Chapter 29: Furious
The silence after Kael’s scream didn’t fade. It hardened, crystallizing into something sharp and brittle that filled the wagon, the clearing, the entire basin. Sloane held her son, her hand cradling the back of his head, feeling the frantic rabbit-beat of his heart against her chest. Her own fury was a cold, solid column in her gut, replacing the fear.
“Elara,” she said, her voice unnaturally calm. “Sit with him. In the center. Don’t move.”
The nurse, her face still pale with shock, nodded mutely and settled onto the floorboards, opening her arms. Sloane pressed a kiss to Kael’s hair, breathing in the scent of sleep and child-sweat, then peeled his arms from around her neck. “Stay with Elara. I’m just outside the door. I can see you.”
His emerald eyes, wide and wet, held hers. He gave a tiny, shaky nod.
She backed out of the wagon, never turning from him until the last second, then spun to face the night. Ronan was already there, his gaze sweeping the tree line. Torches had been lit, casting wild, jumping shadows. Men formed a tight perimeter around the wagon, weapons drawn. The wounded soldier forgotten for the moment.
“They were inside the picket line,” Ronan said. His voice was soft, lethal. “Two men, twenty yards apart, didn’t see a thing.”
“He said it was smiling,” Sloane said. The words felt like ground glass in her mouth.
“A message. To us. To him.” Ronan’s knuckles were white on his sword hilt. “Psychological artillery. They want us tired. They want him terrified. A scared child makes mistakes. Parents of a scared child make worse ones.”
“It’s working.” She admitted it flatly. The anger helped, a clean fuel burning away the helplessness. “So we don’t sleep.”
“We have to sleep. Or we’re dead on our feet when they finally decide to swing in earnest.”
“Then I don’t sleep.” She walked to the wagon’s rear, where the drivers usually sat, and leaned against it, crossing her arms. Her posture was a challenge. To the forest. To him. “You think because I’m a queen I need my rest? I spent my sixteenth year training with the Royal Guard. I stayed awake for seventy-two hours once, on a dare. I can function.”
Ronan studied her face in the torchlight. The regal bearing was still there, but it was carved from something harder now, all sharp edges and unyielding planes. The princess who chafed at constraints was gone. In her place was a sentinel. “You’ll crash.”
“Let me.” She jerked her chin toward the wagon. “You get him to the Vale. You negotiate with the traitor lords. You need your wits. My only job tonight, tomorrow night, every night until we’re behind walls, is to make sure nothing gets near that window again.”
He wanted to argue. She could see the strategic part of him calculating the deterioration of a key asset. But he also saw the wild, emerald fire in her eyes, the kind that wouldn’t be banked by reason. He gave a curt nod. “We move the wagon. Back it against that rock face. Only one approach then.”
He started barking orders. The wagon was unhitched, manhandled by a dozen soldiers until its rear was flush against a sheer section of cliff. It looked like a child pressing its back to a wall. It was safer.
Sloane didn’t help them. She stood her ground, a fixed point, her eyes scanning the inky gaps between trees. The face could be out there right now, watching, smiling at the disruption it caused. Her hand itched for a bow. A moving target in the dark was near impossible, but the feel of the string, the promise of a sharp reply, would have been a comfort.
The camp rearranged itself around the new fortress. The wounded man was settled on a litter. The fire was built up. Ronan posted triple watches, the men standing so close they could touch shoulders.
He returned to her side as the false dawn began to bleach the sky from black to grey. “You should sit, at least.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sloane.”
“I said I’m fine.” Her voice was low, final. She finally looked at him. The weariness in his grey eyes was profound, but the focus was still there, like a knife kept razor-sharp through sheer will. “You take the first real sleep. A few hours. I’ve got this.”
He held her gaze for a long moment, then sighed, a short exhale of concession. He slid down to sit at the base of the rock, his shoulder touching the wagon wheel, his sword across his lap. He was asleep in minutes, a soldier’s trick. His head dipped toward his chest.
Sloane watched the trees. The morning birds began, their songs obscenely cheerful. Light revealed the world in increments: the frost on the pine needles, the steam rising from the horses, the exhausted faces of the men. The ordinary beauty of it was an insult.
