Page 15 of The Sorcerer's Alpha
“No more than thirty riders? Better to risk that than to have you captured.”
Sycamore watched Rhododendron swishing her tail as she ate. As winter days went, this wasn’t a bad one, mild and bright. The sun had been sliding in and out from behind the clouds all day. If Sycamore were here on a pleasure trek, he would be very content.
“I’ll defer to you,” he said. “Whatever you think is best.”
Marut grunted. He was quiet for long enough that Sycamore stopped waiting for a reply. Then he said, “We’ll go east.”
“All right,” Sycamore said.
They slept. Sycamore woke in the dark, not sure what time it was or how long he had been asleep, and lay there until he heard Marut stirring beside him in the tent. Below him, the bedrock dreamed, and above him the stars sang quietly, high and thin. The stars knew him; they were the same stars he saw in Banuri. They told him that midnight approached, and that all was quiet.
“Are you awake?” he heard Marut ask. The tent flap opened, letting in faint starlight.
“Yes.” Sycamore sat up, cold and aching from sleeping on the bare ground. But he was full of the dreams of the earth now. “Should we ride out?”
“Let me check the horses,” Marut said.
Sycamore disassembled the tent and ate the last of his flatbread, hard and stale, as Marut saddled the horses in the darkness. Marut set the horses out to graze again before they rode out. Sycamore sat across from him at the mouth of the canyon and watched the stars gleam through the patchy clouds, trying to ignore his aching stomach. There hadn’t been much flatbread left.
“Can you find us water?” Marut asked after a while.
“If there’s any near enough.” Sycamore stroked his hand along the ground, stirring the rocks to notice him. This bit of earth liked him now after he had slept against it for so many hours, sharing his own dreams. Water, he said to it, and the ground replied with a slow murmur of water deep underground. No, Sycamore said: surface water, close water. The earth muttered a bit, disgruntled by his pickiness, then told him of a spring nearby, half a day’s ride.
“I’ll give the last of our water to the horses,” Marut said when Sycamore conveyed this information. “Then we go.” He sat there in the dark, a silhouette, expressionless and still. “What else can you do?”
“Many things,” Sycamore hedged. He had been trained to speak of his magic as little as he could manage and to provide no details. He had been helping in every way he could think of since Marut had woken him back in White Valley, but he didn’t want to discuss the particulars. At least in part because he feared Marut would find his efforts inadequate.
He expected Marut to press him on the issue, but the scout only made a quiet noise and said nothing further.
They rode quickly and without stopping until they reached the spring, some hours after daybreak, and dismounted there only long enough to water the horses and refill their waterskins. Then they were off again. The path they were taking began to slope noticeably uphill, making the going more difficult, but also lifting Sycamore’s spirits. These past days—how long had it been? Two days and more. These past two days, Sycamore had begun to think the badlands would never end, that they would ride forever through the lovely, eerie canyons, searching for water and seeing no signs of life aside from birds and deer. The hill country didn’t promise safety, but at least it would be more familiar.
Marut stopped them again in a hollow between two ridges of hills. They crouched on the ground to eat some dried meat as the horses grazed nearby. “I think it will rain,” Marut said.
Sycamore grimaced. He hated to be damp.
“That’s good,” Marut said. “Rain will wash away our tracks.”
“Oh,” Sycamore said. “Well. Let it rain, then.”
Marut grinned, a quick flash of teeth, and Sycamore looked away. He rejected most social strictures about his behavior and in general thought as little as possible about what it meant to be an omega. Still, he had been uncomfortably aware of Marut’s presence beside him as he fell asleep the previous afternoon: the smell of him, the deep, steady sounds of his breathing.
They rode. The slope of the ground beneath them went sideways for a while and then downward. Marut frowned at his compass and turned the horses uphill again. Rain began to fall, lightly at first and then hard and soaking. Sycamore hunched inside his cloak and trusted Rhododendron to find her way, as he couldn’t see much through the sheets of rain.
The path sloped downward again. Marut muttered a curse and took his compass from his saddlebag.
“I take it we’re headed in the wrong direction,” Sycamore said, raising his voice to be heard above the rain.
Marut pulled his horse to a stop. “I’m not this bad at way-finding. We keep turning in the exact opposite direction that I want to go.”
“I would imagine that’s the Skopoy,” Sycamore said.
Marut wiped rainwater from his beard. “You can’t stop them?”
“Skopoy magic isn’t like ours. I know little about it.”
“All right. We’ll go south, then, to the outpost. No use wasting time trying to fight our way east.” Marut tipped his chin up, gazing up at the gray, rain-heavy sky. “We ride until the rain stops.”
They rode. Sycamore spoke with the rain as droplets dripped from the hood of his cloak. The rain saw men riding some distance away, following a trail that should have been washed away by the downpour. One of them had an unnaturally long neck that he swayed from side to side, lifting his nose high to sniff the air.