Chapter 5

Wren's POV

Briar caught the gasp before it got out and pressed her lips together, with a glance at the weaver's wife.

"Back?" she breathed. "My lady, that's the one place in the kingdom—"

"It's the last place they'll look."

The sergeants at the barracks used to tell new recruits that when you're hunted, you run toward the hunter's back. Grandfather had laughed about it over supper once, and I hadn't thought of it in years. The Luna had chosen the Lakelands for me. She had announced it in front of the elders and the whole hall, with silver and riders. If anyone was waiting for me, they would be waiting there.

"And before anything else," I said, "I have to be rid of this."

My hand had gone to my belly without my telling it to. Briar looked at it and didn't argue. A woman with a swelling belly, and then a pup on her hip, couldn't hide anywhere for long, and whoever had fathered this one had been put in that bed by Sera.

She squeezed my fingers. "Where you go, I go."

We reached Fennick's Cross at dusk to change horses. The guard swung down and shouted that the coach left in a quarter hour and waited for nobody.

"My lady's sick from the road," Briar called up to him, all smiles. "Just a breath of air. We won't go a step past the yard."

I let her help me down and leaned on her, one hand pressed to my belly. It wasn't all pretending. We walked to the end of the yard and back, and when the guard blew his horn I put my foot on the step. The smell inside the closed coach met me, wet wool and onions and someone's pipe, and I turned my head and was sick over the step.

"Oh, you poor thing." The weaver's wife leaned out to look at me. "You're carrying, aren't you?"

"Four months," Briar said, and her voice wobbled very convincingly. "We're going to her people in the Lakelands, and she's been like this since Silverkeep."

An old woman with a basket on her knees clicked her tongue. "Over Corran's Gap, in this, with her that thin? She'll lose it before the top of the pass, mark me."

"The old mother's right," said the wool trader. "You don't look like folk who have to ride the mail. Stop the night at the inn and take a carrier's cart in the morning. It's slower, but it won't shake her to pieces."

"The inn's clean here," the weaver's wife added. "One night's rest, love. It costs you nothing."

Briar looked at me. I leaned on her shoulder as if I hadn't the strength to answer and gave the smallest nod.

"Thank you," Briar told them, close to tears. "All of you. We'll stop here tonight."

The guard looked at my gray face and decided he didn't want a sick woman in his coach over the mountains. "Get your bundle down, then, and be quick about it."

We stood in the yard and watched the south mail roll out under its lamps and climb the road into the hills, until the lamps were gone.

Then we were alone. I straightened up. My stomach still ached, but my head was clear.

"Find out who's going north tomorrow," I said. "Pay whatever they ask."

* * *

We came back into Silverkeep the next evening on a salt carter's wagon, sitting on the sacks with our hoods up. The market inside the Southgate was louder than it should have been for that hour. People stood in knots by the well, talking with their heads together.

"Corran's Gap," the carter said over his shoulder, before we could ask. He had heard it at the gate. "Last night. Rogues, they're saying. Hit the south mail at the top of the pass and tore it apart, horses and all. Not a soul left breathing."

Briar's hand clamped on my arm.

A fishwife by the wheel took it up. "They found what was left. Not enough to tell who was who."

"Rogues, this far south?" someone said.

"They're saying the Duskmere heir's mate was on it. The rejected one. Barren, poor thing, so she gave him up and went home to her mother's people."

"Duskmere's sent its own trackers up the pass to look for her, and her not even theirs anymore."

"That's the Luna for you. A good heart."

"Unlucky girl," the fishwife said. "Some aren't born to be lucky."

I sat on the salt sacks and couldn't feel my hands.

Rogues didn't come this far south. And rogues didn't wait at the top of a pass for one particular coach. Someone had paid them, or paid men to look like them, and I knew whose silver it had been. The Luna's cart had set me down in the very yard the south mail left from. If I had kept my seat at Fennick's Cross, I would be lying on the mountain road with the rest of them.

I thought of the wool trader, and the weaver's wife who said the inn was clean, and the old woman with her basket who told me I would lose the pup before the pass. They had been kind to me, and they had died on the road that was meant for me.

Briar was shaking. I pulled my hood lower.

"Come on," I said, barely loud enough for her. "Not here."

* * *

Four days later the gate magistrate posted the names of the dead from the south mail. Mine was there, with Briar's beneath it. Body not recovered. Presumed lost.

Duskmere announced that although I had been released, the Luna could not bear to send me to the Moon without rites. She kept the vigil herself at the temple, in plain gray, beside an empty coffin with my name cut into its lid. Half of Silverkeep came to watch her do it, and they said there had never been a kinder Luna.

By then Briar and I were in Little Fallow, an hour's walk beyond the North Gate, in the back room of a soldier's widow called Old Hester. She had lost a son in the Ashlands and asked us no questions.

On the eighteenth day of spring, the whole village ran out to the north road at the sound of horns.

I shouldn't have gone. I went anyway, with my hood up and Briar's hand locked around my wrist, and stood behind the miller's wife at the back of the crowd.

The Ashlands army came down the road four abreast, dust to the knees, banners gray with three years of weather. At the head of the column rode Adrian.

He was broader than I remembered, and browner, with a scar through one eyebrow that hadn't been there at the moonstone. He looked tired. He looked straight over the heads of the crowd at the walls of Silverkeep and never once at the faces lining his road.

Briar's grip tightened until it hurt. I didn't move.

At the bridge below the village, a second party waited across the road, a dozen riders in royal black with the King's silver moon on their saddlecloths. The man at the front sat his tall gray horse without moving while the whole army came down to him.

"Who's that?" Briar whispered.

The miller's wife turned, delighted to know. "That's Prince Evander himself. The King sent him out to bring the heir home."