Snow Like Ashes (8 page)

I know you two grew up together, but he’s our future king. He’s too important to allow anything more than friendship.

My pulse thunders as Mather’s words warp with Sir’s, conflicting bits of knowledge that make me dizzy. Mather
is
too important to waste on me. But—

I ease my hand into his, his coarse fingers swallowing mine. Like he’d been waiting for me to reciprocate.

No.

My fingers uncurl, slowly, and I slide my hand out of his. It’ll hurt too much when it ends. Not if—
when
. When he marries some foreign dignitary’s daughter. When he moves on.

I peel my eyes from him, unable to see whatever emotion flares across his face, if anything, when I pull away. Night throws a number of shadows onto the reaching, clawing fingers of scraggy trees and bushes by the stream, and a gust of wind makes a few of the shadows waver, bulks of darkness that swagger like shuffling boars—

I freeze.

Those aren’t shadows.

Everything in my body screams with warning and I curse Herod a million times over for stealing my chakram.

“Mather.” The strain in my voice pulls him out of the tension between us. I can feel when he sees them, his posture sharpening. The bodies in the trees move again, five of them—Spring scouts.

One of the men eases out from behind a tree, standing in full view. He knows we see him. He tips his head, body masked in the darkness of early evening, and I can imagine the smile tugging at his mouth.
My master will be thrilled I found you.

The other scouts follow his lead, materializing from the grass and bushes until they stand before us, shoulder to shoulder, hands twitching at their waists. Waiting for us to move. One snaps his head toward the horse pen and back again so quickly I wouldn’t have caught it if I’d blinked. They’re going to steal our horses to get back to Spring; they probably abandoned their own a few hours back to avoid being spotted. They’ll try to kill some of us before they leave, to whittle our numbers even lower before they tell Angra where we are so he can stage the final strike. So he can be the one to kill Mather himself.

We can’t let them return to Spring.

We need weapons. We need to alert the others. We need to—

Mather makes a decision before I do, grabbing my hand and dragging me into camp. I flip one last look behind me. The five soldiers move, tearing over the grass toward the horse pen.

This is my fault. They tracked me. I led them here from Lynia, straight here, because Sir is right—I
am
just a child who shouldn’t be fighting in a war.

Mather pulls me faster and something bounces out of the collar of his leather breastplate. The locket half. It gleams in the setting sun’s light, faint and flickering in the shadows, yet embedded with powerful and fiery potential. It’s Winter’s essence.

I rip my hand out of his. “Warn Sir!”

Mather skids to a stop but I’m already gone, surging into my tent. His voice fades behind me as he starts running again, drawing closer to the others and farther from me.

“Scouts!” he shouts. “Scouts, five of them—”

Finn has a chakram too. I find it along with a holster as Sir bellows from the other end of camp.

“All right, new chakram,” I mutter. “It’s time to let Herod know we don’t appreciate being followed.”

CHAPTER 7

MY WHOLE BODY
coils like a tightly wound spring as I rush back toward the horse pen. In the dark I can barely make out the five shapes moving around our horses, throwing saddles and bridles and cursing at each other to hurry.

“Meira!”

Sir’s voice slams into me, warped with panic, and a small part of me leaps with desperation, wanting to hide until whatever is scaring the adults goes away. He tears past me, and to keep up I have to pump every bit of energy into my legs as I sprint over the grass. Everyone else is close behind—Dendera, Finn, Greer, Mather, and Henn. Alysson is the only one not among us, the only nonfighter in our group.

The scouts don’t pause as we draw near, don’t whip out weapons or try to slow us down; they just hurl themselves with renewed vigor into freeing the horses. The Spring soldier nearest to me uses a knife to saw at the rope tying a mount to the fence. I lurch to a stop and my new chakram flies from my palm, slicing through the soldier’s neck in a quick, smooth hiss of motion before rebounding into my hand. The soldier jerks back like he smacked into a wall, the knife slipping from his fingers as he falls, knees clunking into the grass, mouth agape at the starry sky above him.

I leap over the fence and into the horse pen alongside everyone else, a wave of Winterian death. The soldier I killed lies in a heap next to where I land, and I can’t stop myself from looking at his face. He’s young. Of course he’d be young. Not all soldiers are withered in years, covered in the blood of all the people they’ve killed, ready to die themselves.

