Kellhus turned away from her, overcome by grief. As though finding solace in urgent action, he began rolling his sleeping mat beneath the grand willow. He paused and without looking at her said in a pained voice: “You must forget this, Serwë. We haven’t the time.”
Shame, as though her innards had become cold water.
I forced this crime upon him, she thought, staring at Kellhus as he bound their gear to his saddle. Once again her hand found her belly. My first sin against your father.
“The Kidruhil horses,” the Scylvendi said. “We shall ride them to death first.”
For the first two days, they eluded their pursuers with relative ease, relying on the primeval forests that blanketed the headwaters of the River Phayus and the Scylvendi’s martial acumen to preserve them. Nevertheless, the flight took a heavy toll on Serwë. Day and night on horseback, negotiating steep gullies, galloping across stony slopes, and hazarding the innumerable tributaries of the Phayus, was nearly more than she could handle. By the first night, she was swaying on the back of her horse, struggling with both numb limbs and eyes that refused to stay open, while Cnaiür and Kellhus led the way on foot. They seemed unconquerable, and it galled her that she was so weak.
By the end of the second day, Cnaiür allowed them to make camp, suggesting that they had lost whatever pursuers they might have had. Two things, he said, were in their favour: the fact that they travelled east, when any Scylvendi raiding party would surely withdraw to the Hethantas after meeting the Kidruhil, and the fact that he and Kellhus had been able to kill so many after the colossal misfortune of encountering them in their hunt for the boy. Serwë was far too exhausted to mention the one she’d killed, so she rubbed the clotted blood on her forearm instead, surprised by the feeling of pride that flared through her.
“The Kidruhil are arrogant fools,” Cnaiür continued. “Eleven dead will convince them that the raiding party must be large. This means that they will be cautious in their pursuit and send out for reinforcements. It also means that if they encounter our eastward trail, they will think it a ruse and follow it west toward the mountains, hoping to pick up the trail of the main party.”
That night they ate raw fish he speared from a nearby stream, and despite her hate, Serwë found herself admiring the affinity between this man and the open wilds. For him it seemed a place of innumerable clues and small tasks. He could guess approaching terrain from the sight and song of certain birds, and he could ease the strain on their horses by feeding them cakes of fungus scratched from the humus. There was far more to him than abuse and murder, she realized.
As Serwë marvelled over her ability to savour food that would have made her vomit in her previous life, Cnaiür told them episodes from his many forays into the Empire. The westward provinces of the Empire, he said, offered them their only hope of throwing off their pursuers: they had been long abandoned because of the depredations of his kinsmen. Their peril would be far greater once they crossed into the great tracts of cultivated land along the lower Phayus.
And not for the first time, Serwë wondered why these men would risk such a journey.
They resumed their trek in daylight, intending to travel into the following night. In early morning, Cnaiür felled a young doe, and Serwë took it to be a good omen, though the prospect of eating venison raw did not appeal to her. She found herself to be continuously hungry but had ceased speaking of it because of the Scylvendi’s scowl. At midday, however, Kellhus urged his mount even to hers and said, “You’re hungry again, aren’t you, Serwë?”
“How do you know these things?” she asked. It never ceased to thrill her each time Kellhus guessed her thoughts, and the part of her that held him in reverent awe would find further confirmation.
“How long has it been, Serwë?”
“How long has what been?” she asked, suddenly fearful.
“Since you’ve been with child.”
But it’s your child, Kellhus! Yours!
“But we’ve not yet coupled,” he said gently.
Serwë suddenly felt bewildered, unsure as to what he meant, and more unsure still whether she had spoken aloud. But of course they had coupled. She was with child, wasn’t she? Who else could be his father?
Tears swelled in her eyes. Kellhus . . . Are you trying to hurt me?
“No, no,” he replied. “I’m sorry, sweet Serwë. We’ll stop to eat very soon.”
