friend of mine? They delivered his head in a sack?’
‘Razi,’ she asked gently, ‘do you recall nothing at all?’
He put his hand to his head. ‘It does not bother me until I am prompted. Then I realise . . . I seem to have no thoughts!’
‘That sounds peaceful,’ she said.
‘It is!’ he admitted. ‘It’s really quite peaceful – until I realise that it is not normal.’ Razi glanced at her, almost ashamed, and said, ‘I must confess, it does not sound like I have much worth remembering.’
Is that what this is? she thought. Have you surrendered? ‘My Lord,’ she said carefully. ‘Much as you might wish to, you are not a man who can afford to forget.’
His face fell in horror, and Wynter immediately regretted her suspicion. ‘You think I feign this?’ he cried. ‘That I somehow desire to be this way? You think this is cowardice! That I shirk, and dissemble this affliction!’
‘No, Razi!’ She grabbed his arm. ‘No! Not at all!’ But he had seen it in her face, and he went to shake her off. ‘I’m sorry!’ she said. ‘I’m sorry! Truly!’
His anger transformed to despair, and he clutched her hand and squeezed it, looking around him in utter confusion. ‘I do not know what to do,’ he whispered.
‘Well, we must do something, Razi. Even if it is to simply pick one action and stick with it to the last. We must do something. And we must do it now.’
DAY TEN: IRREVOCABLY
COMMITTED
IN THE end it was Wynter who made the decision, and to her surprise the others fell in with it. It was a strange feeling, laying out the maps and plotting their route while three men nodded and listened intently to her opinions. She was unaccustomed to that. She was unaccustomed to the undiluted responsibility. It was terrifying.
Three days later, deep in the heart of a stately pine forest, she lay next to a tiny fire and watched as the last light of day drained from the tops of the trees. The knowledge of how randomly she had chosen this course of action burned in the pit of her belly; it lay like lead in her chest. Everything, everything, rested on her having taken a flip of a mental coin. There had been nothing logical about it. She had simply played an internal game of eeny-meeny-miny-mo and chosen a course of action by chance.
Each time she shut her eyes, she saw Razi and Sól and Christopher as they had been when she persuaded them to do this: brown eyes, blue eyes and grey, staring gravely at her and trusting her. Jesu. And tomorrow would reveal the truth. Tomorrow morning they would finally reach the Chér Ford, there to discover . . . what?
‘You’ll stick like that.’
She startled and looked up into Christopher’s smiling face. ‘Pardon?’
‘You’re lying there with your face knotted like a handkerchief . . . it’ll stick like that if the wind changes.’ He plopped down beside her and shrugged his blankets around him. ‘I wouldn’t be able to love you anymore if that happened, you know. You’d be much too ugly.’
She laughed.
‘Stop fretting,’ he whispered gently.
‘I can’t, Christopher. I really can’t. What if I’ve made the wrong choice? What if we get there and all we find is the remains of some bandit’s meet-up or the litter of a hunter’s camp. We’ll have wasted so much time. I’ll have thrown all Albi’s chances away.’
‘Lass.’ He took her hand, rubbed her knuckles with his thumb. ‘What’s done is done. Truth is, you were the only one of us with balls enough to make a decision. Had you left us to it, we’d still be on that mountain side dithering to and fro while the Wolves snickered at us from the rocks.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘Yes, we would. You quite ruined things for poor Sól, you know. He had lovely dreams of setting up home there with Razi. He’d picked a nice little spot for a hut and everything.’
Sólmundr grimaced at him from across the flames and went back to checking Boro for ticks. ‘Razi should to be that lucky,’ he murmured.
‘I still do not understand what purpose I shall serve you,’ said Razi softly. He tapped his temple. ‘I am as blank as a clean slate.’
‘You are our access to the King, Razi,’ said Wynter. ‘After that,’ she held up Alberon’s folder, ‘these will have to speak for themselves.’
He regarded the folder with uncertainty, sighed, and rubbed his forehead. ‘If you say so,’ he said and