I swallow. There’s no room for emotion in war—another saying of Sir’s.

Two of the men turn to form a makeshift barrier between one of their comrades, almost mounted on a horse, and us. Expressions murderous, they take in the soldier I killed and reach for the swords at their waists. But Sir is running, gaining on them, and they don’t know it, but they’re already dead.

Sir kicks off the fence and hurls himself into the air, curved knives in each hand. His blades flash in the night, graceful and deadly, and he arches like a snake preparing to strike. The armed soldiers haven’t even fully swung to face him when Sir lands on the first, sliding the knives through the soldier’s neck and into his torso. The force of the landing throws that soldier into the next one, and when Sir rips the knives free from the body, he uses the motion to slice the other soldier’s throat. The two men fall, gurgling as blood pulses out of the wounds in their necks, while Sir pivots to the soldier they tried to protect, the one still fumbling to free the horse.

The man scrambles to face Sir, his eyes dropping to the bodies at his feet. “Please,” he whimpers and grabs at the horse, misses, falls to the ground between the two men Sir killed. “Please—I beg you—”

Sir towers over him. “Where is your weapon?” His voice sends tremors of warning across my skin, the first sensation I’ve felt since I killed the soldier.

The soldier cowers. “I don’t—”

Sir grabs a sword from the hand of a nearby dead man and thrusts it hilt first at the blubbering soldier, who hesitates. “Take it,” Sir growls.

The soldier takes the sword. The moment the blade is fully in his grip, Sir lunges, slamming his knives into the soldier’s chest. Cloudy eyes stare at me as the man’s mouth bobs up and down, begging for one last breath, just one—

One final dying moan, and he drops weightless alongside the other Spring soldiers.

Night makes the dead men look like nothing more than glistening bodies curled in sleep. When the sun comes, it will reveal the blood, the gore, streaks of red covering the grass inside the horse pen. A tangy iron stench hovers over the area, making my lungs burn. It should rain, a thundering, screaming storm, to wash all this away. The remnants of five lives—

I stop.

One, two, three, four.

Four. Not five. There were five soldiers, weren’t there?

I scan the area. Dendera and Mather straighten the saddles and other supplies the Spring soldiers tore through. Greer, Henn, and Finn poke through the corpses, taking weapons. Sir crouches over his kills, wiping the blood off his knives with one of the men’s shirts.

And just behind Sir, behind the horse that the last man had been trying to mount, a piece of rope dangles from the fence next to the open gate. Cut.

My arms tremble with dread before I even get his name out of my mouth. “Sir.”

He looks at me, sheathing his knives.

I point to the dangling rope and open gate. “There were five scouts.”

Sir turns and stares at the rope. His eyes flick beyond it and there, already a small speck on the horizon, is the last soldier barreling in a cloud of dust on one of our horses. The man is far enough out of range to be uncatchable. He’ll tell Angra where we are.

Anxiety pours into my stomach, filling me with the knowledge of what’s going to happen next. Sir pivots to face me, his eyes leaping from me to Dendera to Finn to everyone.
No, don’t say it, don’t—

“We’re leaving. Now. Pack only what’s necessary,” Sir announces, already untying horses from the fence. “Convene north of the camp in five minutes.”

His words smack into me. “We’re running?” I squeak, holstering the chakram. “Can’t we just—”

Sir steps toward me, and even in the dark I can see his eyes are bloodshot. That’s the only way he ever shows emotion, in his eyes. “I will not take chances, not when we’re finally so close. Start packing or mount a horse.”

He spins away, taking a few steps through the grass until he reaches Mather, grabs his arm, and hisses something that makes the expression on Mather’s face mimic the shocked, angry one on my own. Sir hurries to the rest, spitting the same orders at them—pack what you can, no time to waste. They separate, scurrying into camp to obey him.

Sir doesn’t see them as he talks. His eyes dart across the horizon, stoic, calm. A boulder in the ocean, standing strong against crashing waves. Herod may be big and dark, but Sir is big and light—just as towering, just as threatening, with strength built on the pure pull of revenge.

