It was a lonely burial, but safe from curious eyes and the teeth of wolves. At least the soldier would keep his secrets under the weight of stone.
*
He found the horse waiting in the darkness, tied to a tree, with saddlebags stuffed with provisions. The animal seemed well muscled, enough to withstand a hard ride; but as much as he wanted to tear off into the night, he checked his fear.
If he rode the thing until it died, his pursuers would surely catch him in a few days, if not sooner. If he took it slow and kept off the road, he and the horse might yet survive. Too much had been sacrificed to buy him this freedom, and he would not—could not—let that be in vain. Soon after abandoning the field and the shearer’s shed, he found a riverbed and followed it south for as long as he could stay in the saddle.
*
He had no clue what fate Perce had suffered; no idea if the guards at the gate had let him live or beaten him to death. If the tutor survived his arrest, then the Duke’s Justice awaited him for aiding a criminal in his escape. Both Ran and the old man knew what that meant. Ran’s stomach rolled at the thought and he turned his face from the pale dawn, as if the light made the wound in his heart harder to bear.
Perce would be furious if Ran let his emotions get the better of him. He would scowl and snort and tell the prince to be a man about it. He didn’t have the patience for sentiment, though a little shone through the moment he gave Ran the scroll tube and admitted it was all he could do to save his life. For that, Ran hadn’t had the chance to thank him, and probably never would. He wept when he lay on his saddle to snatch a fitful rest as another night fell, despite what the old man would think of him.
*
It took two blizzards covering his tracks before he felt he might have finally lost his father’s soldiers. Snow smothered the trail of his horse, and he stayed in the highlands where the terrain was more difficult for soldiers and trackers to cross. He had no doubt that as soon as he descended from the hills, scores of the duke’s troops would be waiting to drag him back to Usmein.
Ran made the provisions last as long as he could, but close to a month had passed and things were tight. All of his fresh food was gone and the preserved meat and hard tack were running dangerously low. He ate only on the days when he travelled, and tried to ignore his hunger on days when he and the horse rested. To fill the gaps, Ran resorted to stealing from small farms and cottages by the cover of night, pinching from smoke houses and pantry stores in barns. If the locals noticed the tracks through their yards, they never raised the alarm, and no one ever followed him back into the high ridges and gullies.
The weather closed in at the turn of the moon and he found refuge in a cave at the apex of a valley choked with snow. As he stripped the saddle and blanket from the horse and led the beast inside, Ran wondered if his father’s men still searched for him or if they’d given up and gone home. Surely it was madness to hunt a boy into the mountains and forests only to bring him back for execution?
Even as he wondered, he knew the answer.
Ran knew his father and the lengths the man would go to in order to protect Orthia, his house, and his rule. He could have ended the war in the Disputed Territory decades ago, just by bending a knee to the Empire, but he would not. Ronart would defend Orthia until his dying breath, even if it meant sacrificing every one of his subjects. Even if it meant ripping his only son’s inheritance from his cold, dead fingers. No price was too high for freedom. He couldn’t just let his cursed son vanish into the wilds and escape justice. What message would that send to the people? How could he control the threat of magic among ordinary Orthians if he couldn’t follow the law in regard to his own son? It cut deep to admit it, but his father wouldn’t allow the search to end until they found him, dead or alive.
Ran glanced at his gloved hands in the orange light of his campfire and sighed. Was it his mother’s blood that carried the curse, as his father so loudly accused? Her horror and sadness, the disappointment in her eyes, haunted Ran in the small hours of the night, when he lay awake turning the past over in his head as if he might find a place to wind it all back. Back to when he was home, before his stupid insistence on going to the Territory, back before he lost everything.
His eyes filled with tears.
The thought drove him to his feet and the campfire flared with the rage that fuelled his magic. He paced the cave and drew shaking breaths to calm his angry heart. Furious at his failures, furious at his stupidity, he spun and punched the cave wall. Burying his fear and sorrow deep into the rock, his fist cracked the granite. If there was pain, he couldn’t feel it, his hands burning with magic.
