They felt the heat build after the first mile, a pall of cinder-rich smoke descending soon after, bringing coughs and retching as they stumbled forward hand in hand. Frentis had hold of Illian whilst she held to Arendil. He was forced to stop frequently to peer ahead, looking for a path free from the orange glow of flame. Occasionally a deer or wild boar would come racing through the haze, lost to view before he could discern any escape route their senses may have revealed.
They were following a narrow trail when a great crack told of a falling tree, a tall pine descending to block their path, wreathed in flame from end to end. Frentis looked about for another path, seeing only the orange glow on all sides. He pulled Illian closer, obliged to shout into her ear against the fire’s roar. “Tell the Aspect to come to the head of the line!”
Grealin appeared shortly after, the sweat now a constant slick over his face. Frentis pointed at the blazing pine trunk with a questioning glance. The Aspect stared at it for a moment then stepped forward with a resigned grimace. He raised both hands, fingers spread wide, his shoulders hunched as if straining against an invisible wall.
For a second nothing happened, then the pine trunk trembled, shuddered and burst apart, scattering burning splinters in all directions. Grealin fell to his knees, gasping and retching in the smoke, blood pouring from his nose. He waved away Frentis’s helping hand and gestured impatiently for him to move on.
“I will not leave you, you fat old fool!” Frentis yelled, hooking his free arm under the Aspect’s meaty limb and pulling him upright. “Now walk! Walk!”
The smoke soon became so thick all vision was lost and they were forced to crawl, seeking cleaner air closer to the ground. All around trees snapped and tumbled in the flames, the oak and yew falling with mighty groans. It’s dying, Frentis thought. Between us, we killed the Urlish.
A sudden breeze dispelled the smoke enough for him to gauge their surroundings, finding a broad clearing with widely spaced trees ahead as yet untouched by flame.
“Up!” he shouted, dragging Grealin to his feet. “We’re nearly out. Run!”
The line fragmented as they ran, stumbling and coughing, feeling the ever-rising heat on their backs. Frentis collapsed to a halt when he realised he was running through long grass with a clear sky above. He lay on his back, gulping air and wondering if he had ever tasted anything so sweet.
“Never seen,” he heard Grealin muttering, sitting up to find the Aspect staring at the burning forest. It seemed to be on fire from end to end now, the sky above the trees filled with roiling black smoke, banishing the sun and leaving them in a cold shadow.
“Aspect?” Frentis asked.
“This was never seen.” Grealin shook his head, deep confusion on his face as he continued to stare at the dying forest. “Not by any scrying. We are beyond prophecy now.”
? ? ?
They had lost five people to the fire, vanished somewhere in the smoke. Frentis had thought the faith-hounds lost too but Slasher appeared as they marched north, bounding out of the long grass with Blacktooth and six of his pack loping behind. He knocked Frentis onto his back and covered his face with licks, voicing one of his rasping whuffs. “You’re a good old pup,” Frentis told him, running a weary hand through his fur.
They kept a wary eye out for Volarian cavalry but the wind proved a friend, calling the smoke from the Urlish down around them in a concealing fog. Frentis heard distant bugle calls and drumming hooves but none came close enough to pose a threat. The land north of the Urlish turned from rolling hills to gullies and crags after twenty miles or so, well remembered from his Test of the Wild and providing welcome cover. He sought out an overhanging cliff he recalled from the three days before One Eye’s men had come for him, a tall sandstone edifice with an eroded notch in its base large enough to accommodate the whole group. The rushing stream outside also masked any sound they made though they dared not risk a fire.
“I’ve seen enough fire for one day,” Illian said, forcing a laugh, but Frentis saw how she shivered and the gauntness of her cheeks. They had no food and only the clothes they stood in to guard against the night’s chill. I should have spared them this, he knew. Too many weeks spent drunk on blood.
Her voice sounded in his mind again, as he found it often did in moments of doubt. But didn’t it taste so good, beloved?
? ? ?
She was there again in his dreams that night, on the beach once more, the surf crashing under a red sky. But this time there was no child. She stood as she had before, not turning as he approached, regarding the spectacle before her with statuelike stillness and wind-tangled hair. He moved to her side, taking in her sombre profile. “So many,” she said, without turning. “More than we ever managed, beloved.”
