest, the world, Abby’s world, would be forever changed. Everythingshe loved and wanted to return to might very well have never existed.
She might never have existed.
“Your call, husband. Whatever you decide, that’s what we’ll do.”
She’d not called him by that name before. Hearing it from her lips set the very foundations of his world to trembling. He would give all that he owned if only he had the faith in himself that she showed in him at this moment.
Abby felt her heart close to breaking as she watched the indecision radiate from Colin. She’d never seen him like this before. For a fact, she suspected this moment was a first for her brave, hardheaded warrior. He was not a man given to vacillation.
How very odd it felt to realize that the whole of her world, the whole of their world together, rested on this one decision. Right or left. East or west. See to his kinsman or attempt to change the future. Colin would choose one or the other and that choice would change everything for them from that moment forward.
“Bollocks,” he muttered at last, reining his horse around and directing him toward where she waited. “Let’s have at this band you’re so sure you can find.”
They rode side by side, once again in silence. He was obviously on alert, constantly scanning the road ahead for any sign of danger. Confident in his ability to protect them, Abby allowed herself to sink inward, using the quiet to explore the extent of her ability to find something.
She visualized the tendril, taut and straining, stretching far out into the distance ahead of her. It wasa new sensation to find something so far away. She felt as if she floated over this world, outside her own body, carried forward on wings, always keeping one eye on the pulsating tendril far below her.
The deeper she allowed herself to fall into the vision, the more real her surroundings became. Rather than the black mist that normally surrounded the energy she sent out, it was as if the mist coalesced into the countryside through which they traveled. The tendril snaked forward, pulsating its fluorescent light along the very road over which their horses carried them.
Below her, trees formed a canopy over the road, so full and large she couldn’t tell where one set of limbs ended and the next began. So dense were the branches she even lost sight of the tendril at times, able to track it here only by the faint pulsing light flickering below the canopy.
There! Movement to the left of the road. That must be the tendril. But no, the light still shone in pulsing blips from the center of the canopy. Curiosity invaded the vision. If not the tendril, then what had she seen?
Abby stopped, hovering above the trees, straining to peer between the leaves, searching for any trace of the movement.
“What is it?”
Like being snatched from a speeding car, Abby’s thoughts slammed back into her body.
Colin’s hand gripped her arm, his face only inches from hers.