It wouldn’t be safe to ride along them—especially not with my lord in such a state—but one might lead a horse along them efficiently enough.
I just didn’t have any idea how I was going to coax Mamoru into walking. More than that, I didn’t know how I was going to coax him into the sudden change of plans.
Best to confront those problems head-on instead of worrying about them, though. I urged our horse onward, looking for a familiar marking, etched into stone by a simple blade, that would tell me where one of the hidden paths started. They were much harder to spot in the moonlight. I took heart from the fact that Mamoru had not tried to leap from the horse since I’d grabbed hold of him, as though whatever had possessed him had been exorcised by my own sheer stubbornness.
I didn’t flatter myself that I was capable of such things, of course. I was merely glad that whatever it had been seemed to have passed. The fever was opponent enough for me. I was just a man and no figure of legend.
Finally I recognized a marking, a symbol scratched into the rock for soldiers to follow. It would do well enough for my lord and me. I pulled Mamoru from the horse when I myself dismounted, and held him in front of me like a bundle of reeds wrapped in silk.
“Walking,” Mamoru sighed, as though it was an unimaginable burden.
“I’ll help you,” I promised, maneuvering around him to take the horse by the reins.
There was a moment, thankfully brief, when the world spun beneath my feet, and the bright blue of the rocks swirled together with the dark ground. Then, the horse tossed its head impatiently and broke my attention. I was freed from the vortex. I didn’t think it was anything more serious than my own exhaustion, but it was yet another thing to watch for.
There were more causes for a fever than I could count. If I fell prey to illness because of my own exhaustion, then everything fell to the gods.
We traveled in relative silence, Mamoru struggling to put one foot in front of the other, while high above us over the mountains, the sun began to rise. He clutched at his robes with thin, pale fingers, as though the silk gave him comfort against the strain of walking. At least, I thought, we could be thankful that losing the cover of darkness would mean losing the worst of the fever for the day as well. It left him weak, though, and leaning heavily on me in order to keep one foot following the other. I pushed from my mind any thought of what might happen if I weakened too—such a turn of events was unacceptable; I refused it—and we pressed on.
The mountains were brightly colored even in the faint hazy light of dawn, blue as the very heart of the country. For one as devoted as I, it was difficult to see the land as a danger, potentially housing enemies at every turn. The fourteenth pass, the one we were using, was unoccupied these days because of its extreme proximity to the Volstov capital. Clearing it out had been one of the first agreed-upon provisions of the treaty, or so my lord had told me, in the weeks after the war had ended.
We moved deeper into the mountains, while memory blurred with my thoughts and the sound of each ragged breath—my own mingling with my lord’s.
At the heat of midday we stopped to rest, and Mamoru slept so deeply I checked his breath with my palm in front of his mouth more than once to reassure myself. He was still breathing though more quietly.
Even the horse sensed our troubles, and he was restless in the sunlight. I soothed both beast and my lord with alternating hands, let Mamoru drink from a skin dangerously low on water, while the horse whinnied in chastisement. We were both beasts of burden—perhaps, at last, we’d come to appreciate one another. Even if the horse was himself a foreigner.
Just on the other side of the range was Volstov, a country less our enemy than our own Emperor was. It was dragon country no more. From our position, twinkling faintly in the far distance, were the jeweled rooftops of Lapis, like a little toy city, as easily scattered by a child’s hand as it had been by the dragonfire.
I turned to show Mamoru, but his eyes were shut against the