Page 47

“Touch me and I’ll cut your hands off,” she said dryly, keeping her face to the road.

“You mortals have such a different sense of humor than we do.”

She threw a dark look over her shoulder, one he recognized from Byllskos. When she nearly put a blade through his shoulder. When she loosed a herd of half-mad bulls on him.

“I will be requiring my hands for the time being,” he whispered back.

Corayne snuffled in her sleep, her full weight balancing on his arm. In the weak light, with her hood raised, Dom saw her father in her face. He thought of Cortael at seventeen, back in Iona, when he insisted he needed only as much rest as an immortal. In the following weeks, he wavered between menacing his tutors and falling asleep in the training yard, a sword still in hand. It fell to Dom to wake him, because he weathered the ensuing outbursts best.

The memory turned bitter. The boy he taught was a man dead. A seed that grew and died in full bloom. Thinking of him was like picking at a barely healed scab, scraping dried blood away to bleed anew.

“We’ll stop before that rise,” he said sharply, pointing to a hill hunching black against the deep blue night.Will that shut your viper mouth?

“We’ll stop at the top,” she shot back. The bitter ache of memory gave way to frustration. “I’m not getting caught on the low ground.”

“You won’t be caught by anything,” Dom whispered in annoyance.

But the edge of his mind itched with doubt.Certainly no one will pursue us. The cursed mortal and his red priest do not know of Corayne, nor can they scour the Ward looking for every branch of the Corblood tree.He glanced at the cypress forest, reading the shadows.I hope.

“I’ll keep watch,” he said.

Her bright eyes flared again, flame in the starlight.

“That isn’t a comfort to me.”

On that we can agree.

Again Dom thought he ought to forsake an oath just this once and leave Sorasa Sarn dead in a ditch.

To the north, the Corteth Mountains were a jagged dark haze, even to his eye. Snow clung only to the highest peaks this deep into summer. The Corteth, the Teeth of Cor, were dozens of miles away, on the other side of the Impera, the Emperor’s River. It wove through the valley, making its way west to Lecorra and the Long Sea. They would reach it soon and cross the river from which Old Cor had sprung. Dom did not know what legends the mortals kept or if there was even a grain of truth left in their histories, but in Iona, things were more certain. The Corborn mortals of another realm had first come to Allward somewhere in this golden valley, stepping through a Spindle to build their empire.

Trees grew over the rise, good camouflage from the road below. There was no campfire—Sarn would not allow it—but the air was warm enough. The Amhara slept strangely, her back propped up against the roots of a tree, her face forward, so she might only need to open her eyes to spot Dom at the far side of their meager camp. She did just that every twenty minutes, eyes glowing like hot coals before they closed again. Dom shook his head at her every time.

Corayne lay between them, tucked under her cloak. She’d woken just long enough to tumble out of the saddle and find a soft patch of grass.

With both his companions asleep, Dom finally allowed himself something to eat, if only to pass the time. It did not take long for a rabbit to pick its way into their circle, nose twitching and eyes bright. Dom made no noise as he snapped its neck and skinned it clean with a few quick cuts of his knife. With no fire, he made do and consumed it raw, eating the liver last.

Slowly, Corayne raised her head, her eyes wide and fascinated.

“Won’t that make you sick?” she whispered.

He wiped his fingers off on the rabbit’s fur. “We do not get sick,” he answered.

Corayne sat up slowly, her cloak pooling around her. “You don’t sleep either,” she said, resting her chin on a hand. Dom felt like a plant being studied, or a page of riddles deciphered. It was not unpleasant, somehow. Her curiosity was innocent.

“We sleep, but not often,” he replied. “We don’t need it as much as mortals do.”

“And you don’t age.”

“After a fashion.”

He thought of Toracal, with his streaks of gray hair, earned over thousands of years. His aunt, with the lines on her brow, at the corners of her eyes, around her mouth, on her hands.The Vedera are called immortal by those who can not fathom a life of so many millennia, stretched beyond the mortal ability to measure. Death avoids us, but it is not a stranger.

There was steel in the world, blades that could cut and kill them. Immortality seemed far less certain after seeing so many of his own die before the temple, their blood indistinguishable from that of any low mortal walking the Ward.And my scars are proof enough of our vulnerability, small as it may be.

“It’s a good thing there aren’t very many of you,” Corayne said in a low voice.

Dom startled, not in confusion, but surprise. “I beg your pardon?”