He looked at the shoreline, seeing the corpses tossed by the waves. The beach stretched away on either side as far as he could see, thick with dead at every step.
“Did we do this?” he asked.
“We?” A small grin came to her lips, a glimmer of the old cruelty in her eyes as she angled her head to regard him, her hand reaching for his. “No. You did this, when you killed me.”
It wasn’t just the shoreline, he could see that now. The sea was crowded with corpses from beach to horizon. All the world’s dead within his gaze. “How?”
“I would have been terrible,” she replied. “My reign one of boundless greed and lust, a bitter queen visiting her lonely spite on the whole world. For you would have left me by then, fallen in the last hopeless battle against my Horde. But terrible as fate would make me, I am not him. This would not have been my doing. I was the one chance this world had for salvation.”
He let her take his hand, feeling the warmth of her flesh, not cold like before. He knew then in a chilled rush of certainty that if she had agreed to his bargain, they would have been together for the rest of their days. All hatreds and crimes forgotten in this distant place where they would have raised their child as the world fell to ruin beyond their sight. The guilt of it choked him, made him want to enfold her in his arms once more, snap her bones and feel her shudder as death took her.
She smiled, the cruelty gone as she clasped his hand tighter, her voice catching as she said the final words. “I’m sorry, my love. But we both need to wake up now.”
? ? ?
“Brother!” Arendil’s voice was low but urgent as he shook him from sleep with a hard tug on his arm. “Riders coming.”
He led them up a narrow track in the cliff’s side, lying down atop it and peering over the edge as the riders came into view. A battalion of Free Cavalry headed by a troop of Renfaelin knights, a tall figure in blue-enamelled armour riding in front. Frentis felt Arendil stiffen at his side as the figure came closer.
“Your father?”
The boy’s face was grim with hate, knuckles white on the handle of his long sword. “He always wears blue armour. Spends half the fief’s treasury on it, so they say.”
The riders halted about three hundred paces off, hunters and dogs coming to the head of the column. It wasn’t long before one pointed directly at the gully.
“We run while they look for us here,” Davoka said. “Be miles gone before they find our trail.”
Grealin spoke the words already forming in Frentis’s mind. “And when they do they’ll be on us before nightfall.” He met Frentis’s gaze. “I’m very tired of running, brother.”
? ? ?
The fat man stood outside the overhang, hands clasped over his extensive belly as the riders galloped into the gully. The tall knight in the blue armour raised a hand, halting the battalion and trotting forward with a bow to greet the fat man, although he felt no impulse to dismount. Their conversation could be only half heard from Frentis’s hiding place at the head of the gully, crouching behind a rock with Arendil at his side, but he discerned the words “Red Brother” and “son.” Grealin spoke his replies with an easy smile and an affable nod, neither of which seemed to hold much sway with the knight who soon drew his sword, nudging his mount forward until the tip was a few inches from the Aspect’s chest. “Enough, brother,” Frentis heard him say. “Where are they? No more games.”
Frentis raised his eyebrows at Arendil. The boy’s face was bleached white but still determined as he replied with a nod.
“Darnel!” Frentis called, stepping free of cover, bow in hand with arrow notched, Arendil at his side, long sword drawn.
The knight wheeled his horse towards them, eyes unseen behind his visor but the triumph of the moment clear in the shouted orders he cast at his retainers. They spurred forward in an instant gallop, forgetting Grealin in what proved a singular misjudgement.
The Aspect allowed the knights and a dozen Free Swords to gallop past before stepping away from the cliff face, turning and raising his arms as he backed away, splayed fingers pointing at the worn notch of the overhang. A sound like a thunderclap echoed through the gully, red dust exploding to envelop the Volarian cavalry, horses rearing in the billowing cloud.
Grealin continued to back away as another thunderclap sounded, the knights’ charge faltering at the force of the concussion shaking the earth, making their mounts draw up in alarm. The man in the blue armour whipped his reins against his horse’s flank to stop it rearing, turning in time to see a spiderweb of cracks spread through the sandstone cliff in the space of a heartbeat. Frentis put an arrow in his leg as he sat staring, the steel-headed barb finding the thinly shielded knee joint. The knight twisted in the saddle, clutching at the shaft then tumbling to the ground as another shaft took him in the gap between breastplate and shoulder.