Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (53 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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From the feel of the object in her hands, from the look on the old witch’s face, Gaultry knew instantly what she had taken. Within the cloth’s folds, she had Richielle’s Rhasan deck.
“No!” The old witch made a darting move toward her.
“Don’t try it!” Gaultry said sharply. “One more step, and these cards will go in the stream.”
The old woman invoked a spell with a curt pass of her hand, and the mass of cloth and card deck blazed hotter than a red-burning ember. Gaultry did not care. She clutched the cursed thing against her chest. A burned smell touched her nostrils, along with the pain. She ignored it. “Put down the knife,” she said.
Incredibly, Richielle obeyed.
The Rhasan deck was getting hotter. Gaultry, one-handed, grabbed up the knife. The angry passion on Richielle’s face daunted her, but she could not stop this now. She backed over to Tullier, and began to cut him free. There was no time for niceties. Wielding the knife one-handed, behind her back, she made a poor job of it, sliced him in one or more places, and at the end when he finally fell free there was nothing she could to do prevent him from tumbling head-downward against the rock. She heard him swear, which at least meant that he had not knocked himself unconscious in the fall.
“Gaultry!” His fingers touched hers. She passed him the knife so he could cut his ankles free.
Twilight was on them. Only the tiniest sliver of the sun’s ball remained in sight over the ridge. “Andion’s Ides are over,” Gaultry said, as level and calm as she was able. “You have missed your chance to play Kingmaker, old woman.”
Richielle did not answer. The expression on her face was more than murder. It was a look of ancient, primitive evil. For this moment she was not thinking of the Kingmaking game. She was focused only on her deck. She wanted it back—oh, how she wanted it. The fire of that desire fueled the burning of the deck in Gaultry’s hands.
Gaultry’s strength was fading—what little she had left. Stripped of her power, worn down with fatigue, she was not sure how she maintained the will to hold on to those burning cards. She stared into Richielle’s face, trying to understand what she saw there.
Richielle’s mouth twisted, observing her fatigue. The fiery heat of the deck leapt higher. Gaultry’s sleeves began to smolder. The goats began
to move, dispersing, as the old woman’s hold on them faded, and Gaultry understood then that to Richielle, Tullier and Kingmaking, at least for the moment, did not exist. All she cared was that she reclaimed the source of her deepest power. Behind her, the land, Richielle’s land, seemed to shiver and move, as though some enchantment was draining from it—
“Take it then!” Gaultry fanned the deck—a movement that seared her fingers—and scattered it into the stream among the churning goats. “Take it!”
Richielle screamed and threw herself into the water after the strewn cards. Gaultry grabbed Tullier and dragged him down off the altar on the side of the stone away from her. “This is our only chance,” she told him. “Follow the river! Even if you lose me, follow the river. It’s the only way to safety—the bitch owns all the other land hereabouts with her magic.”
They began to run—first flat out, and then, as the tall marker stone disappeared around a bend of the river, at a more sustainable jog.
“She’ll come after us,” Gaultry puffed. “After she gathers her cards.”
“Why didn’t we kill her?”
“Tullier, I don’t think we could. Her magic—she’s been twisting our path ever since we left the Tielmaran High Road, back on the other side of the Fingerland.”
“Where are we going now?”
“I don’t know. But a man Richielle was holding prisoner told me this was the only way out.” She noticed the look he gave her. “Yes, I trusted him. I don’t think we have a choice.”
“How did you save me? How did you break free?”
Gaultry thought back to the chaos of the barn; the horrible thing she had had to do with the sheep; the ugly scrawny ewe she had been forced to allow inside her body; the desperate, empty sensation she had felt as she had thrown all her Glamour-power into those animals. Worst of all, the hallucinogenic moment when she had looked up at her hands and seen nothing but deformed stumps, something like a sheep’s trotters. “I momentarily became one with the herd. And that,” Gaultry wheezed, her voice hoarse from the running, “is really all the detail that you need to know.”
