Prince Dono's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The path climbed steeper than Dono remembered. Wind cut through his coat, sharp and cold. He kept his head down and followed the narrow trail between the rocks. The pass opened ahead, a gap between two peaks where the lodge waited on the other side. He stepped onto the flat ground and stopped. Fresh tracks cut across the snow. Horse tracks, deep and clear. Someone had ridden through within the hour. Dono knelt and traced the edge of one print with his finger. Not her. She'd left on foot. Someone else had come this way. Someone who knew where she was going. Movement near the far ridge caught his eye. A figure stood beside a stone forge built into the mountainside, smoke rising from its chimney. The creature was half man, half horse, hammering at something on an anvil. A centaur. Dono had heard stories but never seen one. The centaur looked up, studied him, then returned to his work. Dono approached slowly. "The rider who passed through," he said. "Where did they go?" The centaur set down his hammer. "Two riders," he said. "The woman went to the lodge an hour past. The soldier followed ten minutes ago." Dono's chest tightened. A soldier. His father must have sent someone after all, someone who knew the path as well as he did. The centaur watched him with dark, knowing eyes. "You won't reach her first on foot," he said. Dono looked at the tracks leading down toward the lodge, then back at the centaur. He had no money, no leverage, nothing to trade. "I need a horse," he said. The centaur shook his head. "I shoe them. I don't rent them." Dono stood there, useless and empty-handed, watching his one chance disappear down the mountain. Then he saw it. A gold coin lay in the snow near the tethering post, half-buried where the soldier's horse had stamped. Foreign script ran around its edge. He picked it up and held it out to the centaur. "This fell from the soldier's saddle," Dono said. The centaur took the coin, turned it over in his palm, and bit it with his teeth. He studied Dono for a long moment. "Why do you chase her?" he asked. Dono opened his mouth to give the answer he'd rehearsed a hundred times on the climb up. Something about duty. Something about honor. But the centaur's eyes were too direct, and the mountain was too empty of witnesses. "Because she doesn't need me to be anything," Dono said. The words came out rough and true. "And I want to know what that feels like." The centaur nodded once. He pointed to a brown mare tied beyond the forge. "Take her. She knows the way down." Dono rode hard down the slope, snow spraying from the mare's hooves. The lodge came into view through the trees, small and thatched, with flowers still blooming impossibly in pots by the door. Smoke rose from the chimney. A soldier's horse stood tied outside, still saddled. Dono dismounted and approached the door. Through the window, he saw two figures. The woman sat at a small table, her hood pushed back. The soldier stood between her and the door, his hand on his sword. Dono had reached the lodge. But he was still too late. The question now was whether he would go in as the prince they expected, or as the man who had just told the truth to a stranger on a mountain.