“So does Keris. So trust that, if you trust nothing else.” He thumped his heels against his horse’s sides, bouncing ahead like an oversized sack of potatoes, leaving her no choice but to follow.
The swift pace and the necessity of remaining alert served well to distract her from the ache that sat heavy in her stomach as they rode along the winding path leading through the hills and mountains bordering the Red Desert. They passed the occasional farmer or shepherd, but the people paid them little attention, as both of them were dressed as Maridrinian merchants, Lara’s weapons all hidden.
They stopped near a stream at midday to eat and allow the horses to drink, but still Aren hadn’t said a word. So Lara jumped when he said, “How did you do it?”
“Do what?” she asked, despite knowing what he referred to. This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have.
“How and when did you write your plan to infiltrate Ithicana on that letter I sent to your father? I wrote that just before we—” He broke off, turning to fuss with the saddle of his horse. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to know.”
“Aren—”
“I don’t want to know.” He clambered onto his horse. “Let’s go.”
Chest tight, Lara filled her waterskin in the stream, then mounted and rode after him. “I wrote it the night you were shot in the shoulder by those raiders.” As she said the words, a vision of him kneeling on the muddy path, bleeding everywhere as he tried to explain his dream for a different Ithicana—one not burdened by constant war and violence—filled her mind. “I wrote the message on every single piece of stationary knowing you’d eventually write something to my father.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” He kicked his horse but hauled on the reins at the same time, and the irritated animal only snorted and pranced on the spot. “Move, you stupid creature!”
“The night we were first together, before I came out to you in the courtyard, I was in your room destroying the paper. All that spilled ink you blamed on your cat was my doing. And I counted all the pages. The letter you’d started and the rest—they were all there. I don’t know how one slipped past me, but please know that when I came to you that I believed I’d put an end to my plans.”
Giving up on the horse, Aren slid off the side and strode up the path. “It doesn’t matter, Lara! It still happened.”
How could it not matter? How could it not matter to him that she’d tried to stop her plans from ever seeing the light of day? How could it not matter to him that she’d turned her back on her father and a lifetime of training? How could it not matter to him that the invasion had been as much a shock to her as it had been to him?
Snatching up the reins of his horse, she cantered after him. “Aren, listen! I know this is my fault, but please understand that I didn’t intend for it to happen.”
He wheeled around, reaching into his coat and removing a page creased and worn from constant folding and unfolding, and Lara recognized it as that goddamned letter.
“I’ve read this every day since your sister shoved it in my face. Every fucking day, I read your plans and I see how you manipulated me. How every moment together was just part of your strategy to lure me in and make me trust you. To find the information you needed to destroy everything I cared about.”
Folly or not, that had been the reason she’d never told him she wrote it in the first place: because this was how she’d known he’d react.
“But that’s not the worst of it,” he shouted. “You had your reasons for doing what you did. What’s my excuse? Every detail you learned, every opportunity you had to spy—those were my mistakes. Bringing you to Ithicana was my mistake. Trusting you was my mistake. Loving you was my mistake.” Picking up a rock, he hurled it at a tree. “Ithicana fell because of me, and if you think it will rise again under my rule, you are sorely mistaken.”
She understood then, in that moment, what fueled the anger in his eyes. Not her. Not what she’d done. It was himself whom Aren truly blamed.
And what could she say? To argue that he shouldn’t blame himself for having gone into their marriage in good faith seemed hollow and foolish. Lara opened her mouth and closed it again, rejecting every word that rose to her lips. “Aren—”
She broke off, the sound of hooves filling her ears. Turning in her saddle, she looked back the way they’d come, but it was impossible to see anything through the trees. “There’s someone coming.”
“More than one.” He came up next to her horse, head cocked as he listened. “Do you hear that?”
She picked up on the faint sounds of barking dogs. “They’re tracking us. We need to ride hard. Now!”
For two days they wove through the hills and valleys, struggling to evade pursuers who seemed to never tire, always only a few steps behind no matter how many tricks Lara employed. She stole fresh mounts for them when they came across small villages and farms, leaving their exhausted animals behind in payment. But they weren’t the quality of the mounts her father’s soldiers rode, so with every passing hour the sound of barking dogs and galloping hooves drew closer.
“They know where we’re trying to go,” Aren said to her, shifting in his saddle as the horses drank from a tiny stream.
“I know.” She capped the waterskin and handed it up before filling the other. “I expected Serin to figure out my plan, but not this quickly.” She only prayed that it was because he knew her well and not because he’d captured one of her sisters.
“Your father will have soldiers riding hard up the main highway on the coast and then moving east to cut us off. We don’t have any chance of outpacing them. Not on these nags.”
“They aren’t nags,” she muttered, patting her sweating horse as she climbed back into the saddle. “They’re just not built for speed.”
“I apologize for offending them,” Aren snapped. “But the fact of the matter is that speed is what we need right now.”
Sleep was what they both needed. Neither of them had had more than a few hours, all of it in the saddle while the other led the horses. She was exhausted and sore, and Aren’s constant vitriol was grinding at her nerves. “We’ll move closer to the edge of the desert. Won’t be much in the way of water, which is why they might not expect the move. Once we get around them, we can cut back to the coast and purchase faster horses.”
If only she were half as confident as her words.
Digging in her heels, she led him up the narrow path, casting occasional glances backward. It was impossible to hide the route they took in the rough terrain, which was now devoid of trees, and she could see the glint of sunlight off a spyglass, the cloud of dust rising beneath hooves.
What she wouldn’t give for rain at that exact moment, for clean cold water to fall from the sky and wash away the filth, to fill her mouth, drown the scent of their trail. But the only sort of storm they were likely to encounter now was the sort filled with dust.
With each passing hour, they rode farther east, the air growing drier and the wind holding the familiar scent of sand. Urging her horse up to the crest of a hill, Lara paused to look down at the red sands stretching out before her, endless and vast as the ocean. “We track south from here for as long as we can until the horses need water. Then we’ll—”