Kael emerged later, clinging to Elara’s hand. His eyes went first to the window, then to Sloane. He didn’t ask if she’d slept. He seemed to understand, in the way children understand primal things, that she was standing between him and the bad face. He walked over and wrapped his arms around her legs, pressing his cheek against her thigh. She rested a hand on his head, her eyes never leaving the forest.
“No face,” she murmured.
“No face,” he repeated, a quiet mantra.
They broke camp with a new, grim efficiency. The litter bearing the wounded soldier was a somber weight at the center of the column. Sloane took point, insisting. Let anything waiting on the trail see her first. Ronan, after a brief, tense argument she won by simply turning her horse and riding ahead, took the rear guard.
The descent grew steeper, the path winding through thick stands of pine that choked the light. It was perfect ambush territory. Every shadow felt deliberate. Every snap of a twig was a trigger. Sloane’s senses were so heightened the world felt over-saturated, each detail screaming for attention.
They found the next message at midday, where the trail forked around a giant, moss-covered boulder.
Nailed to the boulder with a crude iron spike was a Solas cavalry insignia, torn from a uniform. Beneath it, drawn in charcoal on the stone, was a simple, stick-figure child in a box. An arrow pointed down the left fork.
The right fork, according to their maps, was the longer but safer route. The left plunged into a narrow gorge known as the Wolf’s Throat.
“They’re herding us,” Alistair said, his voice thick with disgust.
“Obviously,” Ronan said, examining the drawing. His expression was unreadable. “The Throat is a perfect killing box. Cliffs on both sides, no cover.”
“So we ignore it. We take the right fork,” Sloane said.
“And walk into what? If they’re here, directing us, they’ve anticipated that. The right fork could be mined, or blocked, or have an entire company waiting. They’ve shown they prefer subtlety. Maiming. Terror. The Throat allows for a more… traditional massacre.”
“You’re saying we do what they want?”
“I’m saying we acknowledge the choice is between a known trap and an unknown one.” Ronan yanked the insignia from the rock, crumpling it in his fist. “The Throat is terrible ground. But it’s also short. We’d be through it in under an hour. If we move fast, and if we’re prepared for an attack from above, it becomes a gauntlet, not a tomb.”
“And if they’ve filled it with pitch and arrows?”
“Then we burn,” he said simply. He looked at the men, at the litter. “But we’re carrying wounded. We’re tired. The longer route means another night in the open. Another night of faces at windows.”
Sloane looked back at the wagon. Kael was watching from his little window, his knight in his hand. He lifted Sir Grumpy in a tiny wave.
The decision settled on her, heavy and cold. There was no good choice. Only a choice between horrors. The rage in her vibrated, seeking an outlet. “We take the Throat,” she said, the words leaving a bitter taste. “We go through hell. But we go through it fast. And we hit back at anything that shows itself.”
A grim satisfaction flickered in Ronan’s eyes. It matched her own. The passive terror was over. They were walking into the trap, yes. But they were walking in with teeth bared.
“Alistair,” Ronan said, turning. “Redistribute the men. I want our best archers with climbing gear, sent up the sides here, before we enter. They get ahead of us, along the rim. Their only job is to counter-snipe. No heroics. Just keep heads down.”
“Yes, sire.”
“The wagon goes in the middle. Flanked by shields. Everyone else, eyes on the cliffs. You see movement, you shout, you point, you shoot. We do not stop for anything. Understood?”
A low chorus of agreement rumbled through the company. The fear was still there, but it was being forged into something usable.
As they formed up at the mouth of the gorge—a dark slit in the mountain that exhaled a cool, damp breath—Sloane drew her sword. The light on the steel was pale and sickly.
Ronan reined his horse beside hers. “Stay close to the wagon.”
“I’m at the front.”
“Sloane.”
“They want to herd the queen? Let them see the queen.” She kicked her horse forward, into the shadow of the Throat. “Let them see exactly what they’re trying to catch.”
The darkness swallowed her. The sounds of the company behind her became muted, echoes bouncing off the sheer, wet rock walls fifty feet high. The sky was a frayed ribbon of grey above. The only way was forward, down a path of broken stone and slick mud.