H
ow long they had been running, Gaultry could not have said, but twilight deepened quickly in these rolling hills. The streambed became
coarser, narrowing, the gravelly flats roughening, becoming interspersed with larger chunks of stone. It was becoming hard to maintain anything like a running pace.
They pulled up by a small pool to take a breather. Tullier bent briefly and scrubbed the sweat and goat blood from his face and hair. “Will she follow us?” he asked, emerging with water streaming on him.
“Of course,” Gaultry said. “Andion’s Ides may be over, but the summer stars will align at the end of the month to give her another chance. Two weeks. We have two weeks to get you safely out of her reach.” She hesitated. “Never let her take you, Tullier. I will do what I can to hold her back. Tielmark needs a King—but this isn’t the way.”
Tullier gave her a sober look. “She cut me before you came, you know.” He touched his throat, revealing a shallow line Gaultry had not noticed. “My blood on that stone—I could feel the Gods watching. Andion, the Great Twins—all of them. The sacrifice would have proved acceptable.”
“Not to me!” Gaultry said fiercely. “The gods accept many things, but it is up to us to choose which of them we will live by!”
At that moment they first heard the clattering. Looking back, they spotted the first goat. A long-haired, bearded billy, running toward them with a goat’s awkward gait but easy balance.
“She’s coming,” Gaultry said.
“We can fight her,” Tullier answered. “Look. I have her knife!” He flourished the
Ein Raku.
The look on Gaultry’s face dampened his enthusiasm. “What? She took all of our weapons. And far better to keep this blade in our own control.”
“It is an evil thing,” Gaultry said.
“Then better in our hands than hers.” His eyes glinted. She could tell he liked the idea of the knife’s power in his hand. Liked the idea that he controlled it. “We’ll have to stop running sometime. We can’t keep this up through the night.”
“Neither can she,” Gaultry said roughly. Now was not the time to discourage anything that might make him stronger, might tip the balance of him surviving or falling prey to the old witch. But the killer in him—that she did not like. “We have to keep going. Even with her magic to help her, we are both of us more than fifty years her junior. Surely we can outrun her.”
They began to move again, but the heart for running had gone from
them both. They had lost the surge of triumphant energy that had first sent them sprinting from Richielle’s sacrifice stones. Not knowing where they were heading made it harder to keep on. One goat came up on them, then another. Finally, eerily, they were surrounded by a bleating pack. A pack that butted against them, maneuvering them away from the riverbed. “If she’s trying to turn our course,” Gaultry gasped, “there must be some hope still that we can elude her.”
Tullier, focused on the ground beneath his feet, did not answer.
Around them, the outlines of the rock slopes softened. Twilight deepened, increasing the difficulty of finding their footing. The river flats contracted as the stream moved into a deepening valley. Gaultry and Tullier were forced to slow and pick their ground more carefully. The goats took this as a chance to hem them in, aggressive.
Then, just as Gaultry was sure they could run no more, they reached the end of their road. The river took one last hairpin turn, and there the ground ended. It was not a long drop—no more than twenty feet, or thirty. The stream fell over in a cascade, dropping into a frothy pool. Gaultry craned and looked sideways at the sheer face of stone. To either side, the cliff face quickly steepened as it moved away from the low V carved by the river. The stone of the cliff—she recognized this stone. They had reached the edge of Haute-Tielmark’s rocky plateau.
“Tullier,” she said. “I recognize this place. This is the border. We’ve come to the western edge of the Fingerlands. That land down there belongs to Bissanty! I think—I think if we can get down there we’ll be safe from Richielle. That must be why she sent the goats—to keep us from crossing over.”
Tullier shook his head. “It won’t work.”
“Maybe so. But at least we have some idea where we are, and maybe down there in the Fingerlands she won’t have the power to send the ground slipping under us.”
Tullier glanced at the goats, milling around them now. “Llara mine, let’s pray you’re right.”