She stared at his broad back as he rode ahead to join Cnaiür. She was accustomed to watching their brief exchanges, and drew petty satisfaction from the moments of hesitation, even anguish, that would crack Cnaiür’s weather-beaten expression.
But this time she felt compelled to watch Kellhus, to note the way the sun flashed through his blond hair, to study the sumptuous line of his lips and the glitter of his all-knowing eyes. And he seemed almost painfully beautiful, like something too bright for cold rivers, bare rock, and knotted trees. He seemed—
Serwë held her breath. Feared for a moment that she might swoon.
I didn’t speak and yet still he knew.
“I am the promise,” Kellhus had said above the long road of Scylvendi skulls.
Our promise, she whispered to the child within her. Our God.
But could it be? Serwë had heard innumerable stories of the Gods communing with Men as Men long ago in the days of the Tusk. This was scripture. This was true! What was impossible was that a God might walk now, that a God might fall in love with her, with Serwë, the daughter sold to House Gaunum. But perhaps this was the meaning of her beauty, the reason she had suffered the venal covetousness of man after man. She was also something too beautiful for the world, something awaiting the arrival of her betrothed.
Anasûrimbor Kellhus.
She smiled tears of rapturous joy. She could see him as he truly was now, radiant with otherworldly light, haloes like golden discs shining about his hands. She could see him!
Later, as they chewed strips of raw venison in a breezy stand of poplars, he turned to her and in her native tongue of Nymbricani said, “You understand.”
She smiled but was not surprised that he knew her father’s language. He’d bid her speak it to him many times—not to learn, she now knew, but to listen to her secret voice, the one sheltered from the wrath of the Scylvendi.
“Yes . . . I understand. I’m to be your wife.” She blinked the tears from her eyes.
He smiled with godlike compassion and tenderly stroked her cheek. “Soon, Serwë. Very soon.”
That afternoon they crossed a broad valley, and as they crested the summit of the far slopes, they caught their first glimpse of their pursuers. Serwë could not see them at first, only the outer skirt of sunlit trees along a distant stony defilade. Then she glimpsed the shadows of horses behind, their thin legs scissoring through the gloom, their riders hunched to avoid unseen branches. Abruptly, one appeared at the brink, the sun smearing his helm and armour bright white. Serwë shrank into the shadows.
“They seem confused,” she said.
“They lost our trail along the stony ground,” Cnaiür said grimly. “They’re searching for the route we took down.”
Afterward, Cnaiür increased their pace. With their train of horses in tow, they thundered through the wood, the Scylvendi guiding them down rolling slopes until they came to a shallow, gravelly stream. They then changed direction, riding downstream along the muddy banks, at times splashing through the stream itself, until it joined a much larger river. The air was beginning to cool, and grey evening shadows had all but swallowed the open spaces.
Several times Serwë had thought she could hear the Kidruhil shouting through the forests behind them, but the ever-present sound of rushing waters made it difficult to be certain. Yet curiously, she felt unafraid. Though the elation she’d felt for the greater part of the day had vanished, the sense of inevitability had not. Kellhus rode beside her, and his reassuring eyes never failed to find her the moment her heart weakened.
You have nothing to fear, she w
ould think. Your father rides with us.
“These forests,” the Scylvendi said, pitching his voice to be heard over the river, “continue for a short time before thinning into pastures. We ride for as long as we can into dark without risking our horses or our necks. These men who follow us are not like the others. They are determined. They live their lives hunting and battling my people through these forests. They will not stop until they run us down. But once we clear the forest, our advantage lies in our extra horses. We will run them until they are dead. Our only hope is to race along the Phayus far ahead of any word of our coming and reach the Holy War.”
Following his lead, they rode along the river until the moonlight transformed it into a ribbon of quicksilver through blue-backed stone and the looming dark of the surrounding forest. After a time the moon lowered, and the horses began stumbling and shying from the path. With a curse, the Scylvendi bid them stop. Wordlessly, he began stripping the horses of their gear and tossing it into the river.
