by Gwynn White
Axel doubted that even his raider wife had what it took to avoid defeat.
His boots crunched over loose shale as he strode toward a three-foot-wide triangular ice crystal, jutting out over a twenty-foot ravine in the mine. He stopped next to the rock and listened for sounds.
All he could discern was the river tumbling some thirty feet below him. Convinced he was alone, he slung his rifle across his back and pulled two rappelling lines, a couple of pitons, and a small hammer from his pack. He lay down on the ice crystal with his torso and arms hanging over the edge.
Arms straining, he fumbled under the stone where it sunk into the bedrock. He carefully hammered in two pitons: one for him and one for Anna. If Lynx found them, she and Clay would use them, too. This part of the job done, he scrambled back to his feet and eased behind a rock to hide until Lynx, Clay, and Anna arrived.
With time to kill, his mind circled back to the thoughts that kept him awake most nights, long after Lynx fell into a restless sleep in the bedroll they shared in their cave. Even during the day, when he went about alliance business, these concerns never left him.
What to do about Nicholas? Or as Lynx would have it, Talon, Axel’s stepson, who also happened to be the Son of Prophecy.
Some would say their raging argument about the boy was moot because they were still to find Nicholas, but Axel believed in being prepared. Especially since his son had given them a possible clue to his whereabouts: Nicholas had thought about a cold room in a slaughterhouse.
It was a slim lead, given that there were probably thousands of slaughterhouses in the empire, but Axel could not ignore it. The slaughterhouse had to be housed in an abandoned building; otherwise, the workers would have found Nicholas. Lukan and Felix would never risk that.
Axel shifted position behind his rock. Privy to Nicholas’s thoughts, Axel had heard Nicholas wonder why he hadn’t come. Nicholas didn’t think that his most loyal allies were doing everything in their power to rescue him.
Axel swore under his breath. He had sent operatives into Cian to find Nicholas’s slaughterhouse. That seemed the logical place to start. Much to his chagrin, their search had turned up nothing. No one seemed to know about an abandoned slaughterhouse. In their thoroughness, his operatives had searched every abandoned building in the town, but they hadn’t found Nicholas.
Axel had expanded his search to other towns in the Heartland, a task made difficult by the incessant rains and the indifferent infrastructure in the outlying parts of the Heartland. The long wait for results was disheartening in the extreme.
He caught the sound of shifting shale and looked up into the dark, rifle at the ready in case Chenayan guardsmen had broken through. Since Lynx’s capture, the Chenayans had been relentless, breaking into the mines every few days. It took all of Heron’s resourcefulness to keep them at bay.
Axel recognized the light pitter-patter of tiny feet on rock, and relaxed. Rats. What they survived on in the tunnels so far from the human settlements, he didn’t know.
He grimaced at the unhappy comparison to his son.
He understood his boy’s feelings, especially as Nicholas had to ward off constant mental assault from Felix—not for one second did Axel believe Lukan spoke to Nicholas—but it still grated that his son doubted his loyalty. He had always supported and protected those he loved, and Nicholas was no different.
His fingers dug into his rifle butt. Felix’s cruelty was just one more crime Axel notched up against his father. A bullet was too good for Felix the ghoul master. Felix’s vile goading of a boy struggling to survive made Axel even more determined to slit his father’s throat when he and his army finally marched on the palace.
He let out a long, frustrated sigh.
Getting an army together for that march was just one more thing that kept him awake at night. The monarchs were still being difficult. With careful diplomacy, a few strongly worded letters, and some veiled threats, Axel was just managing to keep them and their demands for lower taxes and more battles at bay.
It didn’t help that Lynx fought him, too. If she would just accept Nicholas as a mere figurehead, it would clear the first hurdle to a very necessary meeting with the monarchs. But she still claimed that such a low position would demean Nicholas’s role as Dmitri’s decreed savior.
