to Honganje province itself. It was what we’d both been waiting for, but now I couldn’t wake Mamoru to tell him we’d arrived. If I had, I’d have no assurance that he’d understand me—no assurance that the fever would not take that opportunity to strike again.
Once again, I followed the river. Once again, the fever returned as soon as the sun set.
During the day, it was not so difficult to hold the illness back, but once darkness fell upon us there was nothing I could do but wade into the river and wait.
Mamoru did not struggle so much this time as he had the last. It was easier to keep him from slipping away from me, yet that was no turn of good luck.
“You’ll kill me in the water like this,” Mamoru whispered, deceptive and cold, his eyes white-hot slits. He observed me from behind a face like a mask, and I knew it was the fever speaking. It assumed it knew my lord better than I did. It assumed it could outsmart us with its sly words. “You know how weak I am, Kouje. Do you think I can make it much longer?”
“We shall have to see,” I said.
Mamoru let out a sharp cry, as though I’d pierced his stomach with a blade. It lingered on the air, over the sound of the rushing water, for a long moment; too long.
Then, from somewhere beyond the riverbank, I heard an answering shout.
It was no echo.
I cursed the moon, the sun, winter, and summer; I cursed my father and my mother, the very day I was born. I cursed until I had run out of curses, but all the while I was dragging Mamoru—who’d found new strength to kick and bite and claw and shout—out of the water and up onto the horse.
The horse reared and whinnied, one last act of defiance, before I jammed my boots into his flanks and he tore off alongside the river, slipping occasionally upon the wet pebbles that lined the bank.
I could only imagine the men following us, chasing the lone cry in the night. Bandits, or worse—state officials, soldiers, Iseul’s men, closing in on us.
When was the last time I slept? I had no memory of it, nor indeed of what sleep felt like. In my altered, dizzied state, I imagined all those shadows that had been haunting us closing in on their prey at last, owls upon two field mice.
I covered Mamoru’s mouth with one hand, muffling his cries, and steered the horse with the other. There was only one place along the plains that we could go where we wouldn’t be revealed to the open sky when the sun rose: the mountains. And if my feelings were right, and Iseul had finally shown his hand in using blood magic once again, then there was only one direction we could head for help and sanctuary. I jerked the reins, perhaps too hard, and the horse tore off across the river, away from Honganje. Water flew up around us in an ice-cold spray, and Mamoru tried to bite at my palm.
“Hold tight, my lord,” I said, knowing full well I spoke to someone who was no longer there.
I rode on.
If we could only reach the foothills before the sun began to rise. I had no way of telling whether the men who’d answered my lord’s fevered call had been mounted on horseback, but if they were not, that would surely give us the head start we so desperately needed.
Mamoru pitched forward, his fingers twisted in the horse’s mane as though he meant to bring us down, and I snaked an arm around his chest, pulling him back. He whimpered, then fought against my hold, while I did my damnedest to steer the horse one-handed toward the looming dark of the mountains ahead of us. It didn’t work very well, and I was forced to let my hand fall.
“You’re not making things very easy for me,” I said, because my lord couldn’t hear me.
“You’re so cruel,” he moaned.
I ignored that, as one ignored everything brought on by a fever, and dug my heels in harder. I do not think that I took the time or space to breathe until the ground turned rockier and began to slant upward.
It was then that I began to realize we were going to have to dismount in order to continue. There were footpaths in the Cobalts—secret winding ways that we’d used in the war against Volstov and her dragons.