With him leading us, how did we ever lose to Angra?

“Meira.”

I flinch. My focus was so fixed on Sir that I didn’t hear Mather approach. He smiles, but it’s marred by the sweat streaked across his cheek, by the panic around us.

“You let me sneak up on you?” he guesses, trying for lightness.

I shrug. “I have to let you think you’re good at something.”

He nods, lips relaxing as he watches me with a calm, solemn stare. Like we’ve never had to abandon camp or run off separately into the night until we all reconvened somewhere safe. We’ve done this at least a dozen times since we were small enough to remember, but he’s looking at me now like he’s never had to leave me before.

“Mather?” It comes out as a question.

He swings toward me, stops, pulls back, dancing around like he can’t gather up the courage to do something. My throat closes, shock choking me, not letting me dare hope that he’s going to do what I think—

Finally he sweeps in and lifts me against him. A tight, whole-body hug as his arms come around my back, holding me to his chest with my feet dangling in the air, his face in my neck.

“I’ll find a way to fix this,” he tells me, his words vibrating across my skin, tremors that shake my very foundation.

Slowly, carefully, I relax into him, my arms going around his neck. “I know,” I whisper. When he starts to put me down I cling more tightly, keeping my mouth to his ear. I have to say these words, but I can’t bring myself to look at him as they spill from my lips. “We all know, Mather. You’ll do everything you can for Winter. No one has ever thought less of you, and I think—I know—that Hannah would be proud that you’re her son.”

He doesn’t respond, just holds me there, panting into the space between us. I want to push my face down to his; I want to stay like this, lingering just short of kissing, forever. The conflicting desires make my pulse accelerate until I’m sure he can feel its rhythm beating on his chest. I can feel his, the fast thump of his heart galloping against my stomach.

In a quick burst of motion he sets me down, slides one hand around the back of my neck, and plants a kiss on my jaw, his lips lingering on my skin, leaving permanent trails of lightning in my veins. His chest deflates, the tension on his face unwinding as he pulls back from me. I catch a glimmer in his eyes, the finest sheen of tears. He doesn’t say anything or agree with me or do more than give my fingers one final squeeze.

Then he’s gone. Hurrying into camp to pack or saddle his horse or whatever Sir ordered him to do.

I stand in the middle of the horse pen, one hand on my jaw. My eyes flick up, searching for Mather amidst the chaos.

What was
that
?

But I know what it was. Or at least, I know what I want it to be—what I’ve always wanted it to be. What I constantly have to tell myself can never, ever be. But why now, in the midst of leaving, when I can’t corner him and make him explain or figure out some way to ignore that it even happened? Because it did happen. My jaw feels like it’s been branded by his mouth, and no matter how many times I repeat, “He’s our future king” to myself, I can’t get the impression of Mather’s lips out of my skin.

I don’t
want
to get their impression out of my skin.

Sir slides in front of me, dragging two horses already saddled. “Pack your things.”

I yank my hand down. Mather’s words and his lips and his arms around me fade to the back of my mind, and I hold them there, anchors in the face of all this uncertainty.

“No,” I growl at Sir.
No, we can’t just leave. We have to stay; we have to plan something better than running.
“I can’t let them—”

In one swift motion, Sir grabs my arm and flings me onto the nearest saddled horse. He leaps onto his own and takes both my reins and his, shooting me a glare that tells me not to argue.

His glares have never stopped me before. “We can’t let them destroy this home too!”

Alysson and Dendera swing onto their own mounts as we trot out of the horse pen. We ease to a brief stop in front of the meeting tent, long enough for Finn, Greer, and Henn to throw passing nods at Sir that yes, everything will be destroyed before we leave. Sir flicks the reins and as we continue I catch the faintest crackle of fire from inside the tent, the pop of flames devouring anything of importance, maps and documents. They probably used the fire pit. We won’t be able to bring it with us. Angra will find it, the only part of our past we possess, filled to the brim with ashes.

As I fumble with the pommel for something to hold on to other than a weapon, Sir’s fist around my reins falls, his hand unfolding just enough to cup mine. It’s so subtle I can’t tell if he’s trying to comfort me or making sure I don’t rip control of the horse away.