All Chapters of Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

AmaraWe didn't leave by dark, the way the lieutenant told us to. We moved at dark... east and north, off the river road, toward a fold of high ground Bram liked.I should have felt the wrongness sooner. But I was tired and I had Sela on my mind... she was slow on the crutch and we'd had to keep the whole column slow to keep her with us, and I'd caught two of the forty looking back at her like she was the reason a hard night would get harder.I should have heard that look for what it was.It started with fire. Ahead of us, on the high ground Bram liked, a line of it going up across the exact fold we were moving toward. Close enough to light our faces. Far enough that it wasn't meant to burn us. It was meant to stop us, to turn us, to make sixty tired people bunch up and pick a new direction in the dark, all at once."Don't turn," Bram said, fast. "It's a hand. They light the fire so you flinch the way they want..."We flinched the way they wanted.Not all of us. The seventeen held. Bu

SeraphineI left my blade at the stake. Bram left his beside it and gave me a look that said he didn't like leaving it any more than I liked him being here. Maren had been right... not alone and Bram was the right not-alone.Rell's camp was the first thing that frightened me, before Rell.It was good. Too good. Corvus held ground by terror and you could see it in his camps... the fear, the waste, the men who'd rather die than report a problem to him. This was a camp run by someone people followed. Watch-fires placed right. Horses picketed where they could move fast. And quiet. Greywater's taken people moved through it doing work, and some of them didn't look like prisoners. That was the worst of it. Some of them looked like they'd found somewhere to be.Rell was at the center fire, and she stood when I came in.She was younger than her reputation and older than her face, lean the way her lieutenant was lean."Seraphine," she said. "Corvus's hand. I wondered if the valley story meant y

AldricSeraphine came back at first light with Bram a step behind her.Alive. That was the first thing in her face. Then: bad."Sela's whole," she said, to all of us, but she said it to Amara. "Fed, mouthing off, working the place already. She fed us the picket line without anyone catching it... east side, set too far out, a gap nobody's minding." A breath. "Rell keeps her word. That's the trouble with her. She's not lying about any of it.""And the trade," Amara said."Eight days. You walk in on your own feet, Sela walks out, even, clean, nobody else touched." Seraphine's jaw worked. "She knew you'd refuse a straight swap. She built the clock so you'd have time to decide it was your idea.""And on the ninth day?""On the ninth day she stops keeping Sela comfortable and starts keeping her useful." Seraphine didn't soften it. I was glad. "Those are Rell's words. She wanted them carried exactly."Zane had gone still. Amara hadn't moved at all. I watched her not move, and I knew."Don't,

AmaraWe ran east because east and east was wrong, and I knew it was wrong.Zane had a hand pressed to his side and blood coming through his fingers and he was keeping up on will alone. Sela was a dead weight between Bram and one of the seventeen, the crutch abandoned somewhere behind us. Aldric ran last, between us and Halsa's people, who were close... I could hear them, ordered even in a chase, that terrible Rell-trained quiet.And the whole time, the weight on the back of my neck got heavier, and then it stopped being weight.It became a hand."Amara." Aldric's voice, and then his hand... in front of me. "Eyes on me. Not east. Me."I dragged my eyes off the dark. It cost me. The hand on my neck tightened when I pulled."It knows me," I said. My voice came out wrong. "Aldric, it knows me. It's not new. It's the same... it's what was in him, it's the cold I carried, it's been the same thing all three times and now it doesn't have him to wear and it wants...""It wants you," Maren sai

SeraphineI knew his walk... every footfall, the particular weight he put on his right side from an old wound he'd never let heal clean. I knew it well enough that when the thing came across the dead ground toward our fires, I knew, before Bram said the name, that it had his walk wrong.That was the worst of it. Not that it was him. That it was him edited. The weight off the right side, gone. The temper that lived in his shoulders, gone. Somebody had taken the body I'd watched die and smoothed out everything that had made it a person."Stay behind the fires," I said, to my own people and to Rell's. "It doesn't like fire. It came at us through the cold. The cold is the weapon. The body's just the hand."It stopped at the edge of the firelight, where the warm pushed back against it, and it looked at the ring full of us with Corvus's eyes gone patient, and it found Amara in the middle."You closed the door on the part of me that wore him," it said, in the voice with the heat taken out. "