Chapter 30: Ambush
The old mill stood stark against the pale morning sky, its skeleton blackened by time and fire. The great wheel was a bony wreck, half-collapsed into the silt-choked stream. The air here was still, thick with the smell of damp rot and something fouler—old smoke and decay. No birds sang.
Sloane reined in her horse at the tree line, her eyes scanning the broken structure. "Feels like a mouth," she muttered. "Waiting to snap shut."
Ronan moved up beside her, his gaze assessing. "Too quiet for a working mill. Even a derelict one would have vermin."
"The sun rises over the old mill," she repeated the captured man's words, a sour taste in her mouth. "It's risen. Where's the welcome party?"
They'd left the main force a half-mile back, concealed in a dry gully with Alistair and the wagon. Coming in with the whole column would have been like beating a war drum. This was a scouting party. A gamble. Sloane, Ronan, and a dozen of their most agile fighters, all dressed in muted, forest-colored gear.
"Could be a signal for someone else," Ronan said softly, his hand resting on his sword hilt. "A marker for an attack elsewhere. Or," he added, his grey eyes cold, "it's a perfect place to dispose of bodies."
"Cheerful." Sloane slid from her saddle, her boots sinking into the soft earth. She checked the daggers at her hips, the short sword on her back. "Let's go say hello."
They moved like ghosts through the overgrown yard, weaving between piles of rusted scrap and broken casks. The wide double doors of the mill hung crooked on their hinges, one open just enough to promise darkness within. Ronan gestured. Two men peeled off, circling to the rear. Another pair scaled the remnants of a ladder to get sight on the roof.
Sloane and Ronan took point. The stream gurgled nearby, a wet, lonely sound. Up close, the mill groaned in the faint breeze, a tired wooden sigh. She could feel it in her teeth—the tension. It was too heavy here. The air didn't move right.
He caught her eye, gave a sharp nod. Now.
He kicked the left door. It shrieked open. She flowed in right behind him, low and fast, to the side, out of the backlight.
The interior was a cavern of shadows and slanting, dust-moted light from gaps in the roof. The massive grinding stones sat like dormant idols. Piles of mildewed sacks created treacherous topography. It stank of rodent nests and… something else. Coppery.
A fly buzzed past her ear.
"There," Ronan whispered, his voice flat.
At the far end, slumped against a support beam, was a man. His Solas uniform was filthy, torn. One arm was bent at a sickening angle. His head lolled forward.
Cerran.
Ronan took a step forward. Sloane’s hand shot out, gripping his vambrace. "Don't."
"It's a trap. He's the bait," she breathed, her eyes scanning the dark upper loft, the piles of sacks, the deep shadow behind the grindstone. "We don't move until—"
Cerran moaned, his head lifting slowly. His face was a mask of dried blood and grime. "Majesty?" The word was a rasp.
Ronan’s composure cracked for a fraction of a second. His friend, his blooded scout, alive. He shook off Sloane’s hand.
"Hold position!" she hissed to the men behind them.
But Ronan was already moving, crossing the open floor in long, urgent strides. "Easy, Cerran. We're here."
Sloane’s every nerve screamed. She followed, not toward Cerran, but angling left, putting a grinding stone between her and the deepest shadows. Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs.
Ronan reached Cerran, kneeling beside him, his hand going to the man’s shoulder. "Where are you hurt? Can you walk?"
Cerran’s good hand came up, trembling, clutching at Ronan’s cloak. Then his eyes, dull with pain, flickered over Ronan’s shoulder. A tiny, almost imperceptible shift.
It was all Sloane needed.
"DOWN!" she roared, throwing herself sideways.
The attack didn't come from the shadows. It came from above.
Sacks of rotted grain exploded from the loft, and men poured down with them, not with the clatter of steel, but with the soft, deadly hiss of rope. Nets, weighted at the corners, unfurled through the dusty air.
Ronan reacted a split-second late, already half-turned toward Cerran’s warning glance. A net enveloped him, the lead weights tangling around his limbs. He roared, thrashing, his sword arm pinned.
