CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
RAFE
I was twelve when Sven began teaching me to track. I had complained bitterly, preferring to spend my time training with a sword or learning maneuvers on the back of a horse. I couldn’t be bothered with the quiet, careful work of a tracker. I was a soldier. Or I was going to be one.
He had shoved me, sending me sprawling to the ground. The enemy doesn’t always march in great armies, boy, he said with contempt. Sometimes the enemy is just one person who will bring down a kingdom. He had glared down his long, sharp nose at me, daring me to get up. Shall I tell your father you want to be that person who fails the kingdom because you only want to swing a long stick of metal? I scowled but shook my head. I didn’t want to be that person. I had been tossed aside early, given over to Sven to make a man of me. He had zealously attended to his job. He gave me a hand up, and I listened.
Sven knew the ways of the wilderness, the ways of wind, soil, rock, and grass, and how to read the tracks the enemy left behind. The clues were in more than just the litter of fires or excrement. In more than blood dripped onto soil. In more than footprints or horse tracks. You were lucky if you had those. There were also trampled weeds. A snapped twig. The barest bit of shine across vegetation that had been brushed by a shoulder or horse. Even rocky ground left clues. A pebble crushed into the soil. Gravel mounded in irregular patterns. A ridge of dirt caused by a newly pitched stone. Dust tossed by hoof and wind where it didn’t belong. But right now I pondered his long-ago instruction, rain is both friend and foe, depending on when it comes.
Sven had been able to garner only a modest squad of three men on such short notice, especially since Dalbreck was amassing a show of force at the Azentil outpost. They had caught up with me on the third day. They’d made better time than I did, because I left clear signs for them to follow, sometimes stacking stones they could easily spot from a distance when the ground became rocky.
I guessed we were two full days behind Lia now. Maybe more. The tracks were becoming thinner. We’d had to spread out or backtrack several times when we lost the trail, but we had found it again just outside the City of Dark Magic. As we got closer, we saw that the tracks had been obliterated by dozens of horses traveling in the opposite direction. A patrol, but whose?
We had picked the tracks up again down a narrow trail between towering walls. At the end of the trail was a ruin, where I now sat huddled. I wanted to break something, but everything around me was already broken. I stared at a bloody toe print on a slab of marble near a pool, and I listened to the fierce pounding of rain, every drop of which was foe, not friend.
Sven sat on a tumbled pillar across from me. He shook his head, looking at his feet. I knew the reality of trying to pick up tracks that were at least two days ahead of us. It might be a hundred miles or more before we found fresh tracks. If we did at all. The torrential rains would have washed away everything between us and them.
“Your father will have my head for this,” Sven said.
“And one day I’ll be king, and I’d have your head for not helping me.”
“I’d be a very old man by then.”
“My father’s already a very old man. It might be sooner than you think.”
“Search for a sign again?”
“Which direction, Sven? From this point, there are a dozen routes they could have taken.”
“We could split up.”
“And that would cover about half the possibilities and leave us one man against five if we happened to pick the right one.”
I knew Sven wasn’t seriously suggesting any of these things, and he wasn’t worried about my father or his neck. He was pushing me to make the final hard decision.
“Maybe it’s time to admit she’s out of our grasp?”
“Stop goading me, Sven.”
“Then make your decision and live by it.”
I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her in the hands of barbarians for so long, but it was all I could do. “Let’s ride. We’ll get to Venda before they do.”