Axel disagreed. Being a figurehead was no shame, especially when the symbol on the flag was the boy surviving in the dark. He tipped his hand in salute to his son’s courage, his determination, his grit in fighting to escape. Regardless of Nicholas’s misgivings about taking on Lukan and his “monsters,” the Light-Bearer truly could have been a remarkable general—if there were time to properly train him.
Which there wasn’t.
In the last week, Magridal, his espionage expert, had reported rumbling in the kingdom of Tarach. King Liatl, a desert ruler with a proud fighting tradition, led the Blades, who had once been a formidable force. When Axel and the Pathfinder Alliance had effectively clamped down on private wars amongst the Free Nations, many of Liatl’s Blades had defected to the alliance. They made up the largest contingent of foreign mercenaries in his army. Liatl had never forgiven him for robbing him of his power base.
Intelligence reports claimed that Liatl planned to rebuild his Blades with the intention of destroying the alliance. Axel had sent Magridal under cover to Cosal, Tarach’s capital, to determine if the rumors were true. Like all the monarchs Axel dealt with, Liatl eschewed any technology beyond crossbows and steam engines, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a potentially formidable enemy. Norin had kept the empire and its preternatural guardsmen at bay for four hundred years with nothing more than crossbows and poison.
Regardless of Axel’s conflict with Lynx, he had to call a conclave with the monarchs to shore up his allies.
To him, the only solution to finding Nicholas was to pull a huge army together in the Light-Bearer’s name and to march against Lukan.
With a knife to his throat, his cousin would quickly blurt out where the Light-Bearer had been hidden.
Axel grunted with satisfaction at the prospect of imprisoning Lukan in that dark hole where Nicholas now languished. Lukan’s final demise would be the Light-Bearer’s choice. Fittingly so, too.
While he prepared that campaign, the last thing Axel needed was Liatl going for his underbelly. Axel’s fighting force was loyal as any mercenaries could be, but if Liatl offered more money and better options for bloodying their weapons, the old Blades could defect back to their old master. Who knew what damage those men could inflict on the rest of Axel’s people in this mine on their way to the door?
Axel would not tolerate such a threat to his people.
Lynx had to join his side regarding Nicholas or he would have no choice but to cut her out of all his dealings with the monarchs. She would still be his wife and the mother of the Light-Bearer, but all his desires to share power with her would be dashed. His face fell at the thought.
He scowled his sadness away. After nearly two decades as leader of the alliance, he had come to accept that his personal wishes had nothing to do with the broader objectives in this war. Doing what was right for his people always had and always would take precedence over his personal concerns.
His ears pricked at the scrape of leather on rock above him.
Lynx and her team?
“Axel,” Clay’s voice called down to him. “In case you are thinking of shooting, it’s us.”
Axel called out, “Then let’s get this test underway.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Clay called.
From his hiding place, Axel peered up at Lynx in the red glow from her headlamp—and smiled.
As always, his raider looked her beautiful, ferocious self. A woman in control of her world.
Today he intended to change that. If that didn’t make her see reason regarding Nicholas, nothing would.
Chapter 28
Lit by her headlamp, Lynx squeezed through a narrow crevice in the rock after Clay with with
King Chad’s daughter, Anna, on her heels.
Lynx had every muscle in lockdown to stop her body rebelling against the unforgiving rasp of stone against her skin. Since arriving here, she had gained control over her phobia. Living in the dark forest for so many years helped. But the real incentive was Talon. If he could soar above the terrifying challenge of darkness and mental assault, then so could she.
It broke her heart—and Axel’s—that Talon was doing his best to burrow out of his cell, only to be defeated by what they assumed was a concrete wall. Like finding his ice crystal on the grid, it would take Talon a dozen lifetimes to claw through concrete with his fingers.
The only good that had come from it was that Axel’s respect for Talon had increased a thousandfold. Her warlord was nowhere near ready to concede that Talon could lead men into battle, but he no longer fobbed Talon off as a mere boy with no value to the alliance apart from his name.
That counted for something. But it seemed a minor thing in comparison to their other conflicts.
