The Whitefire Crossing - By Courtney Schafer Page 0,134

he’d played me for a fool again...my jaw clenched. No choice but to play this out and see.

We worked our way through the trees in a wide arc, heading in the direction the track had taken. Cara took the lead as the more experienced hunter. Sethan had taught me how to sneak through forest, but I thought hunting a slow, annoying pain in the ass. Much easier to bring my own provisions.

Cara stopped dead and tugged me to her side. Through the kamma bushes, I glimpsed the dark bulk of a carriage. A faint jingling drifted through the air, as of someone adjusting tack. No voices. I nudged Cara and tilted my head toward the cinnabar tree on our left. The fissured red bark was easy to climb, and the stout branches high over our heads were thick with concealing needles. When skulking around on a scout, nothing beats a high perch. People rarely remember to look up.

I eased my way up the tree, testing each hold to make sure the bark wouldn’t break off and patter to the ground. Thirty feet up, I found a pair of branches thick enough to hold our weight, with a bristling wall of smaller branches for cover. I motioned for Cara to join me, and cautiously rearranged branches to allow us a view down into the fern-filled clearing where the black carriage stood.

I’d feared to see only Pello, lazing beside an empty carriage with a mocking grin. A surge of relief hit me when I saw both him and the guardsman standing in the clearing. My relief faded when I looked closer. Half of Simon’s trunks lay opened on the ground, and a second, saddled mount with bulging panniers stood next to the horse still hitched to the carriage. What were they doing? And where were Simon and Kiran?

“Bring me the warded box.”

Cara and I flinched in tandem as Simon’s voice rang out, sounding terribly near. He stepped out from behind the carriage, no sign of disorientation or clumsiness showing in his movements. Even as I watched, he brushed a fallen pine needle off his sleeve with a fastidious little flick of his hand. No drugs for him yet, then.

Pello scurried over to the carriage and retrieved a carved wooden chest from beneath the driver’s seat. The pattern of the inlaid copper sigils on the box looked awfully similar to my blackshroud ward. Simon must have powerful charms inside. Damn his eyes, what did he intend? And more importantly, why couldn’t he hurry up and swallow some hennanwort?

Simon stood still as a statue, facing the forest to the east, his cropped brown hair shining in the early afternoon sun. At last he spoke over his shoulder. “Get the boy, and get ready.”

I exchanged a glance with Cara. Get ready for what?

***

(Kiran)

Kiran let his weight sag in Morvain’s bruising grip as the man pulled him from the carriage. His weakness wasn’t much of a pretense. During the long muddied interval of time since leaving Simon’s house, the drugged fog had gradually lifted from his thoughts, though the smothering numbness remained. But his muscles felt terribly slow to respond and the disorienting visual and aural effects continued unabated. Even now, his surroundings wavered and danced as if seen through a thick heat haze.

He thought he was in a forest clearing ringed by towering pines with cinnamon-colored bark, of the sort he remembered from the forest near Kost. Simon stood a short distance away. One hand was outstretched, his face drawn with concentration. A sigil-marked box lay open at his feet, but Kiran couldn’t see what lay inside.

What magic was Simon working? Kiran struggled to sense through the void. Green halos sparked and flickered from the tree branches in front of Simon, in oddly regular patterns. Almost, he could imagine they formed a wall...conviction seized Kiran. There was a wall. Simon stood before the border, only steps away from the magic that bounded all of Alathia. The visual distortions from the hennanwort weren’t random, as Kiran had assumed—the drug must not be capable of completely severing his perception of magic. Though he could no longer sense it within, he saw traces of it staining the air, affecting the ikilhia of everything nearby.

But why was Simon here? The border magic in this spot would be at full strength, unattenuated by an archgate. One errant step too far, and the wards would trigger. The treatises Kiran had read in Ninavel warned that the Council kept a cadre of