Three men dropped directly in front of Sloane. They weren't soldiers. Their clothes were rough, practical, faces covered with scarves. They held short, brutal clubs and long, cruel-looking skinning knives.
Her sword cleared its scabbard in one fluid pull. The first club came at her head; she ducked, swept her leg, and felt the satisfying crunch of an ankle giving way. The man fell with a yelp. A knife slashed for her midsection. She parried, the impact jarring up her arm, and spun inside his guard, driving her elbow into his throat. He dropped, gagging.
The third was smarter. He hung back, feinting, his eyes on her, but his intention clear—he was trying to get past her, to where Ronan wrestled in the net, to where Cerran was now struggling to stand.
Cerran wasn't a prisoner. He was the lure.
The realization was a cold slap. Ronan was the real target.
"Alistair! To us!" she bellowed, hoping her voice would carry through the broken walls. She couldn't afford to glance at the door. The scarved man darted forward, his knife a silver flicker. She met it, steel shrieking on steel, and forced him back with a series of rapid, aggressive cuts. He was good. Too good for a bandit.
Behind her, she heard a wet thud, a grunt of pain. Ronan. She risked a look. He’d managed to get a dagger out and was sawing at the net, but two more attackers were on him, clubs rising and falling with grim, practiced efficiency. They were trying to beat him unconscious, not kill him. To take him alive.
Her vision tunneled. Rage, white and pure, obliterated thought. Kael was back in the gully. If they took Ronan, the column would be headless. The marriage would shatter. The Vale lords would have their puppet king.
No.
She let the scarved man lunge, accepting a shallow cut across her forearm to grab his wrist. She yanked him forward, off balance, and slammed her forehead into the bridge of his nose. Cartilage crunched. He staggered back, blinded, and she ran him through.
Wrenching her blade free, she sprinted toward Ronan.
One of his assailants turned at the last moment. She took his hand off at the wrist with a two-handed chop. He stared at the stump, dumbfounded, as she kicked his knees out from under him. The other man swung his club at her head. She caught it on the cross-guard of her sword, the impact numbing her fingers, and drove her knee into his groin. As he folded, she finished him.
Ronan had sawed through enough of the net to tear free. He was bleeding from a cut above his eye, his movements clumsy with dazed pain. Cerran was staggering toward the back door, a dagger now in his good hand, his betrayal complete.
"Traitor!" Ronan snarled, surging after him.
"Ronan, no! It's—"
The rear door exploded inward before he reached it. Not from their men. Four more spilled through, weapons drawn. They’d been waiting for this, for the trap to spring fully.
They were surrounded. The sound of fighting now echoed from outside—Alistair and the others had engaged. No help was coming in.
Sloane pressed her back to Ronan’s, blood slick on her sword hilt. "How many did you bring to your little party, Cerran?" she shouted.
Cerran didn't answer, slipping out the door into the grey light.
The new arrivals fanned out. These were different. Better armored. Mercenaries. In the center stood a man with no scarf, his face a roadmap of old violence. He smiled, and it wasn't the leering grin from the window. This was a professional's smile, cold and devoid of humor.
"The princess is a bonus," he said, his voice gravelly. "Kill her. The king comes with us."
They moved as one.
The next minutes were a blur of fragmented, violent snapshots. Sloane stopped thinking. She reacted. Parry a sweeping axe. Duck under a dagger thrust. Slash at a thigh, feel the blade bite. Ronan fought beside her, a solid, brutal presence, his style all crushing power to her lethal precision. They were a vortex of steel and desperation.
But they were tiring. Every block got heavier. Every breath burned. A club clipped Ronan’s shoulder, and he stumbled. A dagger point scored a line across Sloane’s ribs, hot and sharp. They were being compressed, driven toward the central millstone.
The mercenary leader watched, arms crossed. He had time. He had numbers.
Sloane’s mind raced, slicing through the fatigue. They couldn't win this. Not here. They had to break out. She needed a weapon. Not her sword. Something else.
Her eyes darted to the machinery overhead—the rusted gears, the rotten drive shaft, the massive, taut leather belt that had once powered the stones. It was still connected to a heavy counterweight.
