“Leave me to die out here? Let the Oleander Gentry ride down your caste?”
“The sad thing,” Fie hissed, “is you really think you’re better than Rhusana.”
Jasimir’s whole face tightened, then crumpled. Wind shrieked through the comb of the summit behind them.
Eventually Tavin spoke, softer now. “Changing course now does nothing. Trikovoi is still the closest fort in the Marovar. And we still have to clear this pass tonight.”
He took Fie’s hand and headed down a snowbank.
“If you’re wondering,” he said after a long moment, “that is what it’s like to deal with the king. And every one of us knows Jas is better than that.”
Fie wasn’t so sure. She kept that much to herself. “The king throws a tantrum when his Hawks stop doting on him for an hour?”
“The king throws a tantrum when someone else wants his toys. Jas takes after his mother more.” Tavin grimaced. “And you were right. He’s afraid I’m abandoning my duty.”
Fie tilted her head. The prince looked fair alive to her. “How?”
He squeezed her hand and gave her a strained smile. “For you.”
“Oh.” Fie couldn’t stave off a smile of her own.
“I didn’t expect to find meaning and purpose and all that when I faked my death, but here we are.”
“Here we are,” Fie echoed. “I didn’t expect all this trouble when I thought we were picking up two dead lordlings.”
“Two exceptionally handsome and charming dead lordlings.”
“I should have burned that quarantine hut down with you both inside.”
“And here I thought you didn’t have a romantic bone in your body.”
“Don’t get used to it,” she returned, and realized that she wanted this: his jests, his laugh, his hand in hers as they traveled on. Even with the skinwitches haunting each step, the notion of walking the roads of Sabor with her kin at her back and him at her side … that was something to want and to have.
If they made it out.
Ahead of them, mountain upon mountain scraped at the sky; at their backs, the prince ground his teeth.
Somewhere out there waited Trikovoi. Somewhere much, much too far from here.
* * *
They pushed on.
After the sun tumbled below the horizon, the waning Peacock Moon lit their way, ghosting off sheets of snow and ice and wet rock. More than once, Fie looked back at the ragged trail they’d carved and cringed. The Vultures needed no spell to follow them this far.
Through the night they stumbled. Snow yielded to stone, and stone yielded to gravel and thin, spiteful moss. The slopes rose and fell in sharp crags and shallow basins, bridge after rope bridge spanning the only way onward.
Finally they reached the trees, whip-thin pines clustered as if huddled for warmth. Black boughs choked the moonlight until they had naught to see by. She slept a few brief hours curled in Tavin’s arms, then made him trade the watch to her and rest, her head tucked beneath his chin. When the sun crested the horizon, they split cold, greasy strips of dried beef three ways and set off again.
By noon, if she looked back to Misgova’s summit, she could see Vulture riders picking their way down the pass.
They pushed on.
By midafternoon her bones gave out, run too dry to carry her and the teeth both. Tavin picked her up once more and didn’t set her down until the mountains grew too dark to continue.
She insisted on taking first watch. When he woke for the second, he asked for a Peacock glamour.
Through the dark, and through her tears, she gave him as close to the prince’s face as she could manage.
When she woke, only half a league remained betwixt them and the skinwitches.
They pushed on.
Briars knotted about the slopes, digging thorns into their arms. After the bramble trapped the prince a fourth time, Tavin led them clear of the forests, into plain sight but free of snares. They chased the rising sun east over rattling slides of slate and through a gnarling canyon spiked in great fingers of stone.
By noon, between heaving breaths and the scream of her three teeth, Fie could hear the faint clip of hoofbeats on stone.
Tavin tried to steer them from the open plains now, aiming for ravines or slopes ragged with boulders and outcroppings. The nails studding Fie’s soles near wore down to toothless nubs as they bit paths over barefaced rock.
Then, with the sun prodding the western horizon, the rough terrain wore out. The three of them stopped behind a boulder, weighing their choices: a broad shallow ravine below,