Regret (Lady of Toryn Trilogy) (6 page)

Besides,
you’ve already got a man interested in you,
a little voice in her head whispered to her, and
Ashlyn stifled a smile, her cheeks warming as she once again recalled the
passionate kiss that she and Vargo had shared before she’d sneaked out of Toryn
yesterday. It was hard to believe that her feelings had done such a turnaround
regarding the red-haired Spartan- a man who had, three years ago, been her
sworn enemy. But things had changed since Lord Angelo’s defeat. The Spartans
were working for Jackson now, in support of the Free Lands Democracy. And Vargo
had made no secret of his interest in her.

No, if Ashlyn was being honest
with herself, in the grand scheme of things, if one had to suffer rejection at
the hands of Drake Lockhart, then getting kissed senseless by Vargo immediately
afterward was probably the best consolation prize anyone could ask for. She
still wasn’t quite sure how to label her feelings for the assassin, having only
just moved on from ambivalence to genuine affection, but she supposed there was
plenty of time to figure that out after the war was over.

A flash of movement caught
Ashlyn’s eye, and she quickly halted her horse and murmured a command to the
reveal
stane, extinguishing the trail of
fireflies. Drake drew up beside her, staring intently in the direction that
she’d seen the disturbance. The only significant hiding place was a large
cluster of bushes, big enough to hide several men, but a little too obvious for
Ashlyn’s taste.

“It would be very easy for Toryn
ninjas to spring an attack on you right now,” a familiar voice came from behind
them, and Ashlyn relaxed, recognizing Skye’s even tone.

“Not all of them are as stealthy as
you are,” she said, turning to meet the swordsman’s obsidian eyes. He smirked
up at her as he stepped out from behind a tree, but the jerkiness of his
movements as he walked towards her belied the gesture. She could tell he was
angry.

His clothes were torn. The fabric
was too dark to see any stains, but there was dried blood smeared on his arms
and the exposed bits of his torso. Ashlyn swallowed, a lump in her throat. She
knew she had to apologize, but she wasn’t exactly eager to do so.

Skye led his horse out from
behind the bushes they’d been looking at earlier, and mounted up quickly. “Your
father’s army is sure to be regrouping,” he said to Ashlyn. “They’ve lost at
least a quarter of their forces- perhaps more. It’s very likely that they will
relocate, and even more likely that we will lose them if we don’t start
tracking them now. How are you feeling?”

“Fine…thanks to Drake,” Ashlyn
said quietly, and sighed. “Skye, I’m sorry. I thought if I could get in and
challenge my dad, I might stop the war without any further bloodshed…” She
trailed off, uncomfortably aware that this was the same speech she had given
Skye when she’d run away from Cosmea. That hadn’t gone according to plan.

Frustrated, she shrugged and
smiled awkwardly. “I’m not going to apologize any more. I wasn’t thinking, and…circumstances
being what they were last night, I felt I had a better chance of sneaking in
and challenging my dad to a Leadership Duel myself.”

“What circumstances?” Skye
demanded. “You came up with the plan to leave this morning. What changed
between the time I left your house and the moment you decided to sneak out of
Toryn?”

“Nothing.”
Everything.
Blame it on hormones and misguided thoughts of romance.
She’d tried to confess her feelings to Drake and he had summarily refused her,
and even after Vargo had swooped in to save the day, Ashlyn’s heart was
smarting enough that she wanted to avoid traveling with Drake.

Although looking at her current
situation, that plan hadn’t worked out so well either.

“I knew you would come after me,”
she said for Skye’s benefit, “so if something went wrong you would be there to
help. Leaving without you showed poor judgment on my part, but...at the time I
was feeling a little overwhelmed. Emotionally.” She glanced up at Skye again.
“Kou is still alive. The bear that was attacking me- that was him. Did you kill
him?”

Skye, still looking unsatisfied
with her excuses, shook his head. “There’s no way to be sure. I was moving
pretty quickly. Are you sure it was Kou? Getting shot and falling off Na
Michico- surviving that seems unlikely.”

