Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Back outside, I feel Merc watching me as I pick up my pack and put it on. I don’t wait for him to help me onto the chestnut. With a move that feels practiced, even though I have no conscious recollection of doing it before, I jump, find the stirrup with my left foot, and swing my right leg over the horse’s rump. My weight finds the back ledge I was on before as if I were made for the saddle or the latter was made for me.
“Well, you’ve come a long way.”
The comment is a throwaway from him, made as he puts his boot where my slipper shoe just was and mounts by swinging his leg forward, over the mane.
As he unsheathes his broadsword and sets us off, the words linger.
I start to think about all the things I’ve done that I couldn’t possibly have imagined as recently as a day ago: I’ve swum to freedom, I’ve ridden a horse—I helped kill a balas, for fate’s sake. I’ve eaten meat, traveled a great distance, run when I had to, hidden when I needed to, survived the forest, the night, the daybreak …
My own panic.
My no longer hiding my face.
And I’ve been kissed.
I’ve also lost the only friend I’ve ever had, the only home I’ve ever known, and the relative safety of the village wall. And my own past, as well. Or at least … what I thought it to be—
No, I still have that. Because I refuse to believe anything Mr. Lewis told me or charged me to do.
As we link up with the road we will take to the Badlands, I remember the night I was out in the rain, all alone, trying to get to Mare’s and being sidetracked by the farrier. I had no idea the wild changes that were in store for me. And now I’m pressing forward into a territory that even the village blowhards spoke of with fear in their voices.
With a man who’s a dangerous stranger. Well, not really a stranger anymore.
While I consider my current reality, the strangest conversion takes place. Before all this, the sole strength I had was rooted in the gift I’ve never understood. It’s only ever been in my dance with the deaths of others that I’ve felt powerful. Outside of that, I was indeed a mouse among rats, weak, scared, scampering for cover in hopes of being left alone, yet painfully lonely in my exile.
But I had it all wrong. My gift doesn’t give me strength: I felt that way when I used it because it was the only time I claimed my own power.
This horrible journey is forcing me to find resilience.
So I have been strong.
Which means …
I am strong.
And as I look out ahead of Merc’s shoulder, at the road that continues past the burned settlement toward the mountains, I know that where we’re headed next, things are just going to get ever more dangerous and deadly.
Bring it on, I vow as a curling aggression settles in my gut.
Bring. It. On.
Part Three
The Badlands
A Gathering of Allies.
Thirty-Three
Humor in a Hard Landscape.
The lush green valley continues for what seems like an eternity, running parallel to the mountains that I expected us to have to find our way up and over. Instead, the road we are on proceeds along the base of the great, craggy elevations, and under other circumstances, the ride might have been rather enjoyable what with all the fair, lovely weather, and the amiable amble of our steed.
That all changes.
Abruptly, the grasses disappear and the ground level declines into an inhospitable territory of gray rocks. No more trees or vegetation, no humidity, no streams or rivers. All we have are clusters of boulders, some big enough that the trail must wind around them, others of varying sizes from ones you could build a wall with all the way down to pebbles and sand.
The temperature changes, too, as the sun becomes unrelenting rather than pleasant. It’s risen ever higher and higher in the piercing blue sky, but the heat that gathers around us like the cinch on a sack is about more than just the strength of the rays. The baking dryness is a different climate entirely, a summer’s day at high noon that never fades and is never relieved by a rain shower.
Merc keeps our pace slow and steady, and he stops to offer our horse one of our two bladders of water. The poor thing drinks all of it. Merc then holds off for himself and tells me to sip from the other. I decline. I’m sure I’ll regret this later, but if he’s not drinking, I’m not drinking.
As we resume our progress, we don’t talk much—which isn’t to say there hasn’t been conversation of sorts. My brain fills the silence with all kinds of exchanges between the pair of us, and I dub in his side of things as I wish he would respond. I have to wonder how close the fake past I create for him tracks the actual one he’s led—