Chapter 109: Ambush

Azura’s POV

The mist had burned off by the time we were an hour out.

What replaced it was not much better. Heavy clouds sit low over everything, grey and flat, the kind that neither threatens rain nor promises anything good.

The road stretched ahead of us in a long straight line that eventually curved into the trees and disappeared, which was less reassuring than a road that you could see the end of.

I kept moving.

The map said we were heading in the right direction. The road said the same thing. The trees on both sides said nothing because they were trees and had no opinions about our schedule.

Liona was beside me. She had been beside me since we left the gate, and she had been quiet for the first hour, which was how I knew she was tired.

Liona was quiet, meaning Liona was conserving energy. Liona conserving energy meant Liona approaching the outer limit of what she was willing to do without commentary.

We had been walking for hours.

"How much further?" she asked.

I did not look at the map. "We keep moving."

She exhaled through her nose in a way that was not quite a sigh but was in the same neighborhood.

"I think I am starting to miss my mother."

"Stop whining," I said.

She looked at me sideways. "That was not whining. That was a genuine emotional observation."

"It sounded like whining to me."

"It sounded like a woman who has been walking on a dirt road for four hours expressing a completely reasonable feeling about the comfort of home."

I kept walking, and yeah kept up.

The sun started dropping in the late afternoon, pulling the light from gold to orange to that particular heavy grey that came right before dark arrived and made itself comfortable.

We found a clearing near a small stream that ran alongside the road for a stretch before disappearing back into the trees. Not an ideal camp. The ground was uneven, and the stream was cold, and there were no walls between us and whatever the forest had going on at night.

But it was something.

Liona sat down on a flat rock near the water and immediately pulled off one of her shoes at the bottom of her foot with the expression of someone who had just confirmed something they had been suspecting for the last two hours.

"We should have waited for Torin," she said. "He would have known a shortcut. Or a better road. Or at minimum a horse. I would have given anything for a horse today."

"We do not have time to wait," I said. I was gathering wood from the edge of the clearing, stacking what I could find for a fire.

"We have been walking all day." She switched to the other foot. Winced. "My feet are blistered. I walked through every puddle on that road. My shoes are completely soaked through. I have dirt in places I did not know dirt could reach."

I looked at her. "Do you want to go back?"

She looked up at me and replied, "No."

"Then stop complaining."

She put her shoe back on with a long-suffering patience that I respected despite myself. "I am not complaining," she muttered, more to the stream than to me. "I am providing helpful feedback about the difficulty of the journey so that future decisions can be made with full information."

I set the wood down and looked at her.

"Indeed," I said. "Very helpful."

She pointed at me. "Was that a smile?"

"It was not."

"It was almost a smile. I saw the corner of your mouth."

"You saw nothing."

She leaned back on her rock with the satisfied expression of someone who had won something even though nothing had been awarded. I turned back to the fire and did not give her the satisfaction of looking again.

The fire was small. Just enough to push the cold back a few feet and give us something to look at. We ate what Liona had packed, dry bread and some cheese that had survived the journey better than our feet had. The stars came out one by one through the gaps in the clouds above us, appearing and disappearing as the clouds moved through.

The forest was quiet in the way forests were quiet at night. Not silent. Just full of sounds that belonged there and nothing that did not.

"Do you think he is okay?" Liona asked.

I looked at the fire. "Who?"

She looked at me with the specific expression she used when she thought I was being deliberately slow about something obvious. "You know who."

I said nothing.

She pulled her knees up to her chest and looked at the fire too. "He went back to Crescent Moon," she said. "That is not nothing. The pack house was just attacked. Things are not settled there. He went back to deal with all of that." She paused. "For you. So you could be somewhere safe while he handled it."

"Yeah," I said quietly.

She looked at me. "Then why do you keep pushing him away?"

I watched the fire move. The way it leaned one direction and then another depending on where the air was coming from. Never fully still. Never fully predictable.

"Because I do not need him," I said simply.

Liona was quiet after that. She did not push and I was grateful for it. She just sat there beside me with the fire between us and the forest around us and let the answer sit where I had put it without trying to move it.

I stared at the flames.

I did not say anything else. The thing underneath the answer I had given her. That needing someone and being afraid of what happened when they left were not the same problem but they lived close enough together that I could not always tell them apart.

The fire crackled.

I let it go.

****

We woke early. The ground had done what cold ground does overnight, which is get colder. The fire was ash. The sky above the trees was the pale grey of very early morning, not quite dark anymore and not yet anything else.

I got up. Rolled the blanket. Shouldered the bag.

Liona got up without being asked, which told me her feet were hurting more than she was going to say because usually Liona required at least two attempts to get moving in the morning.

We walked.

The road was the same as the day before. Trees on both sides and dirt underfoot and that particular quality of silence that long empty roads had, like the road itself was indifferent to whether you were on it or not.

Liona was quieter today. Not the packed-in quiet of yesterday where she had been storing things up before they came out in a steady stream. This was the real quiet. The kind that came from someone who was tired down to something deeper than muscle and had decided to just move through it without making a production of it.

I watched her from the corner of my eye.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I am fine," she said.

"You are limping."

"I am walking with character."

I stopped walking.

She stopped too. She looked at me with an expression that was trying very hard to be normal and was not quite making it.

"We can rest," I said.

Something moved across her face. Something that wanted to say yes and was not going to.

"You said we do not have time," she said. "So we move."

She started walking again.

I looked at her back for a second. At the set of her shoulders and the slight favor she was giving her right foot without acknowledging it. Then I fell back into step beside her, and we kept moving, and neither of us said anything else about it.

The road narrowed in the late afternoon.

It happened gradually. The trees pressed in from both sides until the path between them was half what it had been an hour ago. The light changed with the canopy closing overhead, going from dim to dimmer, the kind of grey that made distances harder to judge and shadows harder to read.

I felt it before I saw it.

The hair on the back of my neck. Not the cold. Something else. Something that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the particular awareness that came when the air around you changed quality in a way that meant you were no longer alone in a space you had thought was empty.

"Azura," Liona whispered.

She had felt it too.

I looked ahead.

Three men stepped out from between the trees. Not stumbling out the way travelers stumbled out when they had been walking in the forest and found the road. Stepping. Deliberately. Taking their positions across the path with the ease of people who had done this before and knew exactly how far apart to stand.

Their clothes were dark. Their eyes were sharp and moving and already calculating. The nearest one was smiling in a way that had nothing warm in it.

"Well, well, well," he said. Looking between Liona and me like he was deciding something. "What do we have here?"

The second one looked at our bags. "Travelers. Alone. Lost maybe."

The third one’s eyes settled on me and stayed there. "And pretty ones too."

My hand moved to the knife at my belt without me deciding to move it. It was just there, my fingers wrapping around the handle, the familiar weight of it settling into my palm.

"We have nothing you want," I said.

The first man laughed. It was a short sound and it did not reach his eyes.

"Oh," he said, taking one step forward. "I think you do."