"Ronan! The lever!" she gasped, deflecting a sword thrust.
He followed her gaze. Under the lever controlling the grindstone engagement was a rusted iron pin holding the counterweight pulley.
He understood instantly. He roared, putting all his weight into a massive, two-handed swing that cleared a momentary space. Sloane covered him, fighting like a wildcat, her movements fueled by pure adrenaline.
Ronan reached the lever. He didn't pull it. He slammed his boot down on the ancient, rusted pin shearing through it.
With a shriek of tortured metal, the counterweight released.
The heavy stone shot downward. The leather belt above, suddenly free of tension, whipped through the air with the sound of a cannon shot. It sliced through the space where the mercenary leader stood, catching him across the chest and throwing him into the millstone with a sickening crunch.
Chaos erupted. The other mercenaries froze for a fatal second, staring at their pulverized leader.
"Now!" Sloane yelled.
She and Ronan burst through the gap, not toward the main door, but toward the ragged hole in the back wall Cerran had used. They plunged into the cold morning air, gulping it like drowning swimmers.
Alistair was there, bloody but standing, with three of their men. The yard was a charnel house. The ambushers who had waited outside were down.
"To the horses!" Alistair yelled. "We heard riders coming!"
Ronan looked back at the mill, at the trap that had almost taken them. His face was a mask of blood and fury. "Cerran," he spat the name like a curse.
"Later," Sloane grabbed his arm, her fingers digging in. "Kael. We have to get to Kael."
That cut through the rage. His grey eyes snapped to hers, the king receding, the protector surging forward. He nodded, a tight, grim motion.
They ran, their boots pounding the mud, the sound of approaching hoofbeats growing from the south. Not their men. The promised reinforcement, arriving too late for the ambush, but just in time for the chase.
They broke from the tree line onto the rutted path where their horses were tied, the animals skittish and wide-eyed from the distant sounds of violence. Sloane didn’t bother with the stirrup. She grabbed the saddle horn and swung up, a hot stitch screaming across her ribs where the dagger had grazed her. Ronan was already mounted, wrenching his horse’s head around toward the gully.
“Go, go, go!” Alistair urged, heaving himself onto his own mount. Two of their men weren’t following. They lay still back at the mill’s edge.
The hoofbeats from the south were closer now, a dull thunder vibrating through the ground. Too many to be theirs. Sloane kicked her horse into a gallop, Ronan matching her pace. The world narrowed to the tunnel of the path ahead, the slap of branches, the labored breath of their horses. Her mind was a single, repeating loop: Kael. Gully. Kael.
They took a bend too fast, her horse’s shoes slipping on the wet leaves. She felt the animal recover with a jarring lurch, her teeth snapping together. Ronan glanced back, his face a grimace of pain and concentration. “They’ll cut us off from the main road! We need to reach the gully first!”
“They already know where it is!” Sloane shouted back, the wind whipping her words away. Cerran had known. He’d seen their planned route, their contingencies. Every hiding place was compromised.
The gully mouth appeared ahead, a gash of shadow in the earthy bank. Alistair and the remaining guard veered toward it, but Ronan reined up sharply, his horse dancing sideways.
“Stop! Don’t lead them straight in!”
Sloane saw his point instantly. If they ducked into cover, the pursuers would simply surround the gully and pick them off. Or worse, ride past and find the wagon. She pulled her mare to a halt, her heart hammering against her sternum. They were exposed on the path, the sound of the chase growing deafening.
“We split up,” Ronan said, the words ripped out by urgency. “You take Alistair, flank left through the thickets. Get to Kael, get the wagon moving north. I’ll lead the riders right, toward the river bluff.”
“They’ll run you down!”
“It’s a longer slope. They’ll have to string out.” His grey eyes locked with hers. There was no time for debate. It was a tactic, clean and desperate. “Go. Now.”
He didn’t wait for agreement. He let out a sharp yell, waving his sword over his head, making himself a perfect, shouting target. Then he kicked his horse hard, breaking away from the gully path and crashing into the undergrowth to the east.
