“Who says this is his quest?” the girl demanded. “The people that thing is threatening are ours.”
“I suppose we can always just carry him,” the man mused. “Kebbal has no control over us.”
There! Did you ever think of that? Havec asked triumphantly. His vision began to sparkle, darkness closing in until he peered at the world through a tunnel that was steadily narrowing. Okay, okay! No carrying, you made your point.
Before he could relate the exchange, Farait was snarling, “We are not carrying him into mortal peril when he can’t so much as lift a hand to defend himself!” He had crouched over Havec, placing a hand on the center of his chest as if Smooth Guy would snatch him up and run off with him.
“I already suggested it to Kebbal,” he told the man above him. “If you do it, it looks like I’ll be unconscious.”
Qanath threw her shoulders back, saying bravely, “Sorcery will just have to be enough.”
“Girl, you can’t.” Smooth Guy opened his mouth to say something snooty, and he raised his voice. “Only a handful of people in my homeland speak your language and you’ve already met most of them. Anyway, my people are hostile, they have no idea their own leaders are to blame for the problems on the border. You won’t be able to get within sight of the actual enemy for defending yourselves from wrongheaded attacks, and neither of you can explain yourselves!”
Gently, the girl told him, “There isn’t an alternative.”
“Well fine, I guess I’ll just lie here while you go kill yourself,” he muttered. “Can I not go along and talk for them? Just talk. I won’t get into any trouble at all, I promise.”
There was a moment of suspense, but he just went on lying there. Unable even to strain against the inertia or be frustrated by it. The girl laughed, and it wasn’t as forced as it might have been. “Kebbal has known you for years. It knows an empty promise when it hears one.”
“We aren’t just going to hang about here anyway,” Farait said grimly. When Havec looked into his face, the man met his eyes. “There may be an army charging headlong up the coast as we speak, straight into a trap. We have to turn them back.”
He had completely forgotten about the Tabbaqeran soldiers marching into the teeth of this supernatural storm. It came as a relief to learn that he could serve some purpose after all, and they could hand his mother over to the authorities in one fell swoop. It would be nice to be free of her company, her accusatory looks and unblinking stares. He thought to look for her, and he saw that her rigid deathlike visage remained fixed on the edge of the forest where what had been her husband disappeared. Unwilling to feel sympathy for her, he turned his eyes away.
Reminder of the army and the coastal road had jogged his mind, and he had them wrest the heavy golden ring off his mother’s right hand. Someone needed to warn his uncle what was happening, and that gave them their translator. If they could get to the man, he could get them through. Through what and to what remained in doubt, and it killed him that he wasn’t going to get to go along.
Hot Priest proposed to ride with him, but they couldn’t even get him in the saddle, he was such a dead weight. Havec hadn’t thought it was a smart idea anyway, although he’d kept his doubts to himself, just in case. They were forced to make a stretcher to carry him, suspending several layers of blankets between his own horse and the one that Arandgwail had been riding while in human form. Hib was coming with them, because it was safer and Farait wanted an extra guard to help him keep an eye on the queen. It would fall to the sorcerers to handle this, and Havec absolutely wouldn’t have been willing to let the girl do it had not the shyin been accompanying her. He called it over before they parted ways.
“The girl is very important to me,” he told The Thing. “Understand? You stop as many hearts as you need to, just bring her back in one piece.”
Hair-On-End’s eyes had gone wide, lips forming a perfect O. “Can I touch the dark thing inside you if I do?”
“The dark—Oh. Kebbal, you mean? The person who lives in me?”
It nodded, and its expression reminded him of a kid who had just seen the northern lights for the first time, torn between glee and dread.
“Yes, you may.” To Kebbal, he added, If you don’t like it, it’s entirely your fault. I wouldn’t need to ask someone else to look after her if you would let me look after her myself.
Then the girl herself came to him, taking his hand and telling him she was finally going to pay him back for jumping off the stairs and saving her. Brave words, but her voice shook. Havec didn’t call her on it, just told her to look out for the other two, who would doubtless panic and get themselves hurt if she didn’t keep an eye on them.