The cave groaned in protest, dust and stone chips raining down like the snow outside.
Oh shit… He pressed his palms against the wall and cooed as if his soothing voice might convince the mountain not to fall in on him.
‘You’ve gone and done it now…’ her voice slipped from the darkness at the back of the cave, husky and mocking.
Ran didn’t bother to look in her direction anymore, sick of searching and not seeing. His ghost girl came and went as she pleased, and she’d not shown herself to him in almost a week.
‘You always pick the finest moments to visit,’ he spat and sat his shivering body beside the fire, though it was not the cold that made his skin crawl and his muscles quiver. He shook like a terrified puppy every time his magic roared to life uninvited and burst out to inflict itself on whatever stood nearby. Today it was a cave wall, last week it was a persistent, noisy bird keeping him from sleep; tomorrow it might be a tree.
Whenever his magic flared, he understood the law. He was dangerous, too dangerous to be around innocent people, too dangerous to trust with the care or leadership of others. As much as he missed his home, he was glad to be far from Usmein and anyone who might catch the edge of his wild and unpredictable powers. Ran glanced up and was surprised to see the ghost, watching him, her pale blue gaze wandering from his shaking hands to his face.
‘Have you opened it?’ She asked the same question whenever she came.
She knew the answer but asked anyway, waiting patiently for him to reply before saying another word. Once or twice since leaving Usmein, he hadn’t answered at all, and the silence that followed was something close to the worst thing he’d ever heard. Her eyes fell on the saddlebags beside his thin bedroll but he didn’t move to touch them.
‘No, not yet,’ he replied and poked at the embers of the fire instead.
‘Why?’ She cocked her head to one side like a curious bird. She’d never asked him why, only when, as if fishing for an invitation to an unveiling party. The wicked old wound in her neck gaped a little as she moved, and Ran suppressed a shudder. Mostly, he could ignore it, hidden as it was in the shadows beneath her chin, but when she strained her neck like that, it yawned open to remind him that she was, in fact, quite dead.
‘I…’ he began, then stared at the saddlebag.
Tightly wrapped in layers of woollen clothes and oiled leathers, buried under provisions, a map and a water bladder, was the scroll tube Perce pressed into his hand during his escape. It felt as if the shiny tube hummed under all that camouflage, singing to him as he rode or walked up windswept ridges. He slipped past villages and hamlets, and all the while he felt the tube in the saddlebag, weighing him down like a stone.
Their eyes met across the fire again and Ran shrugged away her question. ‘I know what it says.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Of course you do. You’ve got a whole story in your head that tells you exactly what it says and why you’ve got no reason to open it.’ She paused and lifted her chin, her scrutiny cutting through his warm winter clothes until he felt entirely naked and completely helpless. ‘We both know that story is a lie.’
He swallowed a retort and a few too many curses, and clenched his jaw. Provoking the ghost was unwise if he hoped to get more than an hour’s sleep in the next few nights. She tormented and haunted him when he spoke rudely or cursed
at her, or threw his magic her way, but hadn’t yet turned her powers of persuasion to forcing him to act.
She was a little odd like that.
With a sigh, he opened his hands towards her. ‘A lie it might be, but it’s my lie, my make-believe tale. I don’t need to see the words to know the truth at the heart of it.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘not yet.’
Her hand reached through the flames to hover over his, her flickering form unmolested by the heat. For a moment she considered him with a worried frown and pity in her eyes, an expression her usually stony features had not made in Ran’s presence.
‘But one day you’ll want to know, you’ll need to know, and you’ll beg to see the ink your fear and pride blinded you to. By then, it might be too late.’
‘What? Why?’ His brow creased into a frown. What could she possibly know about the scroll that he didn’t?
