Page 24 of The Sorcerer's Alpha

“There,” Marut said suddenly, pointing downhill. Sycamore squinted, and after a few moments saw a roebuck grazing near a stand of trees. The ground nearby sported odd lumps, which Sycamore realized were other deer, lying down and nearly invisible where the sun had melted away the thin snow.

Marut left Sycamore standing there with the horses and picked his way downhill on foot, moving silently and slowly through the trees. Sycamore bound his magic into a strong, narrow rope and looped it around the grazing deer’s neck, carefully so the deer would sense nothing, and waited for Marut to get into position behind a large boulder that had fallen down the slope. He watched in tense anticipation as Marut took one cautious step at a time. They would only have one chance at this; Sycamore could only hold the bull for so long, and the other reindeer would flee immediately at any commotion.

At last, Marut made it to the boulder and crouched. He was small and far away, and Sycamore’s eyesight wasn’t exceptionally sharp, but he could make out the movements of Marut nocking his arrow and taking aim. None of the deer took any note of him, and he might have been able to get a clean shot with no aid from Sycamore. But they couldn’t take the risk of anything going wrong.

Sycamore fastened the noose around the deer’s neck and dragged it toward Marut.

The bull let out an awful, raspy barking noise, and all the deer sleeping nearby scrambled to their feet at once and bounded off across the slope, their white tails flashing. The bull struggled, digging its feet into the earth, but Sycamore clung to Rhododendron’s pommel and held fast, pitting his iron will against the deer’s will to live. Because the reindeer very badly wanted to live; it valued its life as much as Sycamore valued his own, and wasn’t going to quietly accept its fate. But Sycamore wanted to live, too.

“Hurry,” Sycamore muttered to himself, watching Marut rise into a half-crouch, aiming at the deer without firing. The deer was fighting so hard that Sycamore couldn’t bring it any closer, only hold it in place, and he prayed that would be enough for Marut to get the clean shot he needed.

He didn’t see Marut release the arrow, but he saw the arrow fly, straight and true into the deer’s breast, where it bloomed scarlet as the reindeer crumpled to the earth. Marut rose and crossed the meadow, and Sycamore sighed and bent to rest his forehead against the saddle. The priests said animals only lived mortal lives on the earth, but Sycamore hoped they were wrong, and that the deer would go now to join its ancestors in green hill country that had no end.

He led the horses down the slope to where Marut squatted with his knife out. Marut glanced up as he approached and didn’t quite smile, but his expression warmed as he said, “That was well done.”

“From what I saw, you could have killed it on your own with no help from me,” Sycamore said.

Marut shrugged. “I was lucky that it didn’t smell or see me. And I generally prefer not to rely on luck.”

“Wise,” Sycamore said. He looked away from the deer’s glassy, staring eyes. “You’ll need to do something with that, I imagine.”

Marut straddled the deer and lifted one of its legs, baring the soft belly. “Yes. This will take me an hour or two. We might as well make camp here and ride out again in the morning, if you can find any Sarnoy.”

“I’ll try,” Sycamore said, and took himself off to be literally anywhere else as Marut slid his knife into the clean brown fur.

He found a flat, sun-warmed rock to sit on and extracted his good hand from his blankets to rub his palm across the rough surface. He felt the ground wake to his presence like a cat stirred from a nap by a hand stroking down its spine. The earth recognized him in the vague way a migrating swan might notice something moving far below. He waited, listening to its quiet, slow thoughts. The earth knew the Sarnoy traveled across its surface and dug into it for water, but it didn’t take note of where they camped. Sycamore followed one thread of awareness at a time, searching for the noise and bustle that meant people were there. He was slowed by having to take multiple breaks to warm his hand inside his cloak, but he found one village and then another, closer at hand, and finally a third, the closest yet. He still didn’t have a good sense of how far the horses could travel in a day, but he thought the village was no more than a hand of days to the northwest, which was the direction they needed to travel anyway.

He roused from his stupor and rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed. The sun had shifted around behind him, and Marut had finished his business with the reindeer and was sitting near him on the rock, feeding twigs into a fire. That was why Sycamore felt so pleasantly warm, then.

Marut glanced at him as he stirred. “Did you find anything?”

“Yes. A camp a few days’ ride from here. Let me walk around for a minute, I’m stiff after sitting for so long.” He rose awkwardly, avoiding putting any weight on his bad arm, and staggered a quick circle around their little campsite to loosen his limbs. He felt more off kilter than could be explained by a few hours of searching. In Banuri, he had sometimes spent most of a summer day sitting in the courtyard near his rooms, listening to the bare rock of the hill the palace was built on and around. His face itched where his beard was growing in. His head ached, and his mouth was dry as if he had swabbed his tongue with cotton wadding. His shoulder accounted for it, probably, and his hunger.

Marut had some part of the deer roasting over the fire. Sycamore sat beside him to wait as patiently as he could. He rarely ate meat in Banuri, but he would eat with eagerness now and be grateful to have any food at all. The breeze blew Marut’s scent toward him, and he wrinkled his nose. Marut smelled—not bad, but strongly of himself. Sycamore wanted to notice nothing about his scent.

“The village I found is to the northwest,” he told Marut. “Sizable, I think, or sizable enough. The earth here is less observant than the earth in Chedi, so it’s hard for me to say for certain. But the Sarnoy don’t camp in large groups in the winter. Anyway, I expect we can get there within five days or so.”

Marut made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Nothing closer? No, that’s fine. We have the food for it now. And no risk of the meat spoiling in this weather.”

“The two other camps I found were both farther and in the wrong direction.”

“Five days is fine. It’s good to have a destination. I would be lost out here without you.”

Sycamore studied his face in profile, the elegant line of his nose and the small, faint scar on his cheek. He had thought of himself only as a hindrance. “I would be dead without you. Many times over.” He swallowed and balled the hand of his bad arm into a fist against his ribs. “People did die. For me, because of me.”

He regretted the words as soon as he spoke them. What was wrong with him? Marut wasn’t responsible for easing his guilty conscience. The people who had died were Marut’s teammates and friends; he wouldn’t thank Sycamore for raising a painful subject.

Marut said nothing at first, and Sycamore tried to arrange an apology. Then Marut said, “I think you’re very brave. And resourceful. You see what needs to be done and do it without being told. You don’t complain. I’m grieved that my team died, but I don’t think their lives were wasted.”

Sycamore bowed his head and hunched into his blankets. He didn’t have one single notion about how to reply. Marut was so fearsomely capable, so decisive and assured in his decisions, and his good opinion meant more to Sycamore than he dared acknowledged.

“Here. This should be finished cooking now,” Marut said, and pulled the meat from the fire.

When they were finished eating, Marut set up the tent, and although the sun was still high in the sky, Sycamore crawled inside and lay down in his bedding. He could hear Marut moving around outside, talking to the horses and doing something that sounded like chopping wood. Sycamore’s head spun. He pulled a blanket up to his ears, burying his cold nose in the scratchy fabric. His shoulder ached, but only an amount that seemed reasonable after having an arrow inserted through it, and Marut had examined it again that morning and said there were no signs of infection. So then—

A cold chill rolled through his body as the thought came to him. How long had it been—?

He counted back. He had lost track of the days after they fled from White Valley, but at least fifteen days had passed since they departed from Banuri, maybe closer to twenty. And before that, since his last heat ended—