Today was the last of her formal training. If she passed the test Clay set for her, Heron would enlist her into a platoon in the morning. That meant she and Axel were still at odds about how to handle Talon and the monarchs. She was no closer to sharing his perspective that Talon was a figurehead than Axel was to accepting hers. And still the monarchs chafed against his taxes. It was an untenable situation, but neither of them were willing to back down.
It also burned that if anyone should be training as a soldier, it should have been Talon, not her.
But given her stubborn warlord, there was nothing she could do about it.
Her toe hooked a rock and she stumbled before catching her balance.
Just like Felix could have provided light for her son, Axel had enough ice crystal to power a million dynamos to illuminate every crack and every rock in this mountain, but he kept it dark to make navigation almost impossible for the uninformed.
It was just as well.
Since her escape, the number of Chenayan troops attacking the airtight doors and vents had increased. According to Heron and Clay, breaches were more common now than they had been in years. Once in the mines, the alliance forces were forced from a defensive position into an offensive one—and that began with hunting down and destroying the invaders.
Lynx knew Lukan would not stop the pressure until he had recaptured her. Just one more burden that came with being Lukan’s obsession.
Lynx followed as Clay, then Anna, dropped down into an airship-sized bubble in the rock. Not hewn by hand, the mountain itself had birthed this hole. At the far end, the balloon dropped fifteen feet farther into a valley of razor-sharp ice crystal stalagmites.
Clay called out to Axel, and Axel replied. As far as Lynx could make out, he was below them, hidden somewhere in those crystals. Unseen, he would watch her cope in this unforgiving place. The last thing she wanted was to fail herself and him.
She took a deep breath and sized up where she planned to land in that valley of rock. An inch to the right, a foot to the left, and she would be impaled on softly gleaming needles of stone. She was still not entirely at home with the many-faceted rock.
“Are we going to be here all day?” Clay demanded behind her.
“He’s right, Lynx. The Chenayans would have gotten you by now.” Redheaded Anna raised her hand, eyed Lynx down her finger with a startling green eye, and said, “Pow. You’re dead.” Face adoring, she grinned at Clay.
Clay acknowledged her with a nod.
Anna’s comment would have carried more weight if Lynx wasn’t aware that the seventeen-year-old Trevenite princess worshiped Clay. He could have said the rock was about to melt into chocolate sauce, and Anna would have agreed.
Eyes lined up on her mark, Lynx jumped. Her right leg jarred against the rock, and it was only her black fatigues—now she knew why they were padded—that stopped the crystal slicing her thigh.
She’d carry a bruise, but that she could live with. It could join all the other blotches covering her skin. Axel made a point of counting them every night when she got into bed with him. But apart from that, he never commented, no matter how livid the bruise. She, in turn, didn’t let her multiple stabs of pain stop her from relishing his body—while he enjoyed hers. And then the long night of tossing and turning as she worried about her son would start . . .
She pushed the unhelpful thought away.
The valley sheered away down a cliff that slid some fifty feet into a river. The echo of raging water tumbling over rocks reverberated around her.
“I’m ready to hunt,” Lynx said to Clay. “Give the signal, and let’s get going.” She would have to track down and “kill” Anna before the Trevenite reached a target Clay had set up deeper in the mine. Axel would work at “killing” Lynx before she reached her target.
From the distance Lynx would keep between her and Anna, a blank round would do no more harm than splatter the girl with green paint.
If Lynx got any closer, Clay would fail her. He never missed an opportunity to remind her that Chenayan guardsmen wore ice-crystal jaspers that made them move faster than any normal human. An alliance soldier found within twenty feet of a guardsman would not survive to boast about it.
Clay turned to Anna and yelled, probably so Axel could hear, too. “You have three minutes to get ahead and then we will be behind you. Go.”
Anna tossed the mass of curls that escaped from her leather-and-ice-crystal headband over her shoulder. The coppery color caught the red glow from Clay’s headlamp, dancing like fireflies around the fine bones in her porcelain face. “Got it.”
