Chapter 122: South

The first hunters caught up with him on the fourth night.

He had expected them sooner. He had walked out of the convoy an hour after midnight, and Kaela Voss was not a woman who slept late, which meant that by dawn on the forty-first day she had found a Varken heir sitting beside an empty set of irons, and mounted a horse. He had spent that day running hard. He had spent the three after it running too, south through the black pine forests below the White Hollow, resting in snow holes for an hour at a time and eating whatever the Familiar didn’t want.

[Sleepless Watch. Night 3/5.]

It wasn’t enough. They had horses, and he didn’t.

He heard them before he saw them, a long way off through the trees, the jingle of harness and the low voices of men who had done this before. There were six of them, Imperial hunters in grey furs with long bows and dogs on leashes, and the dogs had his scent.

He climbed a pine and watched them pass beneath him.

[Imperial Hunter. Rank D: Bone.]

[Imperial Hunter. Rank D: Flesh.]

[Imperial Hunter. Rank C: Core Condensation.]

The last one was a woman with a scarred face and a crossbow, and she stopped her horse directly under his tree. She looked down at the snow, at the place where his tracks ended, and then she slowly lifted her eyes to the branches.

’Of all the trees in this forest!’

He could have killed all six of them. He was fairly sure of it. Perfect Blood, Perfect Marrow, four hundred points of strength and a Familiar that had eaten a lake, against six hunters and their dogs. It wouldn’t even have been close.

But every one of them had a family somewhere, and every body he left behind him on this road was another line in the warrant, and another reason for Kaela never to stop.

So he dropped out of the tree on the far side, quietly, and ran.

He ran as Roderick had taught him on the ceiling of the Abyss, as Varro had taught him to stand and Tibbet to fall, and the Moonlit Step carried him through the pines half a step farther than any horse could follow. The dogs went mad behind him. A crossbow bolt hissed past his ear and buried itself in a tree. He didn’t look back.

By dawn, the forest was behind him and the iron mountains rose ahead, black against the grey sky.

[Moonlit Step. Mastery: 52% → 55%.]

He found the smugglers’ road on the sixth day.

He wouldn’t have found it at all if he hadn’t walked it once before, in the other direction, behind a boy in a cloak of black petals. He remembered the cairns of three stones, and how Roderick had touched them in the dark, and he followed them up through the passes one by one, while the wind screamed off the peaks and the cold went into his bones and found nothing there to bite.

Perfect Marrow didn’t feel the cold anymore. He noticed that on the second night in the mountains, sitting in a crack in the rock with snow piling up outside, and laughed out loud.

’Forty days of freezing, and now that I don’t need it anymore, I’m finally warm!’

He didn’t laugh for long. On nights like that, with nothing to do but wait for the wind to drop, he thought about Mira.

He went through all of it carefully, as he had once gone through his colors in the dark of the barred storeroom, checking that nothing else had gone missing. The gutter behind the tanneries. The first words. The fried fish on the quay, and the dome of orange fire on cold nights, and her voice on the low wall of the training yard telling him he was always sorry. It was all still there. He still had every bit of it.

She was the one who didn’t.

Somewhere in the lower city, behind a door that wasn’t always there, a man with no face had a jar on a shelf with all of it inside. He was sure of that. He had seen the merchant’s shelves, and he knew what kind of shop it was.

’I’m coming for that too. It won’t be soon, but I’m coming.’

From the top of the last pass, he could see Kharn.

The fortress hadn’t changed, and everything around it had. The two camps in the valleys were gone, and in their place, on both sides of the great wall, there were armies. Thousands of tents. Siege engines, and long lines of soldiers drilling in the snow, and smoke from a hundred forges. The war that had started in the yard of Kharn on the day of the treaty had grown up while he was on the ice.

He went around it, the long way, and nobody saw him.

On the Aldermere side of the mountains, the first notice he saw was nailed to a mile marker on the North Road. It was the same drawing Kaela had made, his own face in charcoal, a little weathered by the rain.

REN, the Blood Thief. Enemy of the Iron Throne.

Under it, someone had written something else in Aldermere chalk, in big rough letters.

HE ROBBED THE EMPIRE. GOOD FOR HIM.

Aren stood in the road and looked at that for some time.

’Well, at least somebody’s on my side!’

He walked the rest of the way at night.

It took him nineteen more days. He crossed the moor where he had killed Brask’s men and found the camp gone and the rocks grown over with frost. He passed the village with the stone walls and heard its bell ringing for supper. He went through the old forest without seeing a single Hollow Stag, though once, at midnight, he felt something enormous watching him from far away between the trees, and kept walking until it stopped.

And on the twenty-fifth night after the White Hollow, he came over the last hill and saw Highcrest.

It sat where it always had, on its river in the dark, with the Academy on its hill and the white towers of the cathedral and the low crowded roofs of the lower city spreading out along the water. There were more lights on the walls than he remembered, and soldiers on the bridges. But it was the same city. The smell came up the hill to meet him, fish and smoke and the river, and he stood at the top of the road and breathed it in until his eyes stung.

He didn’t go to the lower city first.

He went to the paupers’ field outside the north wall, because he had never seen it, and because he wanted to know.

The stone was in the second row, pale grey and carved deep. There were flowers on it, frozen and old, and a small pile of polished river stones that someone had laid along the top in a careful line.

AREN. HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR ANOTHER.

He crouched in front of it and read it twice.

’I should probably feel something more dignified about this. Mostly I want to know who paid for the stone.’

"The Ashgraves," said a voice from the dark behind him. "Your lady paid for it. Hello, ghost."

He turned.

Roderick was sitting on the wall of the field in his black cloak, with his knees drawn up and his hood back, exactly as he had sat at the edge of a hundred ledges in the Abyss. He was thinner, and his hair was cut, and there was a new scar on his chin. He was grinning.

"You’re late!" he called. "She’s been saying you’d come back for six weeks."

Aren stood up slowly.

"Roddy."

"You look terrible."

"I’ve been running for twenty-five days."

"I know. I heard about it." Roderick jumped down off the wall. "The whole city’s heard about it. There’s a man in the Empire called the Blood Thief who broke their great trial and let out something that walked south through three provinces before anyone could stop it." He tilted his head. "I said to myself, now who does that sound like?"

Then he stopped grinning, crossed the frozen grass, and hugged him, hard, without a word.

Aren held on.

He hadn’t known he needed it until it happened. He stood there in the paupers’ field in the dark, next to his own grave, with his arms around the only friend he had left who still remembered his name, and for a long breath neither of them said anything at all.

"How is she?" he asked at last.

Roderick let go and looked at him. His face had gone careful.

"Alive," he said. "Stubborn. Annoying." He hesitated. "The lilies stopped working three weeks ago, ghost. The mark’s growing again. Crane and the healers are trying everything."

The cold in Aren’s chest, the one that had nothing to do with the Familiar, stopped moving at all.

"And her birthday," Roderick added quietly, "is the day after tomorrow."