Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [157]
“Now just wait. What are you—”
“I’ve got to try to see if I can make it to Cengarn and Carra before the siege closes round.”
“You idiot! You royal dolt!”
“I’m a dolt? If you’d only listened to me we wouldn’t—”
The moment he spoke Dar regretted it. Jennantar reeled back, turning his head as fast as if he’d been slapped with the flat of a sword.
“Jenno, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
“Wasn’t.” Jennantar’s voice was barely audible. “You’re right. I wish I’d died instead of the others.”
Dar tried to speak, found no words, tried again, and then got to his feet, shuddering as if he could physically throw his botched words off and away.
“I’m heading out now,” he said. “If I don’t catch up with you in three days, ride for the south with all the speed you can.”
Jennantar nodded, staring at the ground. Jezryaladar rose.
“Don’t you want a horse?”
“I’ll be harder to find, slipping through the woods on foot.”
Jezryaladar nodded, considering something.
“You should have one of the bows,” he said at last.
“I’ll take it, truly, but only a few arrows. You’ll need them more.”
He waited, desperately searching for something to say to Jennantar, while Jezryaladar counted out their meager stock of arrows and gave him ten, a full quarter of their hoard, to take along with one of the bows. All at once one of the old stories of days of the Seven Kings came back to him, and the wise words of some councillor or other in the long-dead Vale of Roses.
“Jenno,” he said. “No man can turn aside another’s fate, not even me, and I’m a prince of the last of all the royal houses. We were all instruments of Fate today and nothing more. If you forgive me my fault, I’ll forgive you yours.”
Jennantar looked up with tear-filled eyes.
“Done,” he whispered. “And my thanks.”
“And you have mine.”
That said, Dar could turn and leave, heading upstream by the last light of the dying fire.
For two hours Dar kept moving fast, driven by sheer rage for his dead men and terror for the safety of his wife. He kept to the trees, moving from shadow to shadow in the moonless night, concentrating on making no noise, pausing often to listen. Eventually his exhaustion caught up with him. He began stumbling, kicking dead wood, cracking branches like shouts in the night. He found a thick tangle of shrubs and young growth where he could work his way inside to a profoundly uncomfortable but relatively hidden gap, too small to be called a clearing. By sitting just right and curling himself round his drawn-up knees he could drowse in relative safety, though he woke often from dreams of blood running through creeping flames and the sound of Meradan, the demons of the days of old, shrieking as they charged.
Dar woke to a cry in the real world, but one far distant in the graying dawn. For a long while he sat dead-still, listening, but no other cries reached him. Slowly he began to move, working each cramped muscle in turn, letting his circulation return, until he could get up without making noise and work his way free of his shelter. All round him the oak forest was coming to life in the dawn, the leaves shivering in a rising wind, the birds singing and flying. Here and there he could sense animals rustling through the underbrush. They would warn him by falling silent if the clumsy Gel da’Thae came trampling through the woods.
All that morning he worked his way north, keeping to the wild country and angling round to the east, where a rise of hills and forest would shelter him. Every time he felt hungry or tired, he would think of Carra, and her danger drove him worse than any spur or whip. Yet in the end, he found her beyond his reach and protection. Late in the day he came free of the forest, just at the crest of a rise. Down below him a rocky hill fell away to a little valley and a stream, then rose again to a grassy crest, bare except for one scraggly copse of second-growth