The Kiss of Deception (The Remnant Chronicles #1) - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,103
to spread out or backtrack several times when we lost the trail, but we had found it again just outside the City of Dark Magic. As we got closer, we saw that the tracks had been obliterated by dozens of horses traveling in the opposite direction. A patrol, but whose?
We had picked the tracks up again down a narrow trail between towering walls. At the end of the trail was a ruin, where I now sat huddled. I wanted to break something, but everything around me was already broken. I stared at a bloody toe print on a slab of marble near a pool, and I listened to the fierce pounding of rain, every drop of which was foe, not friend.
Sven sat on a tumbled pillar across from me. He shook his head, looking at his feet. I knew the reality of trying to pick up tracks that were at least two days ahead of us. It might be a hundred miles or more before we found fresh tracks. If we did at all. The torrential rains would have washed away everything between us and them.
“Your father will have my head for this,” Sven said.
“And one day I’ll be king, and I’d have your head for not helping me.”
“I’d be a very old man by then.”
“My father’s already a very old man. It might be sooner than you think.”
“Search for a sign again?”
“Which direction, Sven? From this point, there are a dozen routes they could have taken.”
“We could split up.”
“And that would cover about half the possibilities and leave us one man against five if we happened to pick the right one.”
I knew Sven wasn’t seriously suggesting any of these things, and he wasn’t worried about my father or his neck. He was pushing me to make the final hard decision.
“Maybe it’s time to admit she’s out of our grasp?”
“Stop goading me, Sven.”
“Then make your decision and live by it.”
I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her in the hands of barbarians for so long, but it was all I could do. “Let’s ride. We’ll get to Venda before they do.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
KADEN
I’d had a hole burning in my gut since we left Terravin. I didn’t expect her to be pleasant with me after what I had done. How could she understand? But I didn’t have the choices of the nobly bred. My choices were few, and loyalty was paramount to them all. It was all that had ever kept me alive.
Even if I’d been able to disregard loyalties and hadn’t brought her with us, someone else would have been sent to finish the job the way it was meant to be done. Someone more eager, like Eben. Or worse, someone like Malich.
And of course I would be dead—as I should be for my betrayal. No one lied to the Komizar.
Yet that’s exactly what I’d be doing when I told him she had the gift. She might be able to fool the others—Griz and Finch were from the old hill villages where spirits and the unseeable were still believed in—but the Komizar wasn’t a believer in magical thinking.
Unless he saw visible proof of the gift, he’d find her presence useless. She would have to up her game. Still, I was sure the Komizar would forgive me this one lapse in making the decision to bring her back instead of killing her. He knew of my beginnings and the role the unseeable had played in my life. He also understood the ways of so many Vendans who still believed. He could twist it to his purpose.
I rubbed my chest, feeling the scars anew now that she had seen them, thinking how they must look to someone like her. Maybe they just completed the image of an animal. I was afraid that was all I was to her now.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
It was only midday, but I sensed we were getting close to something, and it made me nervous. Finch had been whistling nonstop, and Eben kept riding ahead, then circling back. Maybe they were invigorated by the change in weather. It was considerably cooler, and the soaking rain last night had pelted away a layer of filth from all of us.
Malich was his usual glum self, only changing his expression to shoot me occasional suggestive glances, but Griz began humming. My hands tightened on my reins. Griz never hummed. It was too soon to be arriving in Venda. I couldn’t have lost track of that many days.