Zara Veylinn's Arc

Chapter 4 of 12

Zex breathed shallow against the broken wall. Zara crouched beside him and listened. Boots hit the road on the far side of the stones. Three sets, maybe four, spread out and slow. The hound had done its work on the cart driver, and the guards had come out from the gate to find the cause of the scream. She had minutes before they swept this stretch of grass and found the ditch her boots had cut. She pressed her palm to Zex's mouth before he could speak. His purple eyes went wide, then still. She pointed at the wall, then at the fog thickening in the low field behind it. He gave one small nod. Blood had dried along his jaw. He understood he was a body they would carry or a body they would leave. A guard called out from the road. A second answered. The voices were close enough that Zara could hear the click of a crossbow catch. She counted her choices. She could run and be seen. She could hide and be found. She could send the hound at them and paint her own name across every mouth in the capital by nightfall. She chose a fourth thing. She pressed the ring and thought the hound toward the far ditch, past the guards, into the deep green rot rolling in from the fields. The spectral shape peeled off from her side and slid low through the grass. Where it passed, the sickly fog thinned and then boiled up behind it in a wall. She heard a guard shout about the miasma turning. She heard another curse and pull back. The rot chased them, and they chased the rot, and both moved away from the wall. She got Zex under his arms and dragged him along the base of the stones. The wall ran toward a shuttered building at the edge of the outer road. Its door hung crooked on one hinge. She kicked it open and pulled him inside onto the dust. She shut the door with her shoulder and slid down against it. Her arms shook. Zex coughed once into his sleeve and did not cry out. He watched her from the floor. "You could have left me on the road," he said. His voice was thin but steady. "You could leave me here." She did not answer. She pulled the ring out from under her tunic and closed her fist around it until the seal cut her palm. Outside, the boots moved off toward the fields. The gate stood a hundred paces away, unwatched for the first time since she had reached it. She had one day left, a witness who now owed her his life twice, and an open road to a gate she still could not walk through in daylight. She wiped blood from her hand on her tunic and began to think about the dark.