The Whitefire Crossing - By Courtney Schafer Page 0,49
gear to hunt survivors, but he needs more probe poles and shovels before teams can search for salvageable goods.”
“Tell him I’m on it.” I spurred the mare back up the trail toward the outrider wagon. My heart pounded as we passed more sets of dead mules and a few limp bodies of men. What in Khalmet’s name had happened? And where the hell was Kiran?
A familiar scuffed boot poking out from behind a boulder caught my eye. I hesitated, then jerked the mare to a halt. Damn it, if Kiran was dead like those mules, I had to know. I scrambled around the rock.
He lay sprawled face down. Blood stained the snow red around his outflung hands.
I dropped to my knees and reached for the pulse in his neck, sending up desperate prayers to both Khalmet and Suliyya.
His pulse beat steady under my hand. I passed shaking fingers over my eyes, then ran my hands over his body in a rapid search for wounds. I found none other than the cuts on his palms. From the blood streaking the edge of a rock above him, maybe he’d tried to catch himself as he fell.
I eased him over onto his back. He was completely unresponsive, his face ice-pale. Whatever had struck him down, a healer would have to sort out. I’d take him back to the outrider wagon, and send word for Merryn while I unpacked the poles and shovels.
I hauled him up and over my shoulder. Thank Khalmet he was so skinny. He was tall enough to be awkward for me to carry, but at least he wasn’t very heavy. I staggered down the talus, one question repeating over and over in my head. Why the fuck had he run back to the convoy?
No answer to that unless he woke. The minute he recovered, I’d kick his scrawny highside ass so hard he’d never dare to leave my side again. I slung him over the mare’s saddle with a grunt of relief, and swung up behind. As I urged the mare onward, I glanced up at the couloir.
The split in the avalanche path was directly in line with where I’d found Kiran. Icy shock stopped my breath.
Highside or streetside, no charm I’d ever heard of had the power to stand against an avalanche. But a mage...yeah, a mage could pull that off.
All at once, the nagging little discrepancies about Kiran reshuffled themselves into a terrible new pattern. Oh, no. Oh, fuck, no. How could I have been so fucking stupid?
I’d always thought of mages as living in their own arrogant, unknowable world, for all they shared the city with the rest of us. Gods knew even the lesser ones either stalked past like ordinary folk mattered less than sandflies, or drifted along with an eerily distant expression that was scary as shit. I’d never imagined a mage as a naïve soft-spoken kid, desperate to leave his troubles behind.
Unless that was only a role Kiran had played, for some strange reason of his own. I eyed the limp form draped over my saddle, warily. But then why divert the avalanche and save the convoy, when he’d been safe at my side?
Twisted metal and shattered wood filled my mind’s eye. He hadn’t saved all of the convoy. And Pello’s wagon was one of those hit.
Last night, at Ice Lake...the odd tension I’d seen beneath Pello’s show of anger, and Kiran’s white-faced insistence that I do something about him...oh, shit, of course. I’d thought Pello merely excited over marking Kiran as a highsider, but he must have marked him as more than that. And Kiran...when I’d refused to act, had he decided to take matters into his own hands?
An even more unwelcome thought piled in. Assuming Kiran’s nerves hadn’t all been an act, and he did have an enemy back in Ninavel...not some rich highsider, but another mage? Khalmet’s bloodsoaked hand! One thing to risk some wealthy bastard maybe hiring a disinterested mage to fire off a spell...another thing entirely to face an angry mage with a personal grudge.
I swallowed, my throat dry as bone. If I was right about any of this, then taking this job was the biggest mistake of my life. Better to dance barefoot in a scorpion pit than play a mage’s game, the streetside saying went. Bren’s money would do me no good if I didn’t survive to use it.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was so spooked from the avalanche that I’d read far too much into