‘No…’ she said with a sad smile. Her translucent hand touched the faint stubble on his cheek, a frozen whisper across his flesh. ‘That’s not for me to tell. You have to do this yourself.’
He glanced at the saddlebag where the scroll lay hidden, his heart thumping. What did she know? He could find out if he just opened it, but he was bone tired and not entirely sure he was ready. Reading what Perce had hidden in there would make it all real; his father’s anger, his mother’s sorrow, his future evaporating into the air. He swallowed and looked back at the ghost.
She vanished with the next howl of wind and his horse snorted and stamped his hoof, as he did whenever she left them alone. Ran despised her when she lingered and sorely missed her when she left, an awful see-saw of emotion tipping wildly back and forth as the loneliness of his existence settled in. Her words echoed in his mind and he shook his head to dispel the sound.
‘Maybe it’s time we found some human company, hey fella? Find a farm to get you some more feed?’ he asked the horse, and grimaced as the wind at the cave mouth whipped up to an icy roar. ‘Though maybe not today.’
The horse didn’t respond, as always, and returned his attention to the small chaff bag on the ground. He probably understood that if Ran’s only company remained a mute horse and a ghost girl, then he’d be well and truly mad before the thaw of spring.
*
For another two nights and a day the storm continued to dump snow in front of Ran’s cave, each passing hour blurring into the next, only distinguished by increasing boredom and solitude. When the second morning broke with a clear sky and a singing bird, the sunlight on his eyes felt like hot needles and a noise other than the howling wind was something of a foreign language.
He used a flat stone to dig a channel out of the cave and into the morning. The forest on the mountainside was blanketed in sparkling white. The horse eyed him suspiciously when he approached with the saddle, but Ran smiled.
‘Don’t worry; I’m not going to make you carry me. Just the tack.’
Without knowing the depth of the drifts, he risked breaking more than the horse’s ankles if he rode. With a long lead they could pick their way across the terrain and find their footing, avoiding a fall, breaking something on the horse, or himself, and dying in the cold.
‘If we’re lucky,’ he murmured to the horse, ‘we’ll find somewhere nice and stay the night.’
The horse snorted, which Ran took as agreement, and they slipped and skidded beside each other down the slope to an unused road shrouded in gnarled trees and low shrubs.
They needed more supplies if they were to survive the winter, so an excursion to a village was inevitable. He hadn’t planned much further than the thaw, when the snow would dribble away to the streams and the heavy clouds would lift. He knew he had to survive, but to what end he was yet to decide.
When he did break cover and enter a town, Ran made a point to never stay more than a few hours. He posed as a messenger and spoke only to the few merchants he traded with. Perce’s saddlebags offered up enough coin to get him what he needed, quickly and without too many questions, but he always left town feeling the eyes of the residents on his back. If soldiers or scouts came through, would they tell the tale of the messenger when asked if they’d seen anything strange? Would they recall his face, his features, or the direction he left in?
Often, he circled the settlements and came at them from the south, as if travelling towards the capital and he always made sure to leave to the north. He let his sparse facial hair grow and kept himself fairly filthy to obscure anything that might be a trait worth remembering. He even added a drawl to his words, dropping his voice to a low tone and peppering his speech with enough curses to hide his noble education.
If his luck held, the locals would think him nothing more than a rider or vagrant and he’d slip from their memories altogether. All he had was hope. He needed a rest in a real bed and a hot meal in his belly after so many nights on cold, unforgiving rock. Otherwise, the winter might do his father a favour and put an end to his troubles.
*
They rested at midday. Despite the cold in the wind and the damp in his boots, the faint warmth of the sun at its zenith was glorious against his frozen skin as he closed his eyes and leaned back against the wide trunk of a tree. The road arced down from the mountainside ever so slightly and he guessed it wound towards a town, or a wider, more heavily trafficked highway. It galled him to need the respite a town offered, but he was unwilling to get any closer to desperate than he already was. He’d read enough in his lessons about what starvation did to men’s minds and he wasn’t at all keen on experiencing it first-hand.
