the rising winds—“we have not come this far to lose to them now! Go! I will join you in a trice. Have no fear—I have no more intention of perishing on this godforsaken eyrie than I have intentions of walking the way back to Lincoln!”
Knowing there was no time to argue, Lucien grabbed Servanne’s hand again and picked up the path on the other side of the ledge. It was no less steep and treacherous than the upper half of the descent; if anything, the closer it came to the sea, the more the path degenerated to a mere lip of crumbling stone. They were forced to walk singly and to keep one arm and hip pressed painfully against the rough stone. Servanne’s boast of being able to run like the wind was mocked at every gap and broken toehold that reduced their pace to a snail’s crawl. Her one slipperless foot seemed to find every sharp needle of rock on the path. The monk’s robe weighed her down, snagging on brambles and crevices, twice jerking her back and needing to be torn from the grasp of the greedy talons of rock.
The moon was well behind the mass of the cliffs, casting a dull glow over the surface of the water, but sparing nothing for the path. Lucien seemed to be guided by instinct and, on those occasions when the blackness erased all trace of solid footing, prayer.
Back at the eagle’s eyrie, Alaric waited patiently for the lead guard to come within crossbow range before he leveled the bow and released the trigger, loosing a bolt with a resounding thwang. He struck his target dead centre of the De Gournay blazon, sending the wearer into an almost graceful arc out over the lip of the cliff and into the foaming wash of the sea below. He fired the second weapon, already armed and waiting by his side, killing the next man in line while he was gaping after his fallen comrade.
Calmly, Friar braced the heavy bow nose down while he loaded another quarrel onto the firing shaft. He drew back the string to arm it, raised the ungainly weapon to chest level to fire … and saw that De Gournay’s men had already begun a hasty scramble back up the cliff. There was no return fire. Not even a testy challenge by a guard farther along in the rear.
It had almost been too easy.
Alaric rubbed the skin at the back of his neck and glanced upward at the silhouette of the castle, its shape growing more distinct as the false dawn gave way to the spreading stain of pale gray along the horizon. Even in this uncertain light and at this considerable distance, he could see the heads of the guards patrolling high up on the battlements. If he could see them …
Alaric straightened and whirled around to stare at where the path resumed on the far side of the ledge. There was only the one way down, only one place to go, and, if the Dragon had been alerted to their presence on the cliff, what could be easier than to set a trap at the bottom and simply wait for the Wolf to walk into it? The Wolf, Servanne, Gil, Eduard … !
“Christ!” he swore and ran for the path. Without the need to guide and steady a frightened woman behind him, he moved much faster than the Wolf and Servanne, arriving at breakneck speed at the base of the cliff just in time to catch a glimpse of their two shadowy figures rounding the last curve in the rocks.
The fleeing pair was soaked in sea spray when they finally stumbled down onto the beach. There, to Servanne’s surprise and relief, she could see the glittering swath of a small bay. Though the air continued to vibrate with the thundering roar and crash of the sea, the inlet was nestled behind a breaker of huge boulders and the water was calm enough for a small boat to have maneuvered to within twenty feet of the shore.
The last stretch of their flight was made over a bed of sharp, cutting shale. Lucien, hearing Servanne’s involuntary cry as the first steps drove a shard of glasslike stone into the pad of her bare foot, swept her into his arms and, without missing a step, plunged into the knee-deep water. A shout and the sound of a second pair of boots crunching across the shale brought the wolfish grin back to