Seconds later, the first of the pursuit burst into view. Five riders, then ten, in mismatched leathers but on good, solid horses. They saw Ronan’s fleeing form and, with a unified cry, wheeled to follow him. Their dust cloud swallowed the path.
Sloane didn’t watch. She plunged into the gully, Alistair at her heels. The wagon was where they’d left it, the soldiers formed into a tense, bristling ring. Elara’s pale face appeared at the window, vanished, then Kael’s replaced it.
“Mom!”
The relief in his voice was a physical ache in her chest. She slid from her horse before it fully stopped, stumbling toward the wagon. “We’re leaving. Now. North. Harness the teams, move!”
The soldiers jumped into motion. She yanked the wagon door open. Kael launched himself into her arms, and she held him tight, ignoring the fresh bloom of pain from her cut. “It’s okay. We’re going.”
“Where’s Ronan?” The question was muffled against her neck.
“Buying us time.” She set him down, her hands on his small shoulders. “Listen to Elara. Don’t look out the window. No matter what you hear.”
His eyes, so like her own, were wide but dry. He gave a firm, military nod that almost broke her. She closed the door, latched it, and turned to Alistair. “You have point. Go. Fast as the terrain allows.”
“And the king?”
“He’ll find us or he won’t.” The words tasted like ash. “Our job is to get the heir to the Vale. Move.”
The wagon lurched forward, the wheels groaning as the team found purchase on the gully’s incline. Sloane mounted again, taking the rear guard position, her eyes scanning the ridge tops for any sign of circling enemies. All she could hear was the rattle of their own carriage and the frantic thrum of her own blood.
They rode for what felt like hours, but was likely only twenty minutes of brutal, jolting progress through uneven terrain. Every snapped twig was an arrow loosed. Every bird’s flight was a signal. The weight of Ronan’s absence was a stone in her gut. He’d drawn off the hunters, but he was one man, already wounded.
A soldier ahead signaled a halt. Alistair rode back to her, his face grave. “The north path is blocked. A rockslide, fresh. Too convenient.”
“Cerran’s work,” Sloane said flatly. They were being funneled again. “Alternatives?”
“West takes us back toward the mill lands. East… east leads to the river bluffs. Where the king was headed.”
Towards where he might be dead or captured. Towards the very ground their pursuers would now be combing. It was the worst possible option. It was the only one left.
“East,” she said. “Quietly.”
The procession turned, a slow, weary pivot. The optimism that had started the day was gone, bled out into the mud of the old mill. They were rabbits in a snare, and the wire was tightening. The bluff path was narrow, edged with a steep drop to a rocky stream below. They moved in single file, the wagon wheels dangerously close to the crumbling edge.
Sloane’s ears pricked. Not hoofbeats. A sound like wet cloth tearing. Then a scream from up ahead—cut brutally short.
Ambush. Again.
Figures rose from the gullies beside the path ahead and behind, arrows already nocked. They’d walked into a second kill box. This one was tighter, deadlier. There was no room to maneuver, no old mill machinery to exploit.
“Shields!” Alistair bellowed, but it was too late.
An arrow took the driver of the wagon in the throat. He toppled silently into the footwell. The horse team spooked, lunging forward against their harnesses. The wagon slewed sideways, one back wheel skidding over the bluff’s edge. The whole vehicle tipped with a sickening lurch, wood groaning in protest.
Time fractured.
Sloane saw Kael’s small hands gripping the window frame from inside, his mouth open in a silent cry. She saw Elara trying to pull him back. She saw the wagon balance on the precipice, held only by the panicked forward pull of the horses and the one wheel still on solid ground.
Her world shrank to that unstable angle, to the handful of feet between her and that window. Every lesson, every regal duty, every sharp word with Ronan evaporated. There was only the child, the crumbling earth, and the vast, empty air behind him.
She didn’t think. She kicked her horse forward, directly into the path of the archers. An arrow whipped past her cheek. Another thudded into her saddle. She threw herself from the moving animal, hitting the ground hard and rolling.
She came up sprinting, her boots sliding on the loose scree. The wagon groaned, tipping further. One of the horses lost its footing, screaming as it scrambled. The sudden jerk was the final straw.