“I don’t know how he survived,”
Ashlyn admitted, “but he did. It was him.” She fidgeted with her reins,
shifting her weight in the saddle. “He’s lying to the soldiers he is leading,
though. They didn’t seem too keen on attacking me once I claimed to be the
Elder Heir. I’m sure they all still think I’m dead.” The only reason that Lord
Li had adopted Kou as his heir- according to Kou, anyway- was because the young
man had claimed to have a “vision” of Ashlyn being killed by a wolf in the
Heavenly City. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the soldiers had all been
told the same story.

“Did you see your father?” Drake
asked, speaking for the first time since Skye had joined them.

Ashlyn shook her head. “Nope. I
was inside the cave, trying to find him, but Kou recognized me.” She paused. “I
did challenge him to a Leadership Duel, but he denied my heritage. I’m not sure
he’s going to follow any of our customs. I mean, this whole time I’ve been
trying to avoid getting anyone else involved, but it’s looking like I’m going
to have to.”

“You’re certainly going to have
to let us help you,” Skye said in a clipped tone. “No more running off. If we’d
gone with you, we might have been able to help you before you were injured.
You’ve got to start thinking like a leader, Ashlyn, and leaders don’t abandon
their followers.”

Ashlyn nodded, lowering her chin
and sneaking a peek at Drake through her eyelashes. Skye was right, of course,
but that didn’t stop her from wanting to blame this entire incident on a
certain vampire and his unpredictable behavior.

“I guess I need to work on my
impulsiveness,” she said, genuinely apologetic and hoping she sounded like it.
“But I’m here now. I think…I think we should track my father’s army and try again.
They’ll be on higher alert now, but it’s still our best chance at getting to my
father and Kou and…well…cutting the head off the snake.” She didn’t like the
thought of killing either one of them, particularly her father, but her options
were becoming limited.

“That’s probably a good idea,”
Skye said. “Would you like to use
reveal
to
show us the way?”

Oops. “Of course,” Ashlyn
answered, offering a weak smile. Well, now he was definitely aware that she had
stolen it three years ago. At least the stane was coming in handy now. Grabbing
her shuriken, she activated the magic and urged her horse towards the glowing
path that sprang up before them.

“Are we planning to capture
Devlyn and Lord Li?” Drake spoke up as his horse fell in behind Ashlyn’s.

“Capture if possible,” Ashlyn
said, and hesitated for just a moment. “If it’s not possible, then we’re…just
going to have to do what we can. The soldiers can’t fight for long without a
leader, so if it comes to that, I am…um, aware that my father might not be taken
alive.” Her heart chilled as she said the words, but she ignored the feeling.
Now was definitely not the time for emotions. The situation with Drake had
already made that exceedingly clear.

As she rode, with Skye flanking
her and Drake lingering further back, she wondered again how Kou had managed to
survive his fall off Na Michico. Ashlyn had no idea where Drake’s bullet had
struck the younger Toryn, but it had clearly been well-aimed enough to have
knocked Kou off the steep cliff and into the roiling ocean below. Kou must have
some experience with healing magic. Unless he’d been desperate enough to fake a
gunshot wound and take his chances in the water, of course. That seemed a
little extreme, even for a man who had falsely professed to be Ashlyn’s younger
brother without a trace of shame or conscience.

She set her jaw at the memory.
Kou’s claim that Lord Li was his father had rocked her world to the core. In a
fit of rage, she had used a sanding stone to remove the tattoo over her left
ankle that signified the Li bloodline and its purity. But after the recent
revelations involving Kou and the man he claimed was his- and her- younger
brother, Tag, Ashlyn realized that she might have been too hasty.

And what about her father? What
if he hadn’t been unfaithful to her mother? Had he truly been driven mad by
shift?
Ashlyn felt no particular ill
effects after having used the magic twice. If she was unaffected, then why was
Lord Li leading an army against his own kingdom? She supposed that the presence
of FLD had discouraged him from coming back to reclaim the city of Toryn, but
there were so many frustratingly unanswered questions lingering in her
thoughts- and that was on top of the total mess of her love life, which up
until two weeks ago had been virtually non-existent.
See, this was why I steered clear of social circles for the last three
years,
she told herself bitterly.
I
seem to attract drama wherever I go.

