Clock laughed. ‘You’ve got too much of the south in you, boy. Afraid of a little cold and hardship.’ He pointed to the long train of travellers ahead. ‘We’re hardy people – practically mountain-bred ourselves. We drink the cold and shit out warm sunshine. We’re as sure-footed as mountain goats. The hills are no threat to us.’
He was wrong. Not two hours later, as the sun was starting to set, the woman I’d helped earlier stumbled as she passed the edge of a fifteen-foot drop. She recovered her balance, but her daughter, who’d immediately grabbed her mother to keep her from falling off the path, slipped on the loose shale and slid down into the gap below.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Broken Bones
‘Tillia!’ the woman screamed over and over again as I ran to the edge and looked down. It wasn’t a long way down, only about fifteen feet to a shallow ledge, but below that was another fifty-foot drop that would most certainly be lethal. The child was lying unmoving at the edge. ‘Someone give us some rope,’ I called out to the villagers – surely someone must have rope amongst their supplies? But everyone passed us by, shaking their heads and trying hard not to meet our eyes. A couple of people pressed a piece of fruit or hard cheese into my hand as they shuffled onwards, but that was it.
‘What in all the hells are they doing?’ I asked Clock, who was patting the young mother’s shoulder.
‘Walking on,’ he replied, the sanguine humour gone from his voice. ‘They’ve got families too, and they can’t risk getting hurt. They’re leaving the food so Yelena here can stay with her girl a while longer.’
‘They’d abandon her to die here?’
‘It’s cold on the mountains, boy. You said it yourself.’
‘So much for your northern sunshine,’ Brasti said.
I stood up and shouted to the villagers ahead of us, ‘Walk on if you want, but one of you must have a length of strong rope. Just leave us that.’
None of them acknowledged my words, or looked back.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ Clock said. ‘A piece of rope might be the one thing that keeps them alive on this journey. Anyroad, there’s nowhere to tie it. They won’t want to see it slide down the mountain for no purpose.’
Kest, Morn and Brasti joined me at the edge. ‘It’s only fifteen feet,’ I said.
‘Might as well be fifteen miles,’ Morn replied. ‘You’d have a devil of a time getting back up, even if we did have rope – which we don’t.’
I looked at Kest, but he was shaking his head. ‘Falcio, don’t.’
He was right, of course. If we did what he knew I was thinking, any pretence of being deserter-soldiers would be well and truly gone. I wasn’t worried about the mother and child, but the old man could rat us out as soon as we reached the border. ‘Go ahead with the others,’ I said to him, my tone grim. ‘I’ll wait it out with Yelena here. I don’t think it’ll be long now.’
I looked back down at the overhang. The child’s leg was bent at an impossible angle and blood was dripping from her forehead. She was making her way slowly, painfully, towards the edge.
‘Tillia, no!’ her mother screamed.
‘Girl, stop!’ I shouted. ‘Just stop.’
‘It’s our way,’ the old man said softly. ‘The girl knows she’s just holding her momma here. It’s better this way. Our way.’
I growled, ‘Shut your fucking mouth—’ but Kest laid a hand on my shoulder.
‘Falcio, stop. This isn’t helping,’ he said, but I shrugged him off.
I looked into Clock’s eyes. ‘I’m going to save that little girl now. If you utter one word of what happens here I’ll beat you blind, so no one will believe what you claim you saw. The Gods themselves won’t be able to save you if I find out you had a rope in your pack.’
I let him go and turned to Yelena. ‘Call to your daughter – keep her from going over the edge.’ I opened my pack and pulled my coat out. ‘Get your coats out,’ I told the others.
The old man’s eyes widened. ‘Greatcoats . . .’ he whispered.
‘Damned fool,’ Morn muttered. ‘Worst bloody spy I ever met.’
We tied three of the coats together, connecting the sleeve buckles from one to the other for added protection. Kest was about to start adding my coat when I stopped him.
‘It won’t be long enough with just three,’ he said.
I took the coat and put it on. ‘You won’t be able to pull me up – the leather will get caught on the rocks – so I’ll need to climb, which will take both hands, leaving me with no way to carry the girl.’
‘You’re going to use the coat to carry her?’ He looked over the edge. ‘It’s hard going, and slippery. The odds of falling are—’
‘Not helpful,’ I said, and motioned for Brasti and Morn to hold one end of our makeshift rope while I began to ease myself down.
The descent was awkward. The coats are a tremendous advantage in battle, but turns out, the stiff leather and bone plates that keep us safe from edged weapons also make the coats pretty useless as a rope. I was gripping, white-knuckled, as they lowered me a few inches at a time, and by the time I reached the bottom the muscles in my hands were already exhausted, shaking from the effort.
Thankfully, Tillia had passed out from the pain. It was already getting dark and there was nothing there I could use to splint the leg, but if I didn’t get her back up to the path it wouldn’t matter anyway. I pulled out my black salve – it wouldn’t knit bone, but it would help the pain and ward off infection for now – but as I carefully spread it on her skin, Tillia’s eyes opened and when she saw me kneeling over her in my coat she started screaming and tried to push herself over the ledge.
‘It’s all right!’ I cried, and grabbed her. ‘It’s okay, I’m going to get you back to your mother.’
The girl didn’t stop trying to get away from me until she passed out again. I took off my coat and carefully eased her onto it, then buttoned it around her and tied the sleeves together to create a makeshift sling: an awkward thing, but better than nothing. I stuck my head through the loop formed by the sleeves and lifted her up. She weighed almost nothing, and as I reached for the coat-rope and began the slow, dangerous process of working my way back up the side of the cliff, I felt like I were carrying a delicate glass figurine, one that would shatter at the slightest impact.
Fifteen feet isn’t a great distance, but everything was conspiring against me. This would have been a hard enough slog unencumbered, but carrying the girl made it murderously difficult. The cold air made it hard to feel my hands, which were constantly slipping on the smooth leather. It was almost impossible to find anything resembling a secure foothold on the mountain, an unhelpful mix of sharp, jagged rocks and fragile shale that meant I couldn’t use my climbing spikes either. The others couldn’t just pull me up in case the coat-rope got caught on the overhang.
Four feet from the top, my hands stopped responding completely.
Through sheer force of will I managed to keep them clenched enough to stop me slipping back down, but I couldn’t seem to make my fingers work any more.
‘Nearly there,’ Brasti called down. ‘What are you waiting for?’