“A patrol,” Achamian murmurs, pulling himself to his rump. He cautiously raises his eyes above the forest floor, renews his vigil.
She has to roll sideways onto her hands and knees, so onerous is her belly. She climbs to his side. The boy simply sits behind them, perfectly impassive, his knees caught in the circle of his arms.
“So you think there’s more?” she asks the old Wizard.
“Of course there is,” he says, peering. “They resemble your idiocy that way.”
Her apprehension is slapped from her. She is a heartbeat in understanding.
“What? I should have left him?”
“That boy has survived more than you or I can scarce dream.”
“And he is still a child! He’s—”
“Not so helpless as the one you carry in your womb!” the old Wizard cries, turning on her with sudden savagery. She shrinks from the display, understanding instantly and utterly that he speaks out of an outrage borne of terror … The terror belonging to fathers.
She makes to speak—just what, she does not know—but another screech, strangely piteous, yowls among the bowers from places near and unknown. Another Sranc.
They both resume their anxious peering, and despite their straits, she cannot but think that this is the way with husbands and wives. A part of her even grins …
It is proper, she thinks, that they should be married in a grave.
“Those Sranc are called Exscursi,” Achamian says grimly. “Their scent fills their wild cousins with lunatic terror, clearing the land. The Consult uses them to secure safe passage for their human allies …” He glances at her, speaking this last, and something in her expression ignites a furious scowl.
“What are you smiling about?”
“You are a dear old fool,” she hears herself whisper.
“You don’t understand,” he cries. “Somewhere … out there …”—he points toward the south, to the throng and pillared deep of forest obscuring forest—“lies the People in War in sum … An entire host of Scylvendi!”
“I do understand,” she replies, staring into his eyes as if trying to lean into his irritable old soul … Reassure him. Even still, he refuses to trust what was happening.
“You do? Then you understand this means it’s really happening! The Second Apocalypse is really hap—”
The boy is upon them, hands whole and crabbed hard upon each of their shoulders, warning them to silence. Breathless they peer across the trampled humus and debris. The sound of a pony snorting jolts her—for some reason she had assumed the boy had heard one of the Sranc.
Peering through the chaotic thatch of their blind, the three of them watch as another Scylvendi horseman, apparently alone, rides into view, sinking into a depression then climbing the swale nearest to them … and stopping …
She cannot hear it yet, but all the south seems to shiver with teeming portent.
The People of War in sum …
The man almost seems to sniff the air. There is a brutality to him, the odour of an ignorant race, of souls too simple to countenance nuance or doubt. His arms are bared like the other’s, but nowhere near so many scars stripe their length. A looseness in the skin about the crotch of his armpit reveals his age, but little else. Blue paint adorns his face, as pale as his eyes. Fetishes dangle from his bridle and saddle, what look like desiccate mice strung by their tails. His pony paws at the leaves and loam. Like someone hunting something glimpsed, he rakes the surrounding forest depths with his glacial gaze. There is an alacrity to his eyes, something reminiscent of a weasel’s nose …
Unerringly, it seems, his look settles upon their little pit.
No one so much as blinks. The Princess-Imperial’s heart drops the length of her spine.
He is one of the Few.
Daylight dwindles, draining at a pace that matches their anxious, arboreal flight. She leads despite the late stage of her term. Just behind her, the old Wizard tramps in his anarchic way, looking for all the world like an old hermit, nimble and mad. The boy trots effortlessly in the rear, alternately peering from side to side, probing the greenery that screens their flanks.
They do not talk. The barking of distant Sranc is all they can hear above their breathing. Suddenly it has become all too familiar, fleeing from wilderness into wilderness. The premonition of disaster about the neck and shoulders. The prick in every swallow. The way the birches close the curtains on the environs surrounding, allowing fear to populate them.
They continue huffing and trotting until dusk and darkness reduces all distances to ink and wool. The decision to break for the night comes as a knuckle in the landscape: a balding dome rising to the waist of the encircling trees.
Achamian leans gasping against his knees upon the summit. “He saw us,” he says, peering into nocturnal confusion. She cannot imagine what he hopes to see: the forest is little more than tangled hair and smeared charcoal to her eyes.