Near the cascade there was a place where a steep ramp of rock hung partway down the drop, overhanging the pool. Tullier, who had the best balance, went first. He tentatively lowered his body over the edge, feet scrabbling to find purchase. Gaultry glanced up the streamway nervously, wishing he would hurry. For all her brave words, she could not really be sure that they would be safe once they had passed into Bissanty lands—
and if they had the bad luck of encountering a Bissanty patrol, they were in no position to fight their way clear of that, armed only with Richielle’s
Ein Raku.
“Hurry up!”
“If you’re in such a hurry, why didn’t you offer to go first?” Tullier snapped. “Faugh. If only my hands were not so slippery—”
As he said it, his eyes widened. Gaultry reached for him, a hair late. He slipped sickeningly downward, fingers scraping ineffectively as he scrabbled in vain to regain his grip.
“Jump out!” Gaultry screamed. “Try to hit the pool! Jump!”
“Oh Llara—!” With that cry, he peeled free, falling backward with his hands outstretched—the worst possible position. It happened so quickly, Gaultry could scarcely understand what she was seeing. Like a cat, the boy twisted in midair and got his feet underneath him—just as he plunged into the little cascade pool.
He spluttered to his feet, swearing. She was so relieved, she didn’t care. In her concern for him, she scrambled downward, half panicked that he had broken bones—only to discover, on her arrival poolside, that the dangerous descent was already behind her.
“You idiot! You could have killed yourself!” She had to shout to be heard over the pounding cascade.
“I didn’t fall on purpose. Trust me there.” Tullier hobbled out of the shallows, shaking water out of his clothes. He managed a shaky grin. “You weren’t too careful coming down yourself. But you’re bloody enough, a quick dip might have been worth it.”
Gaultry self-consciously cupped a handful of water to wipe clean her mouth and chin, still fouled from her fight with the goat-herder. They were down. That was the important thing. “Let’s take cover. It won’t be long before she’s on us.”
Tullier frowned. “It won’t be any use. This wet will leave a trail that any fool could follow.”
There was a clatter of hooves behind them, louder than the cascade of water. Two goats had risked the drop, somehow managing to find a path downward. The rest of the herd ranged themselves in an arc across the cascade’s top, staring down at the exhausted pair with a fixed, ungoatlike intensity.
“There!”
Above the cascade, Richielle came into view. She was running full out, a dark fury, nothing tired or aged about her. The falling darkness did
not even slow her as she ran nimbly along the stones where Gaultry and Tullier had slowed and stumbled.
“Llara’s heart,” Tullier said softly. “How can we fight that?” She was like a great dark omen of doom.
Even knowing that there would be no more running for them tonight, they backed away. Richielle reached the top of the cascade, shoving goats aside to glare down at them. “There is still the end of the month!” she screamed. “I will take you then!”
She made to climb the falls, then paused. With a gesture of her hands, she sent goats scrambling forward as her vanguard. One big billy came down, brown coat with a black head and spine, and then another, beige and white. Four more followed that pair, one falling and landing clumsily on its knees. It got up, bleating in pain, and then another followed it down—this one at a controlled pace, its nimble feet somehow finding stable holds for its hooves—showing Richielle the easiest route. The old witch cackled, triumphant, and stepped confidently to follow it.
A steel-blue flash of power threw her back, singeing her hair. Puzzlement came over the old witch’s face, but she was not deterred. She stepped forward again. Once again, that blue-grey flash, repulsing her.
“What is it?” Tullier said. But the awe in his voice told that he already recognized the color of that magic.
Richielle, abandoning caution, hurled herself forward. If that flash of power had not come again, thrusting her back, she would have gone headlong over the cliff. Beginning to understand, she thrust herself forward in a frenzy, screaming, invoking spells, intoning the names of all the Great Twelve. The goats began to melt uneasily away into the darkness, frightened by those flashes of steely power.

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