Chapter 4

Twist

Ashlyn’s eyelids were
drooping, but she was reciting the ninety-one Drago proverbs in her head
repeatedly, doing her best to stay awake in the lulling twilight. Her horse
seemed content to follow Skye’s, plodding along without prompting.

It seemed
anti-climactic, really. All that running and fighting and death-defying earlier,
and now here she was, tagging along after Skye and trying not to nod off. Her
father’s army was on the move, and once they had found the trampled path
telltale of marching soldiers, Ashlyn had put away the
reveal
stane and allowed Skye to take over. Her tracking skills
were good,
but Skye’s were exceptional.

Skye turned then,
twisting in the saddle to look back at her, and Ashlyn bolted upright, trying
really hard to look alert and vigilant.
I
wasn’t sleeping,
she almost said, but thought better of it. “What?” she
asked instead, keeping her voice low.

“I think we’re
close,” Skye said. He halted his horse, turning the animal so that he could
face Ashlyn more easily. “I think it might be best if Drake takes the horses
and keeps some distance away, while you and I see what we can find.” At her
dubious look, he added, “The horses will be too easy to spot. You and I can get
much closer without them.”

In no way did Ashlyn
feel comfortable with giving up her horse, especially after the narrow escape
she and Drake had managed back at the cave, but…she supposed that Skye was
right. “Fine,” she said grudgingly. Skye dismounted, and she followed suit,
meekly following the blond man as he led his horse towards Drake.

“This is
so
lousy,” she muttered as she handed
the reins to the vampire, keeping her eyes averted. She had already experienced
a plethora of emotions over Drake in the last two days and she didn’t feel like
encouraging any errant feelings now.

Skye nodded at her as
he reached up to ensure that his sword was secure in its sheath on his back.
Ashlyn untied the hira shuriken and her sword from the back of her saddle and
strapped them into the makeshift harness she’d made, feeling the reassuring
solidity of the weapons against her fingers. She allowed herself a brief moment
to wonder what had ever become of her favorite bo shuriken, the one that she’d
lost in Storim so many years ago. Supposedly her father had it. If that was
true, she definitely wanted it back.

Skye began to move,
weaving his way through the trees in a quick, agile jog, and Ashlyn ran after
him. They ducked behind trees as they moved, and fell into a slingshot pattern,
with Skye moving forward to secure the first area, and Ashlyn running past him
to the next after receiving the all-clear signal. It was something they’d done
numerous times back when Lord Angelo was still alive, but Ashlyn had forgotten
what an effective tracking partner Skye was. He’d gotten that way from all that
DEMON training, probably, since most non-Toryns didn’t know the first thing
about stealth and sneakiness.

They were moving to
the western side of the island, very close to the beach, and as the trees began
to thin out, Ashlyn became cautious, crouching lower when she moved and seeking
cover more quickly. She glanced around the sparse forest, eyes searching for
threats, but finding none. She turned and motioned to Skye that the way was
clear, and he moved past her, his boots making no sound on the forest floor.

He froze about a
dozen steps ahead of her, and ducked behind a large boulder. Ashlyn stilled,
waiting for a signal. Her gaze caught his. He nodded slightly, confirming that
he’d seen her father’s army, and motioned her closer. Ashlyn peered out from
behind her tree before dashing to him, staying low and silent.

“I see the
stragglers,” Skye whispered to her when she approached. “Is there a route that
will take us to high ground at their flank so we can avoid being seen?”

Ashlyn frowned,
pursing her lips as she tried to remember the layout of the island. “I don’t know,”
she admitted. “It depends on the route they take. There’s some high ground
further up but I doubt they’ll be going through the canyons. It would be too
easy for them to get ambushed.” As she spoke, she realized that the path that
her father’s army was currently on would eventually lead them to Toryn. “Should
we send Drake back to the city?” she asked Skye nervously. “What if they’re
planning an attack?”