A twig snapped in the woods to his left and his eyes flicked open. The peace of a few moments’ rest vanished in an instant, replaced by hollow fear. His horse stood unmoved and unconcerned by the sound, his head down but ears swivelling back and forth. The sound had not startled the beast, who had proven as good a guard as any hound he’d ever met.
The storm of the previous night had carpeted the snowfall with leaves and branches, sticks and tree nuts. The leaf litter rustled again and he paused, scanning the trees at the edge of the snowy clearing. Stealth had been hard to come by in such conditions, and he’d given up on it some hours ago after cursing every hoof fall that loudly crunched through the debris. Whatever moved through the shadows was making an extra effort to remain unseen, but it had been heard. With silent steps he collected his bow, slipped the quiver belt around his hips and stretched the string into place.
Careful to place his booted feet between the fallen matter and on the soft, powdered snow, he followed the direction of the sound and let his magic roll away like a transparent fog. Trees slipped by, their shadows shifting across his vision, drawing his eyes to seek villains in the lee of trunks, boles and boughs.
Leaves crunched and he spun to confront the attacker, bow up, fletched arrow at the corner of his mouth, ready to bury itself in the chest of his hunter.
What the merry fuck…?
A puff of white rabbit stood still as stone, stupid enough to back itself up against a dark tree trunk. Its sparkling red eyes watched him, its small nose twitching as it caught a touch of his scent on the air. Before he could think to stop it, his magic rose and bore down on the rabbit, twisting its hand of influence until the creature did not move at all. Even the quiver of its fine whiskers slowed to a stop.
His attacker, nothing more than a potential meal, stood paralysed in the face of his magic and his arrowhead. Ran blinked rapidly and steadied his hands, drawing a breath then letting half of it go. Time slowed until the motion of the trees dancing in the wind eased and ceased, the hammer of his heart the only sound to fill his ears.
Without command, his fingers loosed the shaft and in that moment, time and all her realities resumed. The arrow nailed the rabbit in the skull and burrowed into the tree, the kill so quick the animal hardly had a moment to realise its fate and squeal for mercy. Other than the gentle hum of the arrow shivering in the tree trunk, the forest was silent.
Blood trickled from the wound and t
he shock of glaring crimson against the blistering white sheen of the snow shook Ran from his trance. The magic dissipated and his hands and fingers shook as he unstrung his bow and moved to collect his quarry. A quick tug brought the shaft and head from the tree’s bark, the rabbit yielding to his touch as he scooped it up and turned.
The ghost barred his way.
Ran choked on a curse and his teeth jammed down on the inside of his lips.
She stood atop the snow, her weightless feet not sinking into the drifts, the blue orbs of her eyes trained wide and unblinking on the rabbit. Her stare pinned him to the spot, her intense focus on the dead animal in his hands. On her face, the tracks of three bloodied fingers drew lines from her forehead to chin, across her perfect pale lips. Smeared in blood, they parted as if they ached to speak some painful truth but could not form the words.
She met his gaze and Ran swallowed hard. Where had the blood come from? There hadn’t been blood on her before, at least not since…
His hands lifted the rabbit between them and he glanced down. Instead of one small wound in the animal’s head, a wide, ragged gash glared up at him from the creature’s throat, its head twisted away at a sick angle.
It was the same wound he had seen on the ghost in the house. The same awful mess that gaped at him whenever she moved her head. His heart leapt and he startled, flicking his hand to throw the dead rabbit away. His arm flailed but his fingers held tight, failing to heed his commands.
What the fuck is going on?!
His mind screamed at him to run but he couldn’t move. He shot a glance at his ghost.
Her throat gaped wide. The old wound, once dried and empty, blackened and bruised, surged with a gush of blood that washed down her chest and onto the white carpet of snow. Her eyes rolled back and she vanished in a burst of power.
Blood of Heirs Page 20