Another truth.
I suck in a breath, shocked that I’ve been able to push him into offering so much. “Impossible. You cannot make that happen.”
His smile graces the space above his trimmed ebony beard as he spreads his arms, pressing his hands flat on the desk in a way that widens his shoulders. “I have the power to decide a hunter’s bounty. As high lord, I oversee King Aodren’s lands. If your cottage is what you want, then I can give that to you.”
I’ll be able to keep everything Papa left, not just the dagger. I would have a home. Papa’s home. My home.
My life and my land for Cohen—?the offer sickens me as much as it thrills me.
Can I really hunt down my only friend? But that’s just it. He isn’t my friend.
“The country has been disgraced by Saul’s murder. And you’ve lost a father,” he says, drawing my attention back to Papa. “It may be an unexpected payout, but as you said, you’ll have no home to which to return. The land is nothing to the king. Mend Malam’s pride and get justice for your father, and the cottage will be yours when you return.”
Papa was all I had left. My decision is for him. I press my hand to the pain beneath my sternum.
“I’ll go.”
My washed hair is braided and tucked beneath a boy’s cap, which the captain provided, along with trousers and a tunic. Captain Omar informed me I’d be traveling as a boy to draw less notice. Fine with me. Trousers are more comfortable than skirts and, in this aspect, being small-breasted has its benefits.
“Shackle her,” the captain tells Tomas as he enters my cell.
I scurry back. “Manacles weren’t part of the deal.”
“Would you rather the noose?” Tomas sidles around me, pulling my wrists into the iron cuffs. I shake my head and bite back an alarmed squeak when his fingers dig into my arm where it’s tender and bruised from the earlier scuffle.
“If you canna find Mackay, the cap’n won’t let you go free.” Tomas’s nasally voice drips with distaste. “Not a daughter of a Shaerdanian.”
“Release her, Tomas,” the captain clips.
The guard obeys by shoving me out of the cell so that I trip forward, stumbling into Leif’s barrier of a body.
Captain Omar tells Leif to escort me out of the dungeon. Just before we reach the door, I hear the captain say, “Tomas, do not overstep your bounds. Next time I’ll withhold your food rations. Today you’ll tend the horses . . .”
I’m unable to catch the remainder of the conversation once the dungeon door closes behind us. But the little I heard is a reminder not to disobey the captain.
Papa taught that a good tracker always knows the lay of the land. East of here, Malam juts up in jagged, monstrous peaks that stay white-capped all year despite the baking summer. The mountain ridge spans into Kolontia, the northern country where snow and ice rule. Papa told me some of their people live in the crystal caves that tunnel under the northern ridge, while others brave the salty frozen bite of the coast that wraps two-thirds of the country.
Running from the north, the Malam Mountains curve in a southwest sickle to border the Southlands. There, the Akaria Desert’s sand dunes ebb and flow like a crawling ocean, and a gorge scars the land as deep as the mountains stand tall.
To the east, the Ever Woods run into the Bloodwood Forest, which carpets the mountains until they crumble into knolls and valleys. With Papa, I traveled along many of the ribboning rivers winding from the mountain glaciers to feed the lowland farmlands. From there, hills of fir, hemlock, and spruce roll into Shaerdan. It’s a lush country of suffocating emerald growth. It’s rumored that in Shaerdan the rain magically falls without a cloud in the sky.
As we ride, I’m shackled and sharing a horse with Leif. He doesn’t wrap a suffocating arm around me like on our last ride together. Still, the uncomfortable lack of space between us is even more apparent when the road rises and falls. Each time I lean forward, Leif pulls me back against his chest. If the captain doesn’t hang me, this ride may be torture enough to kill me.
We leave Brentyn, where the royal city is nestled like an animal burrowed for winter in a blanket of green. After traveling at a thundering pace on the main road, we cut off for the southwest mountains, to a route Papa and I traveled often. Only traitors and criminals trying to flee Malam hazard this pass. The terrain is dangerous, the path steep and sometimes slippery.
We stop when we reach the summit, where the path is narrow and overgrown with creeping ground cover.
“Mackay was sighted here two days ago,” Captain Omar says. He points west. “I need to know if he’s headed toward Lord Devlin’s fief.”