Too weary for words, Serwë dismounted, stretched against the evening chill, and stared for a moment at the Nail of Heaven glittering amid clouds of paler stars. She glanced back the way they had come and was arrested by a far different glitter: a watery string of lights slowly crawling along the river.
“Kellhus?” she said, her voice croaking from disuse.
“I’ve already seen them,” Cnaiür replied, heaving a saddle far out into the rushing water. “The advantage of the pursuer: torches at night.” There was a difference in his tone, Serwë realized, an ease she’d never heard before. The ease of a workman in his element.
“They’ve been gaining ground,” Kellhus noted, “moving too quickly to be picking out our trail. They just follow the river. Perhaps we can use this to our advantage.”
“You have no experience in these matters, Dûnyain.”
“You should listen to him,” Serwë said, more hotly than she intended.
Cnaiür turned to her, and though his expression was lost in the darkness, she could sense his outrage. Scylvendi tribesmen did not brook shrewish women.
“The only way we could use this to our advantage,” he replied, his fury scarcely bridled, “is by striking through the forest. They would continue ahead, perhaps lose our trail altogether, but by sunrise they would realize their mistake. Then they would be forced to backtrack—but not all of them would do so. They know we are bent on travelling east, and they would know they were now ahead of us. They would send word ahead of our coming, and we would be doomed. Our only hope is to outrun them, understand?”
“She understands, plainsman,” Kellhus replied.
Leading their horses on foot, they continued. Kellhus guided them now, unerringly taking advantage of every stretch of open ground, so that at times Serwë found herself running. Several times she fell, tripping over something unseen, yet she always managed to recover herself before the Scylvendi could upbraid her. She was perpetually winded, her lungs burning, a cramp periodically knifing into her side. She was bruised, scraped, and so exhausted that her legs wobbled whenever she stood still. But there was no question of stopping, not so long as the string of torches prickled in the distance.
Eventually the river turned, cascading over a series of stone shelves. Under the starlight, Serwë glimpsed a great body of water ahead of them.
“The River Phayus,” Cnaiür said. “Very soon, we will ride, Serwë.”
Rather than follow the tributary to the Phayus, they veered to the right and plunged into the blackness of the forest interior. For the first while, Serwë could see almost nothing, and she felt as though she followed a train of sounds through a nightmarish tunnel of blackness jostling with blackness. Cracking twigs. Snorting horses. The periodic stamping of hoofs. But gradually, a pallid twilight began etching details from the gloom: slender trunks, deadfalls, the mosaic of leaves across the forest floor. The Scylvendi had spoken true, she realized. The wood was growing thinner.
As dawn gathered on the eastern horizon, Cnaiür called them to a halt. Clutched in the roots of an upturned tree, a great disc of earth reared above him. “Now we ride,” he said. “We ride hard.”
At last she was off her feet, but her relief was short-lived. With Cnaiür ahead and Kellhus in the rear, they barrelled through the brush. As the forest thinned, the latticed confusion of the canopy descended, until it seemed they raced through it, lashed by innumerable branches. Through the staccato thud of hoofs, she heard the swell of morning birdsong.
They broke from the oppressive brush and across the pastures at a gallop. Serwë cried out and laughed aloud, exhilarated by the sudden rush over open ground. Cool air numbed her stinging face and combed her hair into streaming tails. Before them, the red orb of the sun crested the horizon, burnishing the purple distance with orange and magenta.
The pastures gradually gave way to cultivated land, until the distances were thatched with young wheat, barley, and millet fields. They skirted small agrarian villages and the vast plantations that belonged to the Houses of the Congregate. As a concubine indentured to House Gaunum, Serwë had been sequestered in similar villas, and as she stared at the rambling compounds, the roofs tiled in red clay, and the rows of spearlike junipers, she was troubled that something once so familiar could become so threatening and strange.
The slaves lifted their heads from the fields and watched them gallop along the dusty byways. Teamsters cursed them as they thundered past. Women dropped their burdens and yanked astonished children out of harm’s way. What did these people think? Serwë wondered, her thoughts drunk with fatigue. What did they see?
