Chapter 28: Travel
The camp dissolved into controlled chaos within the hour, a process that was somehow both frantic and silent. Orders were hissed, not shouted. Tents came down like wilting flowers. The dead scout’s companion was left with two men at the now-useless way station, instructions to wait for their return or send word if they didn’t. There were no grand words for the lost man. Only a shared, grim look that settled over the company like a second frost.
The Hunter’s Track wasn’t a road. It was a suggestion, a scratch along the mountain’s bony spine, half-swallowed by thorny undergrowth and forgotten by sane travelers. Dawn found them strung along it in a single, vulnerable line, the wagon groaning in protest as the horses leaned into their harnesses, hooves scrabbling for purchase on the wet stone.
Sloane rode directly ahead of the wagon, her spine a rod of iron. Every lurch, every sharp tilt, travelled up through her saddle and into her teeth. She could hear Elara inside, speaking to Kael in a steady, cheerful murmur that was more heroic than any sword thrust.
“Look there, poppet, see how the mist hangs in the trees like gauze? They say forest spirits weave their cloaks from that.”
“Are there spirits here?” Kael’s voice, thin with awe, filtered through the canvas.
“Only the friendly sort,” Elara lied smoothly. “The kind that like little boys who eat all their journey-bread.”
Ronan rode at the head of the line, shoulders set against the steep grade. He was a silhouette against the grey morning, turning occasionally to scan the column, his gaze inevitably finding Sloane’s before flicking to the wagon and then back to the treacherous path ahead. His vigilance was a tangible thing, a third presence on the trail.
The first day on the Track was a grinding exercise in muscle and will. The air grew thinner, biting at the lungs. Patches of old snow lingered in deep crevices, and a cold drizzle began by mid-morning, making the stone slick as grease. Progress was measured in yards, not miles.
During a brief halt to rest the horses, Sloane dismounted and vaulted into the wagon. Kael was wrapped in a fur, a wooden knight in his hands. His face was pale, but his eyes were bright.
“Are we having an adventure, Mama?” he asked.
“The most adventurous,” she said, brushing a curl from his forehead. It was cool. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Are you warm enough?”
“Elara says I’m a little furnace.”
“She’s right.” Sloane squeezed his foot through the blanket. “What’s your knight’s name?”
“Sir Grumpy,” Kael said, holding up the figure. “Because he has to ride in a wagon and doesn’t get a horse.”
A laugh, sudden and sharp, escaped her. It felt like cracking ice. “Even knights need a rest sometimes.” She looked at Elara, who gave a slight, reassuring nod. All was well. For now.
Back outside, Ronan was chewing on a strip of dried meat, his eyes on the craggy peaks above them. “He’s alright?”
“He’s naming his toys after us,” Sloane said, taking a waterskin from her saddle.
The ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Which one am I?”
“Sir Grumpy.”
He snorted, a short, surprised sound. “Accurate.” He offered her the meat. She tore off a piece. It tasted like salt and dust. “Path gets narrower about half a league ahead. There’s a section where the cliff face sheers away on the left. The drop is… significant. The wagon will have maybe a hand’s breadth of clearance.”
“Can it make it?”
“It has to.” He crumpled the remaining meat in his fist. “We lighten it. Everyone walks except the driver. We brace the outside wheels with ropes, men on the cliffside to anchor it.”
“You’ve done this before.”
“Not with my son in the back.” He said it plainly. “We go slow. One wrong step, one spooked horse…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
The place was worse than he described. The Track became a ledge, a pale scar against the dark rock. To the right, the mountain rose sheer and indifferent. To the left, the world fell away into a dizzying void, the river below a distant, furious white thread of sound. The wind here had a voice, a constant, whimpering keen as it funnelled through the pass.
Sloane’s mouth went dry. She stood with the other dismounted soldiers, her shoulder pressed against the cold, wet stone of the mountain, her hand outstretched to touch the passing planks of the wagon as if her touch could steady it. The drivers, men with faces like seasoned leather, whispered to the horses. The animals’ eyes were wide, showing white, their ears flat against their skulls.
“Easy now, easy, you great lump of courage,” one driver soothed, his voice a rhythmic chant. “Just a little farther, just a little more.”
Kael was silent inside. Sloane couldn’t bear it. “Kael?” she called, her voice tight.
“Yes, Mama?”
“Count the clouds for me. How many can you see from your window?”
A pause. “Seven. No, eight! One is hiding behind the big grumpy one.”
“Good. Keep counting.” She locked eyes with Ronan, who was on the far side, his own back against the mountain, his hand on the bridle of the lead horse. His expression was utterly focused, a man translating pure will into physical reality. The wagon wheels creaked, skittering on loose scree. A small avalanche of pebbles cascaded over the edge, disappearing into silence.
Time stretched, thin and screaming. Inch by agonizing inch, the wagon crawled past the precipice. Sloane’s muscles burned from the tension of pressing against the rock, as if she could physically hold the mountain together. Finally, the path widened into a merciful, muddy gully sheltered by an overhang. The wagon cleared the drop.
