Chapter 18: The Keeper's Oath
The decision to ride was a cold stone in Ria’s gut. Willow Shore. The map. It was a direction, but it was also a delay. The peninsula was weeks away by land, less by sea if they could find a ship willing to risk imperial waters. They stood in the ruined common room, the map spread between them, arguing in harsh whispers.
“We go back to the capital, muster the fleet,” Lyon insisted, his finger stabbing the chart. “We don’t even know what we’re sailing into. We need force.”
“Force he’ll see coming,” Caspian countered, his voice low. “If he’s moving assets, he’s on a timeline. A royal squadron takes time to provision. He’ll have watchers on every southern port.”
Ria wasn’t listening. She was staring at the blackened archway that led to what was left of the stables. The Alpha had slipped away from her side, nosing through the debris. He let out a soft whuff, then a low, questioning grumble. Not a warning. A notice.
“Lyon,” she said, cutting through their debate.
He followed her gaze. The Alpha was standing before a collapsed stall, his head cocked, one paw scratching at a bulky, half-buried shape. Not timber. A body.
They moved as one. Lyon and a guard heaved the charred planking aside. The man beneath was in the singed remains of an imperial courier’s uniform. He was alive, but the smell of burnt leather and seared flesh was thick around him. One of his legs was twisted unnaturally, the fabric of his trousers fused to the skin. His chest rose and fell in shallow, wet hitches.
Caspian knelt, his face grim. “Emeric?”
The courier’s eyes fluttered open. They were a clouded blue, swimming with pain. They fixed on Caspian, and a kind of desperate recognition flickered there. “P-prince…?” The word was a bubbled exhalation.
“It’s me, Emeric. What happened here?”
“Orders… direct from the Usurper’s hand.” Emeric’s gaze drifted to Lyon’s southern insignia, then to Ria. It lingered on her grey eyes, confusion warring with agony. He coughed, a splash of dark blood staining his chin. “Came to retrieve the secure chest… and burn the rest. My horse… spooked by the flames. Beam fell.”
His hand, blistered and black, scrabbled at his own chest. Beneath the ruined uniform, something crackled. Caspian gently pulled out a leather dispatch tube, its wax seal—a stark, sharp T—still intact.
“The message,” Emeric gasped, his voice failing. “Priority. For the… the Willow Shore keep. ‘Immediate transfer of all primary assets to the Stormdancer. The two juvenile subjects are to be sedated for transport.’” He swallowed with obvious difficulty. “The… the ship sails with the evening tide from Cove Blackrock. Today. He knows… he knows someone is coming. He’s running with them.”
Ria’s world narrowed to a single, silent point. The stable’s ruined roof framed a slice of grey, turbulent sky. Juvenile subjects. Sedated for transport. The words from the letter—harvested, successor lines—crystallized into a image so sharp it pierced the numb shell around her mind: small forms, limp on a cot, being carried onto a dark ship.
She didn’t feel the tremble that usually lived in her hands. She felt nothing at all. A perfect, chilling stillness.
Caspian broke the seal on the tube, sliding out the single sheet within. His eyes scanned it. He gave a tight, grim nod. “It’s authentic. Orders signed by Theron’s own chancellor. Cove Blackrock. That’s a hidden imperial anchorage, north of the peninsula. A fast ship could make it in two days with this wind.”
Lyon was already calculating, his face like granite. “We’re three hours from our outpost at the River Sellen. They have swift cutters for patrols. Not warships. But fast.”
Emeric’s breathing grew more ragged, the pauses between each inhale stretching longer. His clouded eyes found Ria again. “You… you have her eyes. The lost one. The ghost they kept in Sector Seven.” A final, rattling breath escaped him. “He never meant for you to grow up.”
Then he was still.
The silence in the ruined stable was absolute, broken only by the faint creak of cooling timber. The Alpha whined softly, nuzzling the dead man’s hand, then came to sit against Ria’s leg, a solid weight of fur and warmth.
Ria bent down and pried the dispatch from Caspian’s fingers. The paper was crisp, official. She didn’t read it. She folded it once, carefully, and placed it with the other letter inside her tunic. Two pieces of proof. Two death warrants.
She looked at her brother, then at the prince. Her voice, when it came, was quiet, devoid of anything but a final, terrible certainty. It was the sound of a door closing deep inside her.
“We don’t go back to the capital,” she said. “We go to your River Sellen. We take the fastest cutter they have.” She turned her flat, grey eyes toward the north, as if she could already see the dark shape of a ship called Stormdancer cutting through the waves. “We intercept him at sea.”
Lyon opened his mouth to protest, to list the risks—a cutter against a possible imperial frigate, the unpredictability of the open sea, the madness of it. But he saw her face. He saw the ghost of the little sister he’d mourned replaced by something that had been forged in the dark, something that recognized only one path: forward.
He simply nodded. “We ride hard. No stops.”
Caspian rose, looking from the dead courier to Ria. The hunted fear in his own eyes had been refined now, tempered into a sharp edge of resolve. Theron was moving. He had the children. And he was trying to flee. It changed the game from a pursuit to a hunt.
“The tide is at evening,” Caspian said, striding toward the horses. “He’ll want to be clear of the coast by nightfall. We have time. But only if we move now.”
They left the courier in the ashes of the stable, a silent sentinel for a burned-out neutral ground. As Ria swung up into her saddle, the Alpha let out a short, sharp bark. He looked toward the distant palace, then up at her, conflicted.
