Page 14 of The Sorcerer's Alpha
Beside him, the wizard was silent, his head bent.
“Keerti and the others got you this far,” Jyoti said. “We’ll get you the rest of the way.”
Marut pressed his hands to his stinging eyes. Surely there was some other answer, some other path. But he could think of nothing. If the wizard’s magic could help, he wasn’t volunteering. There was nothing else to be done.
They had all taken oaths. Their lives belonged to their king, and their king needed the wizard. What Marut felt about the situation was irrelevant.
“Ride well, my brother,” Jyoti said.
Marut reached out and clasped Jyoti’s hand in his, his throat closing over. He met the eyes of each of his team in turn: Jyoti, Agasti, Chandran, Ganak, Nilay. He didn’t expect to see them again in this life.
“Ride well,” he said, hoping those words would communicate what he needed them to: his gratitude, his grief. He saluted them, leaving his free hand pressed to his shoulder for a long moment, knuckles grinding into the bone.
“Go now,” Jyoti said, and released him.
CHAPTER6
Sycamore braided together strands of what he had been learning from the rocks and draped that magic around Rhododendron’s neck like a garland. The sky is full of rain, the rocks said. The meadows are full of sweet grass. Sycamore ran his fingers through Rhododendron’s mane and added his own message:Run.
He extended the garland to Marut’s horse, picturing it looping loosely around the great black neck. Run, he spoke silently.
The horses raised their heads. Their ears pricked forward.
“Run,” he said to Marut.
They galloped until the sun was near its zenith. Then, at last, the horses slowed. Sycamore’s magic had run out. He would need time to gather more inspiration from the earth. He was empty now like a bowl of water knocked over and spilled out onto the dirt.
“Are we safe?” Marut asked, as the horses walked down a slope into a long valley, carpeted in grass and dotted here and there with clusters of bushes.
“I can’t say.” Between their haste and the charms he had left with the other scouts, he thought it was unlikely the Skopoy had been able to pursue them. Still, he knew they had at least one sorcerer with them, so he couldn’t make any guarantees.
Marut nodded. He rode in silence for a few minutes, guiding his horse down a dry channel to the valley floor. Then he said, gesturing between the horses, “I suppose you couldn’t have done this earlier.”
“For seven horses? No.” Sycamore tried to think of what to say. He didn’t have much comfort to offer, although Marut deserved whatever he could manage to scrape together. “I’m sorry about your friends.”
Marut looked aside, his mouth tightening. “They’re with the ancestors.”
Sycamore let it be. Hewassorry, genuinely, but he wouldn’t press the point. He knew what he would be thinking in Marut’s position: that this wizard—he knew very well how the scouts referred to him—had accomplished nothing, and now the entire patrol was lost. One man’s life wasn’t worth all this trouble.
Back in camp, he had overheard one of the scouts from another team say that the colonel had deliberately drawn back to allow the Skopoy into the valley. Sycamore knew the man had hoped to capture one of the beasts, but he found it shocking that the colonel had so gravely miscalculated. Addled by Skopoy magic, perhaps, or so desperate not to fail at his task that he had made a foolish gamble. What a useless waste of a mission.
He thought of scrying for Poplar, but he couldn’t see the use in it. Poplar could do nothing. There was no help to send for them that would arrive in time to do any good. If he and Marut couldn’t save themselves, there would be no saving them at all.
They found a good place to stop, a long, blind canyon where they and the horses would be well hidden from anyone passing by. Sycamore sat with the earth as Marut watered the horses and took them to graze, until he had gathered enough fresh magic to set a boundary line. Then he walked to the mouth of the canyon and joined Marut where he crouched to watch the horses crop the long grass.
“Bring them back in once they’re done and I’ll protect the canyon,” Sycamore said. “We can all sleep for a while.”
Marut nodded. “Can we risk a fire?”
“We could. The less there is to conceal, the less work the magic has to do.”
“Forget the fire, then.” Marut gazed out across the meadow. “I expect the Skopoy will track us. I’ve done what I can to conceal our path, and the ground isn’t the worst for it, but the horses will have left prints.”
Sycamore hugged his knees. “What can we do?”
“Move faster than them. Attempt to mislead them. Find help. There’s a military outpost southeast of here, where the Koramandi and the badlands meet. We could ride there, or press due east into Chedi.”
“I have misgivings about leading them directly into the heartland of our country,” Sycamore said.