I shrugged, cutting another piece of apple. “You two talk louder than you realize.”
Shared accusatory glares between them. Proud, arrogant, cruel. I’d been taking their measure this fortnight. “Unless you want to risk the other courts having time to rally and intercepting you before you can cross to the strait, I’d pick this one.”
Brannagh rolled her eyes.
I went on, rambling and bored, “But what do I know? You two have squatted on a little island for five hundred years. Clearly you know more about Prythian and moving armies than me.”
Brannagh hissed, “This is not about armies, so I will trust you to keep that mouth shut until we have use for you.”
I snorted. “You mean to tell me all of this nonsense hasn’t been to find a place to break through the wall and use the Cauldron to also transport the mass of your armies here?”
She laughed, swinging her dark curtain of hair over a shoulder. “The Cauldron is not for transporting grunt armies. It is for remaking worlds. It is for bringing down this hideous wall and reclaiming what we were.”
I merely crossed my legs. “I’d think that with an army of ten thousand you wouldn’t need any magical objects to do your dirty work.”
“Our army is ten times that, girl,” Brannagh sneered. “And twice that number if you count our allies in Vallahan, Montesere, and Rask.”
Two hundred thousand. Mother save us.
“You’ve certainly been busy all these years.” I surveyed them, utterly nonplussed. “Why not strike when Amarantha had the island?”
“The king had not yet found the Cauldron, despite years of searching. It served his purposes to let her be an experiment for how we might break these people. And served as good motivation for our allies on the continent to join us, knowing what would await them.”
I finished off my apple and chucked the core into the woods. They watched it fly like two hounds tracking a pheasant.
“So they’re all going to converge here? I’m supposed to play hostess to so many soldiers?”
“Our own force will take care of Prythian before uniting with the others. Our commanders are preparing for it as we speak.”
“You must think you stand a shot at losing if you’re bothering to use the Cauldron to help you win.”
“The Cauldron is victory. It will wipe this world clean again.”
I lifted my brows in irreverent cynicism. “And you need this exact spot to unleash it?”
“This exact spot,” Dagdan said, a hand on the hilt of his sword, “exists because a person or object of mighty power passed through it. The Cauldron will study the work they’ve already done—and magnify it until the wall collapses entirely. It is a careful, complex process, and one I doubt your mortal mind can grasp.”
“Probably. Though this mortal mind did manage to solve Amarantha’s riddle—and destroy her.”
Brannagh merely turned back to the wall. “Why do you think Hybern let her live for so long in these lands? Better to have someone else do his dirty work.”
I had what I needed.
Tamlin and Jurian were still off hunting, the royals were preoccupied, and I’d sent the sentries to fetch me more water, claiming that some of my bruises still ached and I wanted to make a poultice for them.
They’d looked positively murderous at that. Not at me—but at who had given me those bruises. Who had picked Ianthe over them—and Hybern over their honor and people.
I’d brought three packs, but I’d only need one. The one I’d carefully repacked with Alis’s new supplies, now tucked beside everything I’d anticipated needing to get clear of them and go. The one I’d brought with me on every trip out to the wall, just in case. And now …
I had numbers, I had a purpose, I had a specific location, and the names of foreign territories.
But more than that, I had a people who had lost faith in their High Priestess. I had sentries who were beginning to rebel against their High Lord. And as a result of those things, I had Hybern royals doubting the strength of their allies here. I’d primed this court to fall. Not from outside forces—but its own internal warring.
And I had to be clear of it before it happened. Before the last sliver of my plan fell into place.
The party would return without me. And to maintain that illusion of strength, Tamlin and Ianthe would lie about it—where I’d gone.
And perhaps a day or two after that, one of these sentries would reveal the news, a carefully sprung trap that I’d coiled into his mind like one of my snares.
I’d fled for my life—after being nearly killed by the Hybern prince and princess. I’d planted images in his head of my brutalized body, the markings consistent with what Dagdan and Brannagh had already revealed to be their style. He’d describe them in detail—describe how he helped me get away before it was too late. How I ran for my life when Tamlin and Ianthe refused to intervene, to risk their alliance with Hybern.
And when the sentry revealed the truth, no longer able to stomach keeping quiet when he saw how my sorry fate was concealed by Tamlin and Ianthe, just as Tamlin had sided with Ianthe the day he’d flogged that sentry …
When he described what Hybern had done to me, their Cursebreaker, their newly anointed Cauldron-blessed, before I’d fled for my life …
There would be no further alliance. For there would be no sentry or denizen of this court who would stand with Tamlin or Ianthe after this. After me.
I ducked into my tent to grab my pack, my steps light and swift. Listening, barely breathing, I scanned the camp, the woods.
A few seconds extra had me snatching Tamlin’s bandolier of knives from where he’d left them inside his tent. They’d get in the way while using a bow and arrow, he’d explained that morning.
Their weight was considerable as I slung it across my chest. Illyrian fighting knives.
Home. I was going home.
I didn’t bother to look back at that camp as I slipped into the northern tree line. If I winnowed without stopping between leaps, I’d be at the foothills in an hour—and would vanish through one of the caves not long after that.
I made it about a hundred yards into the cover of the trees before I halted.
I heard Lucien first.
“Back off.”
A low female laugh.
Everything in me went still and cold at that sound. I’d heard it once before—in Rhysand’s memory.
Keep going. They were distracted, horrible as it was.
Keep going, keep going, keep going.
“I thought you’d seek me out after the Rite,” Ianthe purred. They couldn’t be more than thirty feet through the trees. Far enough away not to hear my presence, if I was quiet enough.
“I was obligated to perform the Rite,” Lucien snapped. “That night wasn’t the product of desire, believe me.”
“We had fun, you and I.”
“I’m a mated male now.”
Every second was the ringing of my death knell. I’d primed everything to fall; I’d long since stopped feeling any sort of guilt or doubt about my plan. Not with Alis now safely away.