A collective, shivering exhale went through the company. Ronan gave a sharp nod to the drivers, then his eyes found Sloane’s. In them was no triumph, only the acknowledgment of a hazard passed, and the silent calculation of how many remained.
They made a wretched camp that night in the gully, sheltered from the worst of the wind but not from the damp chill that seeped up from the ground. A hot meal was impossible; they chewed more dried meat and hard biscuit. Kael fell asleep almost immediately after eating, exhausted by the unspoken fear of the day.
Sloane sat with her back against a wagon wheel, a wool blanket around her shoulders. Ronan sat a few feet away, sharpening a dagger on a whetstone with slow, rhythmic strokes. The sound was almost peaceful.
“Three days, you said,” Sloane murmured, watching the fire sputter.
“If we don’t freeze or fall first.” He tested the edge of the blade with his thumb. “Your southern lords must want you very badly gone to force us onto this.”
“They don’t know we’re here. They think we’re stuck at a broken bridge, arguing about what to do next.” She pulled the blanket tighter. “That’s our only advantage. Surprise.”
“An advantage we lose the moment we descend into the Vale.” He sheathed the dagger. “We need to know what we’re walking into. Not rumors, not fears. Facts.”
“How? We have no spies that far ahead.”
Ronan was silent for a long moment, watching the weak flame. “We send someone. Not a soldier. A single rider, on a fast horse, taking the lower trails. Someone who can move like a local, listen in taverns, count heads at manor gates.”
“That’s a week’s ride, even if they avoid the mountains.”
“It is. Which means they need to leave tonight. To have any hope of circling back to us with news before we make our… entrance.”
Sloane’s mind raced. It was a risk. Dividing their strength further. But walking into the Southern Vale blind was a greater one. “Who?”
“Alistair volunteered.”
She shook her head immediately. “You need him here. The men trust him.”
“I know.” Ronan’s gaze was unreadable in the dim light. “He suggested someone else. Cerran.”
The young scout. The one who’d nearly fallen with the bridge. He was quick, clever, and from a village near the Southern border. He knew the dialects, the customs. He’d also just watched his friend die. There was a fury in his eyes now that could either make him reckless or brilliantly focused.
“Can he do it without getting himself killed?” Sloane asked.
“I asked him the same. He said, ‘Let me find out, Your Majesty.’” Ronan mimicked the young man’s tight, earnest voice with unsettling accuracy. “He leaves within the hour. With any luck, we’ll see him again somewhere south of here, with a full report and a terrible taste for local ale.”
It was a slender thread of hope. But on the Hunter’s Track, surrounded by the yawning dark and the endless sigh of the wind, it was the only thread they had. Sloane nodded, once. The decision was made.
Later, as she lay beside Kael’s warm, sleeping form, listening to the quiet orders as Cerran was outfitted with the fastest horse and the lightest gear, she stared at the canvas roof. The plan was in motion. They were committed. The only direction was forward, deeper into the mountains, trusting a scared young man to outride the consequences of a royal marriage, and a sabotaged bridge, and a child’s fragile health.
Somewhere in the darkness, a horse’s hooves picked their way carefully down the trail, the sound fading until it was swallowed completely by the immense, waiting silence of the night.
The silence after Cerran’s departure felt deeper, the kind of quiet that pressed on the eardrums. Sloane lay awake for a long time, measuring Kael’s even breaths against the memory of those fading hoofbeats. She finally slept a thin, restless sleep, haunted by visions of bridges that were not bridges, but gaps in the floor of the world.
Morning brought a brittle, crystalline cold and a new problem. During the night, a thin sheet of ice had glazed the track ahead, shimmering treacherously in the weak sun. It was too wide to go around, and the slope too steep to climb above.
“Well, that’s just politely sinister,” Ronan muttered, crouching to examine the ice. He scraped at it with a dagger. It was deceptively thick.
“We could turn back,” a soldier behind them ventured, his voice tight.
“Back to what?” Sloane said, not unkindly. She squinted at the path. “The bridge is rubble, and the men who made it so are likely waiting between it and here. This,” she nodded at the ice, “is just weather. We can negotiate with weather.”
Her mind worked, discarding options. Salt would be useless here. They needed traction. She turned and walked back to the supply wagon, past the nervous horses. She returned with an armful of the rough, woolen blankets they slept on.
“We cut them into strips,” she said, dropping the bundle at Ronan’s feet. “The men wrap their boots. We lay the remnants down for the wagon wheels. It’ll ruin the blankets, but it might get us across.”
Ronan looked from the blankets to her face, a flicker of assessment in his eyes. It wasn’t a queen’s solution. It was a soldier’s field fix. He stood and gave a sharp nod. “Do it. Every man to a knife. Move.”
The company fell to the work with a grim focus. The sound of tearing wool filled the cold air. Soon, the path was littered with dun-colored scraps looking like pathetic offerings to the mountain. Kael watched from the wagon window, fascinated.
