Page 17 of The Sorcerer's Alpha
Their clothes were dry when they rose before dawn and dressed in the faint light of the fire’s remaining coals. The rain had stopped. The earth felt various things moving upon it, very distantly, like a sleeping bear noticing the tickle of a flea. The stars said some of those things were Skopoy horsemen, and the wind said one of them was an alpha.
“The Skopoy haven’t lost our track,” he said to Marut.
Marut hefted the saddle onto his horse’s back. “I wouldn’t expect them to.”
Sudden fury rose in Sycamore’s breast. Well, then, let them die now, if there was no helping it. Let them both lie down and die on the ground. There was no use in continuing on, hungry and cold and driving the poor horses harder than they were pleased to go. Let them loose the horses out into the wild and be done with it.
His anger ebbed away as quickly as it had risen. He would have to be a fool to expect pretty reassurances from Marut, whom he knew by now had little to say about anything beyond the bare practicalities of existence. Nor was reassuring him Marut’s responsibility. Marut was busy keeping them alive.
They rode out in the pre-dawn darkness. The horse’s hooves were soft on the ground, still moistened from all the rain. Sycamore looked for the stars and saw them winking here and there as the heavy clouds parted. Marut held his horse to a walk, and Rhododendron followed suit. They went slowly south.
“What is your horse’s name?” Sycamore asked as the sun came up.
Marut glanced over at him. “Jackrabbit.”
“It suits him,” Sycamore said. “Quick and lively.”
“Yes,” Marut said. He put a knee to Jackrabbit’s side to nudge him left, toward yet another canyon. The sloping walls rose above them, forming a dim passage that wended through the rocks. Marut said nothing as they rode in single file, so Sycamore assumed they were done conversing for the time being or potentially for the rest of the day, and was unprepared when Marut turned to him as they emerged from the canyon and said, “Do you have a name?”
Sycamore eyed him. “You aren’t content to continue referring to me as ‘the wizard’?”
Marut’s head jerked toward him, eyes wide. “Lord Sorcerer—”
“Oh, stop it, do you think I care about any of that? We’re going to die in this wilderness, I don’t expect you to bow and scrape.” Marut’s ears were red. Sycamore didn’t want to be charmed, but was. He said, “I go by the name Sycamore. You’re welcome to use it.”
“All right,” Marut said. He glanced at Sycamore, then turned his gaze back toward his horse’s ears. “What makes you think we’re going to die here?”
Sycamore snorted. “It seems like the obvious outcome.”
“I don’t intend to die,” Marut said. “And I don’t intend for you to die, either.”
Sycamore looked up at the sky above them, the sun rising to their left and one of the moons visible high to the southwest. Rhododendron’s breath steamed in the morning air. Whatever the cause—a warm night’s sleep by the fire, the pot of lentils—his fading hopes brightened like small flames blown on with a gentle breath. Marut spoke with conviction, and Sycamore couldn’t find it in himself to tell Marut he was a liar.
His improved spirits lasted until they stopped near midday to water the horses. As Rhododendron drank, Sycamore squatted down to rest his hands on the earth. The rocks spoke of hoofbeats, close and quick. Each rapid strike throbbed through Sycamore’s palms and down his spine until his whole body reverberated with their force. The Skopoy weren’t far, and were closing fast.
“What is it?” Marut asked, and when Sycamore looked up at him, mute with desperate fear, he put the plug back into his waterskin and said, “We’ll go.”
CHAPTER7
Marut guided the horses up the slope of the nearest hill. He wanted a vantage point.
“To the east,” the wizard said as they came up onto the narrow cap of the hill, a ridge wide enough for the horses to stand on but only barely. Marut turned in that direction and saw, in the distance, a cloud of dust rising from a canyon.
They were too close. It wasn’t possible, not with the rain. Marut turned Bunny south along the ridge and set him to a gallop once they were on level ground once more.
He had been tracked by enemies before. In the years before these dual wars with Skopa and Tihasel, his patrol had mainly been occupied with clearing out bandit camps in the distant reaches of the kingdom. Once, in the far south of the country where the foothills became mountains, he had been separated from his team and spent three days hunted by bandits until he could double back and meet up with the patrol once more. He had thought then that he might die, and that had been with fewer men on his trail and no magic.
He didn’t intend to die now, but he only had so much control over his fate.
The horses were fresh after a full night of sleep. Bunny flew beneath Marut’s hands, needing only the lightest of touches to guide him through the winding canyons. Stopping for so long overnight had been a mistake, but Marut had thought it worth the risk at the time after seeing the wizard so cold and miserable and the horses flagging. But now they were able to run hard and steady, so perhaps it hadn’t been a mistake after all.
The horses ran beyond when Marut expected them to slow, and longer still after that. He knew the wizard was helping speed them along in some way. When Marut risked a glance behind him, Sycamore was leaning forward over Rhododendron’s neck with his jaw set and his hands gripping the reins. He looked entirely unhappy, but Rhododendron kept pace, and the wizard kept his seat.
Marut muttered a brief prayer to the ancestors—to Jyoti, who was with them now. If he ever returned to Banuri, he would spend a full month’s pay to burn an offering on the altar at the Temple of the Wind.
Even with Sycamore’s aid, the horses slowed at last, first to a trot and then, finally, to a walk. They needed rest, and he turned back to tell the wizard so, only to be met with Sycamore grimly shaking his head.
“How,” Marut said helplessly. The horses had galloped three times longer than even the best Nirawoy racing horse could manage.