“I heard that about her,” he says. Then he dumps some water into their water trough and heads back into the camp without another word.
“We have to gonow,” I hiss at Larus the moment he’s beyond earshot. “He knows something’s wrong.”
Larus is already breaking the shackles on my wrists and ankles. He hands me the knife I threw at him. “Don’t make me regret giving you this.”
But I won’t hurt him, not now. I can’t believe I did earlier—gods, I was going tokillhim. Maybe I really have changed.
I scan the area around us. The camp is behind us, but the way before us, the way to the river, is marshland. Walking through it will be slow and horribly noisy even if I drop my shadows. The only option is to head west into the desert. There are likely more Nithyrian legions out there, but we won’t need to get far from the camp before we can cut back to the river and signal the boat Larus was talking about.
The chainmail Larus stole is noisy, but so is the camp. I keep the shadows on us the entire way, spreading them as far as I can to try to camouflage our escape. It’s late enough now that the moon has set, giving us additional cover.
We make it one hundred paces onto the dunes before the alarm bells sound.
Chapter Two
The sand slips beneath my feet as we climb up the dunes as fast as our feet will carry us, the camp stirring into action behind us now that someone has sounded the alarm.
Larus is ahead of me, moving faster than I’ve ever seen him. When I step into his tracks, I understand why: he’s using his magic to compress the sand into steps. They fall apart in a moment, but they’re much better than the alternative.
“It’s not far up here to the nearest road,” he says, looking over my shoulder to check if we’re being pursued. “We should be able to make it.”
“Should? Larus, they’ll kill us if they catch us.” I nearly lose my footing as I miss one of Larus’s steps, but he reaches back and catches me by my tunic, pulling me back upright.
“Guess we better not let them catch us,” he says, and he laughs.
Helaughs.
Is he insane? “Are you having fun?”
“Sylvie, I’m an old man. It’s been a long time since I got to do all of this, the running and the fighting. I thought I’d lost my taste for it, but it’s the first time in years that I’ve feltalive.”
An arrow whizzes past and embeds itself in a palm just inches from Larus’s head.
“Can’t catch me, you bastards,” he says.
I’m…I’m not sure how to feel. On the one hand, I must have known intellectually that Larus was, at one point, an entire person of his own, with wants and needs and preferences like anyone else.
But to see him in action, really in action and not just sparring with me as training, is something else. Larus has been steadfastly serious for as long as I’ve known him, not even losing his composure at the bottom of the bottle like so many do, myself included. I guess what he really needed was a little adventure of his own to get him out of his shell.
I can appreciate that.
“There!” he cries, pointing at a break in the line of low-growing palms that separate the marshes from the dunes. We run for the road as more arrows fly past.
From a great distance behind us, Adria yells, “Stop them!”
“Can’t stop us now,” says Larus. We’re nearly to the river.
But there’s nothing there. The river is dark and empty before us with not a boat in sight. The marshes surround the road on both sides—the only way to go is forward into the river.
Into its crocodile-infested waters.
“Your armor,” I say to Larus, panting from the run. He’ll drown in that chainmail even if the crocs don’t get him. “You have to—”
“No,” he says. “We’re not swimming.” He points across the width of the Mara at something approaching.
It’s cloaked in a heavy shadow, but I can see it clearly: it’s a boat. It looks like an ordinary fishing vessel, small and marked with the god Arnan’s trident, but its oars are withdrawn and its sails are black for better concealment at night.
“TheUmbra,” he says.