Her heart hammered a furious rhythm against her ribs. Not from fear now. From anticipation. The bad face was out here somewhere. And she was coming for it.
The Wolf’s Throat didn’t just narrow; it constricted, the rock walls pressing in like a giant’s hands. Light faded to a dull gloom, the air thick with the smell of damp moss and something metallic, like old blood. Sloane’s horse skittered, its hooves clattering on wet stone.
“Steady,” she whispered, to the animal or herself, she wasn’t sure.
Behind her, the column compressed, the sounds of their movement—the creak of leather, the clank of steel, the heavy breath of the men—amplified and thrown back at them by the stone. It was like marching through the gullet of something alive and waiting. She kept her eyes moving, scanning the jagged lip of the cliffs above, every shadow a potential archer.
“Movement! Left, sixty feet up!” a voice echoed from the rear.
A bowstring thrummed. The distant clatter of a dislodged rock answered. Then silence. Her own archers, somewhere on the high rim, were earning their pay.
“Keep moving!” Ronan’s command bounced off the walls, flat and hard.
The path tilted downward, a treacherous slide of loose scree. They picked their way single file, the wagon’s brakes groaning. Sloane felt a primal urge to gallop, to burst out into open space at a dead run. This slow crawl was torture. Every second in the gorge was a gift to their tormentors.
A soft thwock struck the rock face beside her head. A crossbow bolt. It shattered, spraying splinters.
It hadn't come from above. It came from ahead.
“Ambush front!” she yelled, sliding from her saddle in one fluid motion, using the horse as cover. “Shields!”
Chaos, sharp and immediate, erupted. Figures detached from the shadows ahead, not many, maybe ten. They wore mismatched leathers, faces smeared with dirt and soot. They didn’t charge. They fired and faded, using the natural cover of boulders and fissures. Their goal wasn’t a stand-up fight. It was delay. Pinning.
“They’re just harrying us!” Ronan shouted, his sword deflecting a bolt that whined past his shoulder. “They want us stuck here!”
Sloane saw it. The attackers were positioned behind a choke point, a tumble of massive boulders that funneled the path to a width of one horse. To clear it, they’d have to go over, a brutal, slow effort under fire. The Throat was doing its job.
Rage, white-hot and blinding, obliterated her fear. This was the smiling face. These were its hands. She didn’t think. She moved.
“Cover me!” she barked, not waiting to see if anyone listened.
She broke from the relative safety of the horse and sprinted, not for cover, but straight toward the largest boulder in the barricade. Bolts snapped past her, one tearing a groove in her leather vambrace. The world narrowed to the rock, the scrabbling sound of her boots, the raw burn in her lungs.
She didn’t try to climb the smooth front. She used a smaller stone as a step, launched herself sideways, and jammed her fingers into a vertical crack. She hauled, her boots seeking purchase. Muscles in her shoulders screamed. A bolt embedded itself in the rock where her head had been a second before.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Ronan leading a furious charge of shield-men toward the front of the barricade, drawing fire. A soldier behind her crumpled with a cry.
Then she was over the top, rolling onto the flat summit of the giant boulder. Three archers were reloading below, their backs to her, focused on the shield wall now pounding at the base of their makeshift fort.
They never heard her.
She dropped among them. Her sword was a blur of efficient violence. The first man went down with a choked gurgle, his crossbow clattering. The second turned, eyes wide, raising his weapon like a club. She stepped inside his swing and drove her pommel into his temple. He dropped like a sack.
The third scrambled back, fumbling for a knife. Sloane kicked his legs out from under him and put her boot on his throat, not pressing down, just pinning. She leaned close, her emerald eyes blazing in the dim light.
“Who sent you?” Her voice was low, a predator’s growl.
The man spat, the spittle landing on her boot. “Death to the mixed-blood heir,” he hissed, a fanatic’s gleam in his eyes.
She increased the pressure. “A name.”
He just smiled, a crooked, bloody thing. It was the same smile Kael had described. Her vision hazed red.
“Sloane!” Ronan’s voice cut through the fury. He was atop the boulder now, his grey eyes taking in the scene—the two dead men, the one pinned. “We need one alive.”