With a sound of splintering wood, the wagon tore free from the team and toppled over the edge.
The world upended. Kael's scream, short and sharp, was swallowed by the grinding crash of shattering timber. Sloane’s own breath vanished, her lungs hollowed out by pure terror. She was moving before the last splinter settled, scrambling on hands and knees to the jagged edge.
Below, the wagon lay on its side like a wounded animal, partly submerged in the shallow, rocky stream. One wheel spun lazily. The silence was worse than the noise.
“Kael!” The name tore from her throat, raw and ripped.
She went over the edge not by climbing, but by controlled falling, sliding down the steep incline on a wave of loose dirt and stone. She scraped through brambles, thorns slicing her arms. She didn’t feel them. Her world was the wreckage twenty feet below.
Alistair’s shouts from the bluff top above were distant, meaningless. An arrow thunked into a tree trunk beside her head as she slid. The archers were still there, still firing, but they were secondary now. A problem for later.
She hit the stream bed hard, icy water soaking her to the knees. She stumbled, then ran the last few feet. The wagon’s canvas roof was ripped, the frame snapped. She clawed at the door, now facing the sky, her fingers bleeding against twisted metal.
“Inside! Answer me!”
A whimper. Then Elara’s voice, thin with pain. “Here! We’re here!”
Sloane hauled herself onto the side of the wagon, peering into the dark interior. Shapes shifted in the gloom. Elara was pinned under a fallen trunk of their supplies, her face pale. Kael was crumpled beside her, one arm tucked at an odd angle, but his eyes were open, blinking fast.
“Mom?”
The air rushed back into her chest, a painful, grateful gasp. “I’m here. Don’t move.”
She jumped down inside, the wreckage groaning under her weight. She shoved the heavy trunk off Elara with a grunt. The nurse sucked in a shuddering breath, clutching her ribs. “His arm,” she managed.
Kael’s left forearm was clearly broken, the shape all wrong beneath his tunic. His lip was split and bleeding, but his gaze was fixed on her with terrifying clarity. “The bad men are still up there,” he whispered, his voice shaky but coherent.
He was right. Shouts and the clang of steel echoed from the bluff top. Alistair and the remaining guards were engaged. They had seconds, maybe less, before someone decided to climb down and finish the job.
“Can you stand?” Sloane asked Elara, her voice low and urgent.
The nurse nodded, teeth gritted, and pushed herself up. Sloane turned to Kael. Her hands, usually so steady, trembled as she gently probed the break. He flinched, a sharp intake of breath, but didn’t cry out. “Need to splint this, love. It’s gonna hurt.”
“Do it,” he said, his jaw clenched, echoing her own stubborn fury. He was five going on thirty, forged in the terror of the last two days.
She ripped a strip from her own tunic with her teeth, then grabbed two straight pieces of splintered wagon frame. Working fast, she aligned the bones as best she could. Kael let out a choked sob, tears finally spilling over, but held his arm steady. She bound it tight, the makeshift splint crude but rigid.
“Elara, take my dagger. Get to that thicket.” She pointed to a dense cluster of young pines clinging to the bank further downstream. “Watch the bluff. If anyone comes over that isn’t us, you scream.”
Elara took the offered blade, her knuckles white, and scrambled from the wreckage, moving low and fast through the water.
Sloane wrapped her cloak around Kael, bundling him against her. “Arms around my neck. Squeeze with the good one. Don’t let go.” He locked on, his face buried in her shoulder. She climbed out of the shattered wagon, every muscle protesting.
An archer appeared on the bluff edge directly above, drawing his bow. Sloane had no shield, no room to run. She twisted her body, putting herself between the arrow and Kael, a useless human shield against a plunging shot.
The archer jerked suddenly, his bow spinning from his hands as he clutched at his throat. He toppled forward, cartwheeling down the slope to land with a wet thud in the stream. A throwing axe protruded from his neck.
Ronan stood twenty yards upstream, bloody, dismounted, and breathing like a bull. His grey eyes found hers, then dropped to Kael in her arms. A flicker of something like relief passed over his battered face before it hardened back into battle-focus. “Path’s clear upstream! Now, Sloane!”