“Go,” she commanded him, her voice softening only for him. “Guard your family. We will bring mine home.”
The wolf hesitated, then touched his nose to her boot. He turned and melted into the skeletal city, a grey shadow returning to its own. Ria watched him go for a second, then gathered her reins. She didn’t look back at the Eagle’s Rest.
Lyon took the lead, setting a brutal pace north. The wind picked up, carrying the distant salt smell of a sea they could not yet see, and the promise of a storm.
The wind picked up, carrying the distant salt smell of a sea they could not yet see, and the promise of a storm.
Ria gripped the saddle horn, the leather biting into her palm. Each jolting stride of the horse sent a deep, sickening ache through her lower abdomen, a hollow pain that was five days old and still raw. She kept her jaw locked, breathing in shallow sips, her knuckles white against the worn leather.
The landscape began to change, the burned fields giving way to scrubby pines that whispered and hissed in the gathering wind. Lyon glanced back at her, his eyes narrowed. “You’re grey, Ria. We can walk the horses for a few minutes.”
“No,” she said, the word clipped. She fixed her gaze on the horizon where the pines met the turbulent sky. “The tide won’t wait for me to catch my breath.”
Caspian watched her from his own saddle, noting the fine tremor in her shoulders she couldn’t suppress. He’d seen that particular pallor before, on palace servants who’d suffered complications in the downstairs quarters. A cold understanding settled in his gut, merging with his own memories of blood on marble. He guided his horse closer to hers, his voice low enough that only she might hear.
“The map said Cove Blackrock is all sharp granite and nasty crosscurrents,” he said, as if discussing the weather. “Even with the tide, the Stormdancer will need careful piloting out of the cove. That costs time.”
Ria nodded, a tight jerk of her chin. She clung to that fact, a slender thread of hope. The pain was a wall she had to breathe through, a separate thing from the engine of her will. She thought of the two who cried. Their faces were blurred smudges in her memory, but the sounds were etched clear: a newborn’s indignant wail, a toddler’s fussy whimper. She was thirteen. Then she was fifteen. They took the babies and the warm feeling always followed, leaving her empty and confused.
Now she had words for it. Juvenile subjects. Assets. Daughters.
“Tell me about the cutters at Sellen,” she said to Lyon, forcing her voice to be steady, forcing her mind to work on logistics instead of the cramp tightening its fist inside her.
“Light, fast, single sail,” Lyon replied, riding beside her. He kept his tone matter-of-fact, but his eyes kept scanning her face. “Built for chasing smugglers in the delta. Not for open ocean storms, but for speed in a straight line? Nothing better.”
“How many can it hold?”
“Us, maybe four crew. Tight fit.” He paused. “We’ll be sitting ducks if that frigate has archers.”
“We’ll have to get close enough that archers don’t matter,” Caspian said. His mind was already churning through naval tactics he’d studied but never used. “Board her. It’s the only way.”
A sharp gust of wind slapped rain against them, cold and biting. Ria flinched, and the movement sent a fresh wave of nausea through her. She swayed in the saddle. For a terrifying second, the world tilted, the dark trees blurring. She felt a hand clamp onto her elbow, steadying her.
It was Caspian. He held on just long enough to ensure her balance had returned, then let go as if nothing had happened. He didn’t look at her. “This storm might help us. If it gets rough enough, it becomes a knife-fight between ships, not an arrow-volley.”
The path descended into a rocky gully, the horses sliding on wet stone. The jolting was agony. Ria bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper, focusing on that bright, sharp taste. She would not fall. She could not. Somewhere ahead, on a ship named for a storm, two girls were being carried onto a deck, sedated, cargo to be relocated. Harvested. The words from the burned chest were a drumbeat in her head.
They reached the bottom of the gully where a shallow, frantic stream churned. “Rest the horses here,” Lyon commanded, swinging down. “Water them. Two minutes.”
Ria didn’t argue this time. She practically fell from the saddle, her legs buckling as they hit the ground. She caught herself on the horse’s flank, breathing hard, forehead pressed against the damp, rough hair. The world pulsed behind her eyelids.
Lyon was there, thrusting a waterskin into her hand. “Drink. Slowly.”
She obeyed, the water shockingly cold. Caspian was checking his horse’s hooves, but his attention was on the tree line behind them. “No sign of pursuit from the capital,” he murmured. “He’s confident. Or he’s pulled all his men to the coast.”
“He’s scared,” Ria whispered, straightening up. A cold sweat plastered her braid to her neck. “That dispatch was a panic move. He found the courier dead at the Eagle’s Rest. He knows someone has his plans.” She looked from her brother to the prince, her grey eyes gleaming with a hard, exhausted light. “He doesn’t know it’s us. He just knows he’s been uncovered. That makes him reckless.”
Lyon helped her back into the saddle. His hands were gentle, but his expression was fierce. “Can you keep going?”
Ria took the reins, her body one unified ache. She thought of two little girls she’d last heard crying. She nodded.
“Then let’s go introduce ourselves,” Lyon said, mounting up.
He kicked his horse into a gallop, charging up the far side of the gully. Caspian followed. Ria dug her heels in, clutching the horn as her horse lunged forward, the motion tearing a silent gasp from her throat. She rode into the pain, through it, the salt wind now strong in her face, the first true drops of the storm beginning to fall.