Daring fugitives, she decided. A man whose harsh face reminded them of Scylvendi terror. Another man, whose blue eyes plumbed them in the haste of a single glance. And a beautiful woman, her long blonde hair askew—the prize these men would deny their unseen pursuers.
By late afternoon, they urged their lathered horses to the summit of a stony hill, where the Scylvendi at last allowed them a momentary respite. Serwë nearly toppled from her saddle. She fell to the turf and stretched through the grasses, her ears ringing, the ground slowly wheeling beneath her. For a time, all she could do was breathe. Then she heard the Scylvendi curse.
“Tenacious bastards,” he spat. “Whoever leads those men is as canny as he is stubborn.”
“What should we do?” Kellhus asked, and the question somehow disappointed her.
You know. You always know. Why do you cater to him?
She struggled to her feet, amazed that her limbs could so quickly stiffen, and then followed their gazes to the horizon. Beneath the rose sun she glimpsed a small veil of dust trailing toward the river, but little more.
“How many?” Cnaiür asked Kellhus.
“The same as before . . . sixty-eight. Although they now ride different horses.”
“Different horses,” Cnaiür repeated dryly, as though as disgusted by what this meant as by Kellhus’s ability to draw such conclusions. “They must have seized them somewhere on the way.”
“You failed to anticipate this?”
“Sixty-eight,” Cnaiür said, ignoring his question. “Too many?” he asked, staring hard at Kellhus.
“Too many.”
“Even if we attack at night?”
Kellhus nodded, his eyes strangely unfocused. “Perhaps,” he replied at length, “but only if all other alternatives have been exhausted.”
“What alternatives?” Cnaiür asked. “What . . . should we do?”
Serwë glimpsed a curious anguish in his expression. Why does it trouble him so? Can’t he see we’re meant to follow?
“We’ve gained some ground on them,” Kellhus said firmly. “We continue riding.”
With Kellhus in the lead, they wound into the shadow of the hill, slowly gathering speed. They scattered a small herd of sheep, then pressed their long-suffering horses harder than ever before.
Hurtling across the pasture, Serwë felt the ache seep from her jerking limbs. They outran the hill’s shadow, a
nd the evening sun fell warm upon her back. She urged her horse faster and pulled even with Kellhus, flashing him a fierce grin. He made her laugh with a funny face: eyes shocked at her audacity, brows pinched in indignant outrage. With the Scylvendi behind them, they galloped side by side, laughing at their hapless pursuers, until the evening passed into twilight and the distant fields were rinsed of all colour save grey. They had, she thought, outdistanced the very sun.
Abruptly her horse—her prize for having killed the scarred man—faltered mid-stride, throwing its head back with a grunting shriek. She could almost feel its heart burst . . . Then exploding ground, grass and dirt between her teeth, and throbbing silence.
The sound of approaching hoofs.
“Leave her!” she heard the Scylvendi bark. “They want us, not her. She’s stolen property to them, a pretty bauble.”
“I will not.”
“This is not like you, Dûnyain . . . Not like you at all.”
“Perhaps,” she heard Kellhus say, his voice now very close and very gentle. Hands cupped her cheeks.
Kellhus . . . No blue babies.
No blue babies, Serwë. Our child will be pink and alive.
“But she’ll be safer—”
Darkness, and dreams of a great, shadowy race across heathen lands.
Floating. Where’s the knife?
Serwë awoke gasping for breath, the whole world rushing and bucking beneath her. Hair whisked and fluttered in her face, stinging her eyes. She smelled vomit.
“This way!” she heard the Scylvendi shout over chopping hoofs, his voice impatient, even urgent. “The crest of that hill!”
A man’s strong back and shoulders were crushed against her breasts and cheek. Her arms were wrapped impossibly tight around his torso, and her hands . . . She couldn’t feel her hands! But she could feel rope chafing at her wrists. She was tied! Trussed to the back of a man. To Kellhus.
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