He didn’t wait to see if she followed. He turned, sword raised, to meet two men charging down the stream bed toward him. He moved with a weary, brutal efficiency, all economy of motion. He was hurt—his left leg favored—but he was still a wall.
Sloane ran, the water dragging at her boots, Kael’s weight a precious, exhausting burden. Elara fell in beside her, still clutching the dagger. They passed Ronan just as he kicked the second man off his blade. The stream ran pink around his boots.
“Horses are gone,” he grunted, falling into step beside her, his gaze sweeping the tree line. “We go on foot. They’ll circle.”
“Where?”
“Deep forest. Lose them. Then we head for the Vale on foot.” He glanced at Kael. “Can he travel?”
“He’ll have to.”
They abandoned the stream, plunging into the thick, shadowed pines. The sounds of fighting faded behind them, replaced by the thick silence of deep woods and their own ragged breathing. They climbed, the ground rising steeply away from the water. Sloane’s ribs screamed with every step. Kael, blessedly, was silent, a warm, heavy bundle of shock and pain.
After an hour, Ronan signaled a stop in a small, mossy clearing. He listened for a long minute, his head cocked. Only forest sounds answered. He sank against a tree, finally allowing his exhaustion to show. A deep gash on his thigh had soaked his breeches in blood.
“You’re bleeding out,” Sloane said, lowering Kael carefully to sit against a log.
“It’s slowed.”
“It hasn’t.” She set Kael down. “Elara, watch the trail back.”
She approached Ronan, tearing another strip from her already ruined tunic. He watched her, his expression unreadable, as she knelt and began to bind the wound tightly. The muscle beneath was hard as iron, hot with fevered exertion.
“Cerran?” she asked, not looking up.
“Dead. Took his confession first.” Ronan’s voice was flat. “The Vale lords didn’t just want to stop the marriage. They wanted me as a prisoner. A bargaining chip to dissolve Solas from within. The attacks on Kael… they were a mercenary group the lords hired. Specialists in psychological terror. Cerran was their inside man.”
Sloane tied the bandage off with a vicious yank. “So we walk into the Vale with no wagon, no horses, half a guard, and the welcoming committee wants us dead or captured.” She sat back on her heels, the adrenaline ebbing, leaving a profound, grinding weariness. “Brilliant.”
A small, weak laugh escaped Ronan. It was a dry, cracked sound. “You leapt off a cliff.”
“You let a net drop on you.” She met his gaze. “We’re a pair.”
For a second, the hard planes of his face softened. The king was gone, the strategist stripped away. Just a tired, battered man who’d almost lost the fragile new future he was building. He looked at Kael, who was watching them with enormous, exhausted eyes.
“Your Highness,” Ronan said, his voice gentler than she’d ever heard it. “You’ve been very brave.”
Kael studied him for a long moment, his little face smudged with dirt and dried blood. He untucked his good arm from the cloak and held out his knight, Sir Grumpy. The painted face was chipped now. “You dropped your army,” Kael said quietly. “But you came back.”
Ronan stared at the toy, then at the boy’s serious face. He reached out, not taking the knight, but closing his own large, blood-crusted hand gently around Kael’s small one, holding both boy and toy. “I will always come back,” he said, the words a vow in the quiet clearing.
Sloane felt something in her chest tighten, an old, guarded wall trembling. She looked away, busying herself with checking Kael’s splint. The forest around them was a cathedral of green shadows and looming, ancient trunks. They were exposed. Hunted. They had no supplies, no clear path.
But they were alive. All three of them.
Ronan released Kael’s hand and pushed himself upright, wincing. “We have about two hours of light. We need to find shelter, something defensible. And water.” He looked at Sloane. “Can you keep going?”
She stood, every bruise and cut announcing itself. She looked at Kael, at his broken arm, at the unwavering trust in his eyes. She thought of the smiling face at the window, of the cold professionalism of the mercenary leader, of Cerran’s betrayal.
“Try and stop me,” she said.