She knew he was right. The tactical part of her knew. But the mother who had felt her son’s terror last night saw only the bad face. Her sword moved. A clean, sharp line opened across the man’s cheek, from ear to mouth, mimicking a grotesque, permanent smile.
He screamed, a high, raw sound.
“Now you wear it,” she whispered. She lifted her boot. “Run back to whoever paid you. Show them what happens when they send ghosts to frighten children.”
The man clutched his face, blood welling through his fingers, and stumbled away into a narrow crevice in the gorge wall, his screams fading into a whimper. The barricade was clear.
The column surged through the gap, men scrambling over the rocks. The brief, fierce fight was over. They had two more wounded. One dead. The cost of the Throat.
As they regrouped on the other side, the gorge finally began to widen, the light growing. Ronan grabbed her arm, his grip iron. “That was recklessly stupid. Brilliant, but stupid.”
She yanked her arm free. “It worked.”
“What if there’d been twenty of them behind that rock? You’d be dead.”
“But there weren’t.” She wiped her blade on a clean patch of the dead archer’s tunic. Her hands were trembling now, the adrenaline leaching away. “They’re not committing numbers. They’re using fear and pinpricks. They have another purpose.”
“The Vale,” Ronan said, releasing her and looking south toward the growing light. “They’re not just trying to stop us. They’re trying to soften us. Make us arrive bloodied, exhausted, and paranoid.” He looked at the cut on her vambrace, then back at her face. “It’s working, too.”
She didn’t deny it. The cold fury was still there, but under it was a deep, humming fatigue. She’d tapped a well of violent energy, and it was running dry. They cleared the mouth of the Wolf’s Throat an hour later, emerging onto a high, wind-scoured plateau. The Southern Vale unfolded below them, a quilt of green and gold farmland dotted with stone manors and crossroads villages. It looked peaceful. It was a lie.
Camp was a solemn affair that night on the plateau. They dug proper latrines. Ronan set a rotating watch with overlapping sightlines. No one suggested Sloane stand guard. She sat inside the wagon with Kael and Elara, forcing herself to chew some jerky.
Kael touched the torn leather on her arm. “Did the bad face do that?”
“A friend of the bad face,” she said. “He won’t be smiling anymore.”
He considered this, his small face serious. “Good.”
She held him until he slept, his breath evening out against her neck. Only then did the full weight of the day press down on her. The man’s bloody grin under her boot. The shattered look in the wounded soldier’s eyes. Her own reflection in the dark window was a stranger’s, smudged with dirt and a stark, unqueenly violence.
She slipped out of the wagon near midnight. Ronan was by the fire, staring into the embers. He didn’t look up as she sat beside him.
“He talked, you know,” Ronan said quietly. “The man you let go. Babbled as he ran. Alistair caught some of it.”
Sloane went still. “And?”
“‘The sun rises over the old mill.’” Ronan poked the fire with a stick. “That’s what he kept saying. ‘The sun rises over the old mill.’”
“A rendezvous point.”
“Or a signal. Or nonsense from a man in shock.” He tossed the stick into the flames. “We’ll know tomorrow. The map shows a derelict mill at the eastern edge of the Vale, near the border pass. It’s a direct line from here.”
“So we don’t go there.”
“We have to.” He finally looked at her. “Cerran was supposed to scout the southern trails, but if they caught him… if they turned him… that phrase could be for him. A way for us to make contact if everything went wrong. Or it could be the final ambush.”
The fatigue in her bones turned leaden. There were no clean paths. Only layers of trap and counter-trap, all built on shifting sand. “We’re walking in blind either way.”
“Not entirely.” Ronan’s gaze was fixed on the distant, dark shape of the Vale. “We know they’re afraid of a direct fight. We know they want to break our spirit before we meet their lords. And we know they’re willing to terrify a child to do it.” His voice hardened. “That’s a weakness. People who fight like that have something precious to lose, something they think this marriage will take from them.”
“Their power. Their pure bloodlines. Their old grudges.”
“Maybe.” He stood, stretching the kinks from his back. “Get some sleep. Really sleep. I’ll watch. Tomorrow, we go to the old mill. We’ll be expecting a smile.” He glanced at her, a ghost of that earlier assessment in his eyes. “And we’ll be ready to rip it off.”