“Seeking to explore a different kind of uncharted territory. It further convinced Thierry that Terre d’Ange needed to find a way to seek greatness.” His mouth twisted. “One that didn’t involve loosing a fallen spirit on the world.”
To that, I had no reply.
“You didn’t help, either, Moirin,” Denis added. “I’m not saying it was your fault.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t. But when you sailed off on that enormous Ch’in ship in pursuit of some arcane destiny, it fanned the flame within him.”
I felt guilty. “I didn’t want to go.”
Bao stirred. “Hey!”
“I’m glad I did,” I said to him. “But I didn’t want to. I didn’t choose my everlasting destiny!”
“Thierry did,” Balthasar said. “Or at least he tried to. And he would have chosen it with or without you idiots attempting to summon demons, or Moirin’s date with a mysterious destiny.”
“Why didn’t you accompany the Dauphin, my lord Shahrizai?” Mathieu de Montague asked with curiosity. “It seems you knew him so very well.”
Balthasar smiled wryly. “Cowardice.”
Bao scoffed.
“I don’t think anyone’s going to believe that excuse anymore, my lord Balthasar,” I observed.
He shrugged. “All right. Mayhap I’m not a coward, but I like my comfort and luxury. I don’t mind a stiff challenge so long as at the end of the day, there’s a hot bath and silken sheets, and some pretty lad or lass begging for sweet discipline. Thierry knew that about me. He never expected me to go.”
“Do you suppose he ever imagined you’d come after him?” Mathieu asked.
Balthasar laughed with genuine amusement. “No.” He ran one hand over his sweat-streaked, grimy face, flicking his fingers with disgust. “No, I think Thierry de la Courcel will be surprised as hell to see me when we find him.”
“If we find him,” someone on the far side of the fire muttered.
“When we find him,” Balthasar corrected him. He glanced at me. “He’s still alive, right?”
I stared into the dusk falling over the savannah, the trackless sea of grass rippling in the evening breeze. I wished we’d had a confirmed sighting to assure us we were on the right path; and I wished that Jehanne had returned to my dreams to tell me once more that her step-son lived, or give me any kind of guidance.
Bao nudged me. “Right, Moirin?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Without a doubt.”
FORTY-SEVEN
We marched across the savannah.
Our gratitude at having reached dry land with ample grazing soon gave way to frustration at the lack of drinking water. Eyahue had cautioned us to conserve our stores, but he hadn’t fully reckoned on the needs of our pack-horses, being unaccustomed to taking them into consideration.
At every stream and drinking hole, we drank our fill and refilled our waterskins, doling out the contents parsimoniously to men and horses alike on the long stretches in between. Onward we marched beneath a broiling sun, throats parched and dry. Eyahue taught us the trick of holding pebbles in our mouths to generate saliva.
“Keep going, keep going! You’ll have plenty of water on the river.” The old pochteca chortled. “More than you ever wanted!”
On the tenth day, one of our pack-horses foundered. We had done our best to tend to the horses, but this one had developed an infection in the frog of its hoof on the left foreleg after slogging through the swamp, and it had only worsened over the course of the journey. When it began to limp too badly to keep pace with our caravan, we made the decision to put it down.
The Jaguar Knight Temilotzin did the deed, cutting the big vein that pulsed alongside the pack-horse’s neck with a keen-edged obsidian dagger. The horse sank to its knees and toppled slowly onto its side, its eyes rolling in what looked like relief, bleeding profusely into the grass. Its sides rose and fell several times, and then went still.
We butchered it and ate the meat. We redistributed its load among the men and continued onward. And we still had no confirmation that the Dauphin’s party had passed this way.
“What if they misread the map?” I asked Eyahue. “What if they missed the river?”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter if they read the map wrong. Sooner or later, they will meet the river.”
And sooner or later, we did, too.
Even as the swamp had given way to savannah, the savannah gave way to the jungle once more.
There were signs of cultivation on the outskirts of the jungle. It was Brice de Bretel who let go a startled cry, pointing. “Look!”
At a glance, it seemed