“Are we making a wool road, Papa?”
“We are,” Ronan said, tying a strip around his own boot. “A very expensive, very temporary one. Remember this the next time you complain about itchy socks.”
The crossing was a slow, collective act of faith. Each man tested his footing, the wool gripping the ice with a soft, crinkling protest. Sloane went first across the worst section, her body angled against the slope, her movements deliberate and balanced. She turned and nodded to the drivers.
The wagon inched onto the blanket-strewn ice. The horses’ hooves, also wrapped, stamped and slid. The driver’s knuckles were white on the reins. For a terrifying second, the rear wheel skated sideways, sending a shower of wool scraps into the abyss. A soldier lunged, shoving his shoulder against the wagon’s side, his boots scrambling for purchase.
The wagon righted itself with a groan. The company held its breath until the last wheel crunched onto bare stone on the far side. No one cheered. They simply collected themselves, breathing plumes of vapor into the air, and moved on, leaving the sad, fraying path behind them.
By the third day on the Track, a rhythm of shared misery set in. The cold was a constant companion, seeping through layers of wool and leather. Conversation dwindled to necessary commands and the occasional black-humored observation. Sloane found herself riding beside Ronan more often, not for strategy, but for the simple, animal comfort of proximity.
“I keep thinking about the Silverflow,” she said suddenly, her voice raspy from the cold, dry air. The promise felt like a artifact from another lifetime.
Ronan glanced at her. “The fishing trip?”
“The peace. The quiet that isn’t this kind of quiet.” She gestured at the oppressive, watchful silence of the peaks. “I’ve never actually been fishing.”
“I’d guessed.” A faint amusement colored his tone. “You’d try to command the fish to bite. They’re notoriously disobedient subjects.”
“I’d have you to command them for me.” She surprised herself with the remark. It was almost flirtatious, a ghost of the sharp-tongued princess she used to be.
He looked straight ahead, but she saw the corner of his mouth twitch. “A king’s primary duty. We’ll find you a blue one. To match your sigil.”
The path began its long, slow descent out of the highest peaks on the fourth day. The air grew thicker, easier to breathe. Patches of stubborn green appeared in sheltered corners. The relief was palpable, a physical loosening in every shoulder. Even the horses seemed to step with more purpose.
It didn’t last.
They made camp in a high basin just below the tree line, a relatively pleasant spot with a spring of fresh, icy water. Sentries were posted. Standard procedure. But when the shift changed at midnight, one man did not return to the fire.
Alistair found him fifteen minutes later, at the edge of the spring’s clearing. He was face down, not in the water, but beside it. Not dead. A deep, precise gash ran across the back of his thighs, severing the tendons. He was conscious, teeth gritted against a scream, fingers clawing at the pine needles.
He hadn’t seen anyone. Heard nothing. Just a searing pain and collapse. The message was not in his death, but in his maiming. He could not walk. He would slow them for days, a drain on resources, a living, breathing piece of friction.
Ronan examined the wounds in the torchlight, his face a mask of cold fury. The cut was professional. Surgical. “They’re here,” he said, his voice low and flat. “They’ve been here. Watching.”
“Cerran?” Sloane whispered, her hand on her sword hilt, her eyes scanning the black wall of trees.
“If they caught him, we’d know. This is a greeting. They’re telling us our surprise is gone.” He stood, looking from the injured man to the dark forest. “They’re also telling us they don’t want a direct fight. Not yet. They want to unravel us.”
The wounded soldier groaned, his face pale. “Leave me, Your Majesty. I’ll slow the column.”
“We’re not leaving you,” Sloane said instantly, the words leaving no room for debate. It was the wrong tactical decision. They all knew it.
Ronan met her eyes. A silent argument passed between them in the flickering light. Honor versus strategy. The promise to their people versus the safety of their son. He gave a single, terse nod. “We make a litter. We move faster tomorrow.”
But as they turned to organize the grim work, a new sound cut the night. Not from the forest, but from the direction of their own camp. A high, thin wail of sheer terror.
It was Kael’s voice.
Sloane was moving before the sound finished, sword out, feet pounding across the clearing. She burst past the wagon’s guards to see Elara standing rigid in the open wagon flap, a hand over her mouth. Inside, Kael was sitting bolt upright in his bedroll, trembling, pointing a shaky finger at the small, square window.
“A face,” he choked out, his little body shuddering with each gasping breath. “At the window. A bad face.”
Sloane hauled herself into the wagon, gathering him up. He buried his face in her neck, his cries muffled. She looked at the dark, empty window, then at Elara. The older woman’s eyes were wide with a fear that had nothing to do with ghosts.
“It was just for a second,” Elara whispered. “Pale. Smiling. Not at me. At him.”
It wasn’t an attack. It was a violation. A demonstration. They could touch the sentries. They could look upon the heir in his bed. The mountain itself was no longer the enemy. The enemy was in the trees, moving like the wind, and they had just looked her son in the eye.