There was nothing else to be said, and they parted ways, Havec’s band turning their faces south into the trees and relative safety while the people without weapons continued headlong into danger. Farait rode watchfully alongside the horses carrying him, Hib to the rear as he was wont. His mother sat stiff-backed in her saddle to the fore, hands lashed to the horn. For what good that did them: if she decided to bolt, she didn’t really need her hands, and now they had left the road again, she might have more experience riding in this rough terrain than the soldier did. He wasn’t sure Farait would leave him to chase after her.
The instant they set off, the snow he had feared for more than a day finally began to fall. It was coming down thick and fast, a blizzard such as those Tabbi sorcerers had never seen. Havec was sick with fear for the girl, and he would have been looking back over his shoulder with every step, but he couldn’t move his head.
***
Qanath watched Havec until he vanished amidst the thick branches of the evergreens, and she wasn’t sure which of them she was more worried for. She had had no inkling, until he collapsed, that the ancient supernatural thing inside him had that sort of liberty. She had imagined the relationship to be more one-sided, the host more firmly in control.
“Shall we?”
She turned around to face the two men with her and amended: one man with a mink on his shoulder. She opened her mouth to say something bracing, but what came out was, “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“It happens.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you implying something?”
Amril chose to put his back to her, making for his horse. “Quite the opposite. I served, if you’ll remember. On the most troubled border in the Empire. I’ve seen a lot of puke in my life, much of it mine.”
He mounted up, and the mink on his shoulder scrambled about until it was facing her. She couldn’t read the expression on its tiny face, if expression there was, but had the sense that its gaze was eager and inquisitive, begging to know why she wasn’t hurrying to come along. Stifling a sigh between her teeth, she made for her own horse. Easy to fight against the other human, but Arandgwail was something else. It wasn’t so much that he had saved her life, she thought, as the puzzled way he’d looked at her when she tried to thank him for it. The shyin was such an alien creature, and she had always been taught that they had virtually no will of their own. Yet he had leapt into the path of that man who meant to murder her and he had not been told.
The instant she was up, she thought to say, “Are we just going to chase it? It’s afoot, we’re mounted, we’re going to catch it up in a matter of minutes. Should we have a plan?”
The sorcerer watched her through eyes narrowed down to slits, as if he was thinking rather less on her question than on whether he meant to take offense. He turned away abruptly, gesturing down the twin ruts of the trail. “I wasn’t going to suggest we follow it. It went into the woods heading north, and if we’re making for this town on the coast, the road will be the better way.”
Feeling thwarted, she flapped her reins until her horse got the hint and started off down the trail. She couldn’t recall that she had ever used to bait people and pick fights as a means of coping with her own anxieties and wondered if Havec was rubbing off on her. Right now, she felt like she could do with a dose of his brashness and didn’t recoil from the thought. This would have been so much easier to face if he were here, as much for the moral support as the strength of his swords.
“You have a plan of your own?” Amril asked when he caught her up on the trail.
“I was thinking about what you said yesterday,” she admitted. “About how something went wrong. When we found Havec’s dad in that cave, he told us he was after a new body, and it looked like the old one wasn’t working. You saw how he couldn’t really move.”
“And now he’s moving as easily as a living man, except he doesn’t seem to be steering the ship,” the sorcerer supplied, as if he too had wondered at this.
“Hib told us they were sacrificing to this god, trying to win its ear, but you’re the one who pointed out how upset the Queen was when she realized the god was walking the world in the flesh. Like that wasn’t what they meant to do. She blamed Havec for it.”
“You’re thinking, when his father realized his bid for immortality had won him the rest of time trapped in a frozen corpse in a cave, he changed the plan? Cut a different deal?”
“You have to wonder. If he didn’t sell himself to give the god a door into hagila ra’ir.” A thought struck her, and she added, “And why people don’t do it more often, if it’s possible.”
“If only we’d thought to ask the priest more questions while we could,” Amril added, sounding annoyed.