Clay flicked off his light and nudged Lynx. “Come. I don’t want you watching her.”
She followed Clay into the darkness. They sat on a rock, and Lynx listened for sounds of Anna and Axel leaving, but the rush of river water drowned out everything. She turned her attention to Clay. “She fancies you.”
Clay groaned. “The story of my life. They’re either too young, too involved with someone else, or family.”
“Family? Who?” Lynx had yet to visit Norin. She had wanted desperately to see her father, but both Axel and her father had warned her against it. It seemed Lukan had stationed a few thousand guardsmen on the outskirts of the caravan. They all knew it was in the hope of capturing her. As much as it broke her heart, she had agreed to stay away.
Clay gave a bashful laugh. “Wolf’s daughter, Petal.” A pause. “I guess you can say she also fell in the ‘too young’ category. She’s about Anna’s age, but she used to follow me like a lap dog. Wolf and Aloe were crazy with worry. I was just . . . well, crazy with irritation. Anyway, I stopped visiting home for a while. It’s better now, thank the Winds.”
Amused by his tale, she smiled at him in the dark. “So what cured her?”
“She fell for another healer, Quail. Nice lad. We all like him. You will, too.” He gave her a sad smile. “When you finally get to go home.”
Lynx shrugged, trying to hide her anger and fury that Lukan had again robbed her of something she so desperately wanted. “They planning to marry?”
“They talk of it all the time, but you know the problem with Norin princesses and Chenayan crown princes better than anyone. Wolf is probably beginning to watch the mail carriage for missives from Lukan demanding a bride for Grigor.”
Lynx’s stomach clenched with anger for Petal and her Quail. For Grigor, too.
Clay shifted against his rock. “Anyway, Anna is betrothed to Prince Xipal, the desert king’s son.”
“Is Xipal her choice?” Lynx couldn’t imagine the girl in love with someone else, not the way she made doe eyes at Clay.
“No. Politics. Chad feels beholden because we destroyed Liatl’s army.” Clay flicked on his headlamp and looked at his watch in the dull red light. “Let’s go.”
Lynx leaped to her feet. Regardless of her pity for Anna, she intended to “kill” the girl today.
Clay led her to edge of the cliff that fell to the river belo
w. She surveyed the terrain as she walked, aware that the jagged rocks, unexpected crevasses that tumbled into deadly precipices, and broken tunnels, were as much her enemy as the Chenayans.
At some point during the eons, a red stalactite had crashed to the ground, littering the edge of the cliff with rocks and loose shale. Careful not to slip, she picked her way across them, looking for the pitons Axel was supposed to have set to secure the ropes for the drop down the cliff.
Clay stood with his arms crossed, making no effort to help her.
And that was just as it should be. She had not helped him raid his first egg.
When she first started training with him, Clay had drummed into her that Heron frowned on leaving rock-climbing gear in the mountain for the enemy to find and use. Such kit was used sparingly, and always hidden. Where possible, they relied on their fingers, boot tips, and cracks in the rock to maneuver up the faces. One of the many pockets on her black fatigues gaped with black chalk to help with bare-handed climbs.
She knelt to better study the rocks. A three-foot-wide shaft of ice crystal jutted out over the lip. She peered under it and spotted a gleam of metal. Two pitons. Only someone who knew they were there would find them. Axel hadn’t managed to fox her. She allowed a smile of satisfaction as she unfurled the cord wrapped around her waist.
Flattened on her stomach, she used her elbows to edge over the ice crystal. If she slipped into the river, she would crash to her death against rocks the size of her old cottage before she could even think of swimming to safety.
She took a deep breath to calm her wildly beating heart and stretched her shoulder and arm to reach the piton. The hole located, she threaded her cord through and attached the other end to a harness around her legs and waist. A quick check of her weapon, and she grabbed the cord and stepped back off the ledge. Boots bouncing against the rock, she sailed down the cliff.