The Queen's Secret (The Queen's Secret #2) - Melissa de la Cruz Page 0,27
probably jump out of his skin. So all I can do is send a silent message of thanks to him, and to Mother Deia, for giving me a moment of peace in an otherwise bleak day.
Chapter Eleven
Caledon
Four days of hard riding takes Cal and his assassins across the border into Renovia—the place he misses, the place he grew up. The place he and Lilac met, and could have lived happily ever after, if her royal identity hadn’t intruded.
The first swamps they encounter are so familiar to him—their mists and hollows, the fumes that rise from them late in the day, the long-legged birds stalking among the reeds, and the birch forests that stretch in every direction—Cal knows them as well. Sometimes, if the sun is at just the right angle, the birch trunks glow a ghostly white, imparting their own kind of magic. Even in winter there’s a special kind of light here, one that doesn’t exist in Montrice.
Knowing a place doesn’t mean you can trust it, and Cal maintains his respect for the great emptinesses of the Kingdom of Renovia. Wild animals lurk here, unseen, and now, in the early winter, they’re still active and already hungry. At night their screeches and rumbles echo through the trees. Some people call this the dead time of year, but Cal knows how much life, and how much danger, teems in these wild places.
At one point they ride close to the border with Argonia, but that realm with its great seaports and foundries, its elegant capital and courtly manners, may as well be thousands of miles away. Once the great swamp begins, civilization ends. That’s what the Montricians think, anyway, and maybe they’re not entirely wrong. After just a day riding through Renovia, the endless trees and marshy waters begin to look like a dream to Cal, a never-ending dream in which every other person has disappeared.
Almost every other person.
His two companions ride behind him most of the time, but sometimes they take the lead when the path ahead is clear. Jander says very little, and occasionally pulls over his bay mare to forage for berries or herbs. Cal never worries about Jander getting left behind or lost, because he has more sense about how to survive outdoors than the entire population of Mont. But there are dangers hidden in the trees that even Jander, with his sharp wits and natural knowledge, wouldn’t be able to fight. In an attack, he’ll need Cal and Rhema to step in.
Rhema. Sometimes Cal regrets bringing her. The first day of their journey, she was the girl who wouldn’t shut up. She had so many questions, Cal wanted to gallop away and leave her behind. In fact, that was one of the reasons they’d made such speedy progress in Montrice—he didn’t want to hear another word from Rhema.
Two nights of hard riding and sleeping in or under trees and taking turns to watch at night so nobody got mauled or pounced on seems to have knocked some of the chirpiness out of her. She’s still, Cal muses, the one most likely to wander too far from camp or ride too hard in pursuit of some marshy phantasm.
“Chief,” she calls. “Over there, due west. There’s higher ground, just a patch of it. Maybe a good place for tonight, if you’re ready to stop.”
Cal doesn’t reply, but he nudges his horse in that direction. Rhema can never wait for him to find the best route, or for him to find a place to rest. Her mind’s always spinning, thinking about the next thing, the next danger. It’s a good quality, he guesses, but an exhausting one.
“I’ll ride on ahead,” she says, passing him on her bay horse. Cal glances back at Jander, and the boy shakes his head, picking through the long grass on his own horse, suppressing a smile.
“At this pace, we’ll reach Serrone tomorrow,” Cal tells Jander, and he’s right. Not long before nightfall the next day, the forest breaks and fields stretch before them, all the way to tumbles of houses, smoke wisps rising from every chimney, and the palace of Violla Ruza towering above them.
Rhema whistles with appreciation.
“Nice castle,” she says.
“It’s a palace,” Jander rasps, and Cal is surprised to hear him speak about anything but directions or the weather. Maybe Rhema is getting on his nerves as well.
“Do we get to meet the queen?” she asks, undaunted by Jander’s tone. “Or is it just you, Chief?”