If I were fleeing the Six Duchies with captives and a troop of Chalcedean mercenaries, it was the last route I would take. The Fool’s words came back to me. He had insisted I would not be able to find them, that the only way to regain my daughter was to go directly to where they must be taking her. I took another pinch of the carris seed, crushed it between my teeth, and rode on. It was sweet in my mouth, a tangy, heady taste, and in a moment I felt the surge of both energy and clarity it always gave.
The likeliest unlikeliest, the likeliest unlikeliest drummed in my head, the words keeping rhythm with Fleeter’s hooves. I could continue on this highway all the way to Salter’s Deep. If I saw nothing along the way, then I could join the Ringhill Guard and wait near the captured ship. Or once there I could work my way back along a less used route and hope to be lucky. Or investigate some of the back roads. I rode on. I passed one diverging road. The next one, I decided. I’d take the next one and follow it.
I heard a sudden caw overhead. I looked up and saw a crow, wings spread, sliding down the sky toward me. Suddenly it was Motley and I braced myself for her to land. Instead she swept past me in a wide circle. “Red snow!” she called suddenly and clearly to me. “Red snow!”
I watched her as she circled again and then veered away. I pulled Fleeter in. What did she mean? Did she want me to follow her? There was no road, only an open field and beyond it a sparse wood of birch and a few evergreens that soon thickened into true forest. I watched her as she glided away, then tilted her wings and beat them hard to come back to me. I stood in my stirrups. “Motley!” I called and offered her my forearm. Instead, she swept past me so low that Fleeter shied from her passage.
“Stupid!” the crow shouted at me. “Stupid Fitz! Red snow. Red snow!”
I reined Fleeter away from the road. We follow her, I told the horse.
I don’t like her.
We follow her, I insisted, and Fleeter conceded her will to mine. It was not pleasant for her. We left the packed and level road, pushed through a prickly hedgerow, and entered the farmer’s field. The snow here was untrodden, and the frozen ground uneven beneath the windblown snow. Our pace inevitably slowed just as I wished that we could gallop. But a lame horse would be even slower. I tried to contain my impatience.
The crow flew away from me, into the shelter of the trees. We moved steadily toward where she had vanished. A short time later she looped back to us, then circled away again. This time she seemed content that we were following her and called no insults.
And there we intersected a trail: not a road, merely an open space that left the field and wound into the scant forest. Perhaps a woodcutter had made it. It could be a cattle-track that led to water. I looked back along it. Had it been used recently? It was hard to say. Were there deeper hollows under the blown and polished snow? We turned and followed it.
When we reached the outskirts of the birch forest, I saw what I could not have seen from the road. The white horse had seemed but another mound of snow in the distance. I did not see the fallen rider until I was almost beside the fur-clad body. And only the crow, looking down from above, could have seen the trail of melted red-and-pink snow that led back into the forest.
The horse was clearly dead, its eyes open and frost outlining the whiskers on its muzzle and coating its out-thrust tongue. Droplets of blood had frozen around its mouth. An arrow stood out of its chest, just behind its foreleg. A good lung shot but not one that had penetrated both lungs. I knew that if I cut the animal open, I would find its body cavity full of blood. There was no saddle on the horse, only a halter. The rider had fled in haste, perhaps. I pulled in Fleeter despite her distaste for the scene and dismounted. The body that lay beyond the horse was too large to be Bee, I told myself as I floundered through the snow toward it. The hair that showed beneath the white fur cap was the right color, but it could not be Bee, it could not, and when I reached her and turned her over, it was not. The pale youngster I revealed was as dead as her horse. The front of her furs was scarlet. Probably an arrow, one that had gone right through her. And she was a White or at least a part-White. She had lived for a short time after she’d fallen facedown in the snow. Frost had formed heavily around her mouth from her last breaths, and her cloudy blue eyes looked at me through ice. I let her fall back into the snow.
I could not get my breath for the shuddering of my heart. “Bee. Where are you?” My words were not even a whisper for I had no air to push them. I wanted to run back down the blood-trail shouting her name. I wanted to mount Fleeter and gallop there as swiftly as possible. I wanted to use my Skill to scream to the sky that I needed help, that I needed everyone in the Six Duchies to come and help me save my child, but I forced myself to stand, sweating and trembling, and do nothing until that fit of reckless urgency had passed. Then I went to my horse.
But as I lifted my foot for the stirrup, Fleeter sank to her front knees. Tired. So tired. She shuddered down, her hind legs folding under her. So tired.