Chapter 10: The Snow Trail
The cold was a physical blow, each gasp scraping his torn throat raw. Leonid stumbled, his boot catching on a submerged root. He hit the snow-packed earth with a grunt, the impact jarring up through his injured shoulder in a bright, white flash of agony. For a moment, he just lay there, cheek against the freezing mulch, the world reduced to the pound of his heart and the wet, ragged sound of his own breathing.
Get up.
The voice in his head was not his own. It was his father’s, from a lifetime ago on a sun-drenched field in the south. A man dies on his feet, Leonid. Never let them see you break.
He pushed himself up, one arm trembling violently. The stolen guard’s cloak was sodden with blood from his reopened thigh, heavy as a corpse. He’d torn strips from his own tunic to bind the wound at his neck, but the linen was already saturated, a damp, chilling collar. He tasted iron, constant and thick.
He’d moved on pure instinct after slipping the infirmary’s latch, a ghost in the pre-dawn grey. The memory of the training yard, of her final, icy command in the sickroom, was the fuel. Your Majesty. Each syllable had been a needle driving deeper than any sword tip. The shame of his hope, that somehow in his near-dying, she might… what? Drop her mask? It curdled inside him, colder than the forest.
A branch snapped somewhere behind him, far off but distinct in the crystalline air.
Leonid froze, listening. The wind sighed through the pines. Then he heard it—the faint, eager baying of hounds. They had his scent. Of course they did. He stank of fear and blood and palace liniment.
He lurched forward, his movements clumsy, uncoordinated. The river. The old map in his mind, studied during stolen moments in the palace library, placed a tributary of the great northern river somewhere to the west. If he could reach it, follow it south… it was a threadbare plan, spun from desperation. The water might throw off the hounds. It might also kill him with its cold.
The trees began to thin. Moonlight filtered down, painting the snow in monochrome. His vision swam, dark at the edges. He saw flashes of the past few hours: the lax grip of the guard he’d ambushed for the cloak, the shocking, open expanse of the postern gate, the endless, consuming white of the woods. And her face, a perfect, unreadable oval above him. A queen assessing damaged goods.
“Spread out! He’s bleeding like a stuck pig, he can’t have gone far!”
The voice, rough and carried by the wind, was maybe a hundred yards back. Leonid threw himself behind the broad trunk of a lightning-blasted pine, pressing his body into the blackened wood. He counted three distinct voices, the crunch of many boots.
“King’s gonna be pissed. That southern bastard was her favorite toy.”
“Shoulda finished him in the yard. Cleaner.”
“Nah. More fun this way. Like coursing a hare.”
Their laughter was short, brutal. Leonid closed his eyes. He was the hare. Wounded, exhausted, driven. The hot surge of fury that followed was a blessing; it burned through the cold fatigue for a second. He was Leonid of the fallen Manoban clan. He had taken ten men to their knees before they felled him. He was not a hare.
He pushed off the tree and ran.
It was less a run than a frantic, falling scramble. Every step sent a jolt up his thigh. His shoulder was a dead, throbbing weight. The forest floor dipped into a shallow ravine, and he half-slid, half-tumbled down the frozen incline, grabbing at saplings to slow his descent. At the bottom, a blessed sound: the faint, musical trickle of water over ice.
The stream was narrow, maybe ten feet across, its surface a lacework of brittle ice over dark, rushing water. It glittered in the moonlight. Without hesitation, Leonid stepped into it.
The cold was so intense it stole his breath. It clawed through his boots, his leggings, a thousand sharp teeth biting into his wounds. He gasped, the sound a shredded whisper. He began moving downstream, wading against the current that tugged at his knees, the water numbing his legs to stone. He dragged the soaked cloak behind him, let it trail in the water, hoping it would dilute his scent trail further.
He followed the serpentine path of the stream for what felt like hours, the world reduced to the consuming freeze and the need to place one foot before the other. The baying of the hounds grew frustrated, confused, fading into the distance. Dawn began to bleed a pale grey light through the skeletal trees.
The stream widened, joining a larger, slower-moving river. Here, the ice at the edges was thick, sculpted by the wind into rough waves. Leonid hauled himself out onto a shelf of it, his body shaking uncontrollably. His clothes were frozen plates against his skin. He needed shelter. Fire. Or he would be dead by midday, a picturesque statue for the crows.
Ahead, the river curved around a rocky outcrop. Tucked against the stone, half-hidden by a fallen pine, was a dark shape—a trapper’s hut, maybe, or a forgotten hunter’s blind. It was little more than a lean-to of weathered planks and peat, but it was the first sign of human hands he’d seen that didn’t mean a cage.
He crawled toward it. The door was a loose-hanging animal hide, frozen stiff. He pushed it aside.
The interior was dark, smelling of old smoke, earth, and animal fat. It was empty. A crude stone hearth held cold ashes. A pile of moth-eaten furs lay in a corner. It was a tomb. It was sanctuary.
Leonid collapsed onto the furs. The tremors wracking his body made his teeth chatter violently. He knew, distantly, that he needed to tend his wounds, to build a fire. But the cold had sunk into his marrow. The darkness at the edges of his vision was spreading, warm and inviting.
Just sleep. It’s over.
He saw Jennie again. Not the queen on her throne, but Jennie in her chambers during her last heat, her face softened in the lamplight, her fingers tracing the scar on his ribs. You are the only real thing in this whole stone lie, she had whispered, her scent all honey and longing, unmasked. It had felt true. It had felt like a shared secret, a stolen truth.
Then he saw her in the infirmary doorway, the suppressant a bitter halo around her, her eyes as empty as the snow outside.
The pain in his chest eclipsed the pain in his throat. He had loved her. He, a slave, had dared to love a queen. And she had watched him bleed out for an emissary’s entertainment and called him it.
A final, savage tremor racked him. He fumbled with the clasp of the stolen cloak, his fingers numb and useless. He needed the furs over him. He needed to move. But his body was shutting down, betraying him one sense at a time.
The last thing he was aware of, as the darkness pulled him under, was not the cold. It was the lingering, phantom scent of her chemical perfume, clinging to the inside of his own nostrils, the last vestige of the cage he had finally, blessedly, escaped.