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I hugged him tighter, and he clung to me, like we were still in danger. “I’m not ever going to let you fall, Appius,” I whispered to him. “Not ever.”
“And I won’t let you fall either,” he whispered back, then pressed his lips to the pounding pulse in my neck.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to meld with him. Whatever happened, whatever Dushka said when we made it to Kettering, I would make the case that Appius would stay with us. I didn’t think Dushka would object, but if he made me choose between him and Appius…I didn’t know what I’d do.
I didn’t think I would sleep, but after a long period of restlessness, I finally dropped off.
When I awoke, it was because Leander was getting up, and he elbowed me in the back as he did. That had me instantly awake, and since there was no point lazing about when we still had so much ground to cover, I slowly untangled from Appius and got up to follow Leander to the side of the waystation, where he’d gone to piss.
“Are we home free yet?” he asked me with uncharacteristic seriousness as we peed side by side.
I swallowed and glance to the side, down the road we would walk that day.
“Almost,” I said. “If that last bridge is still intact, we’ll be fine. Even if we have to climb across another chasm…I think our chances are good at this point.”
“Unless a wild animal attacks us or we run out of food, or we come across bandits in the mountains,” Leander said with a smile that held no humor.
I shook my head. “I don’t think we’ll be attacked by animals. They’ve been avoiding us, in case you hadn’t noticed. And I’m pretty sure at this point that we have enough food to get us to the mountain inn I stopped at before. From there, it’s only a few more days to Kettering. And as for bandits,” I smirked. “They’d be as scared of us as we might be of them.”
Leander laughed and shook the last drops from his cock, then tucked himself away.
I did the same, and by the time we made it back to the others, everyone was up and Lucius had built the fire up again.
“Why did you do that?” Leander asked. “We don’t need to cook anything, and we’ll just have to put it out again before we move on.”
“It’s because I’m cold,” Lucius said with a scowl.
Leander shrugged and sniffed, then sat down next to him, holding out his hands to warm them as well. “Suit yourself, but you have to make sure it’s all the way out before we go.”
On the surface, their bickering was the same as always. But I could see that the old rancor was gone. We’d all been through something, and we’d been through it together. We were brothers for life now. Even Mara.
We were a bit more at ease as we walked that day. We encountered one more boulder field, but that one was even smaller than the one we’d climbed across the day before.
“It’s like General Rufus and his men started as close to the Old Realm as possible by causing the most destruction they could close to home,” Appius said after we finished climbing over that boulder field after lunch.
“Well, of course, dummy,” Darius said, using the pejorative teasingly. If he’d seriously been calling Appius dumb, I’d’ve punched him. “They wouldn’t very well destroy things on this side of the mountains first.”
“They wouldn’t have been able to get home then,” Leander said.
Which was, of course, obvious, but I knew what Appius meant.
“Let’s cross all of our fingers and hope they used up whatever gunpowder or incendiary material they had on the bridges and mountainside closer to the Old Realm and that they ran out of it all the closer they got to the frontier.
“It makes sense that they would,” Mara said with a shrug as we walked on. The road was wide enough that all six of us could walk abreast and participate in the conversation. “Hardly anyone has the materials needed to make gunpowder anymore. And of those that do, only a few have the knowledge to make it.”
“Isn’t that kind of weird, though?” Appius asked. I was so happy that he was back to his usual, cheerful, inquisitive self, now that he’d escaped death and spent a night in my arms. “I mean, all of the really old history books say that gunpowder and ammunition and firearms were as common as weeds back a couple thousand years ago. They’re much more effective weapons than blades or arrows. So why did something more powerful than what we have now fall out of use as weapons?”
“I think it’s because the elements used to make it became harder to find,” I said, casting my mind back to lessons at the palace school in Yacovissi.
“The elements still exist,” Lucius argued. “Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any gunpowder at all.”
“I, for one, am glad gunpowder is rare now,” Leander said. “Can you imagine what sort of power King Julius would have if he had weapons like that at his disposal?”
The conversation was a little chilling, but we all kept on with it, speculating what the world would look like if we still had the capabilities of the ancients, what King Julius would do if he had that kind of power, and me adding in my thoughts about what Magnus would do with the same power. That turned into a discussion about what it would be like if Magnus and Julius came face to face again, which turned into me gushing about what a good ruler Magnus was.
It was exactly the sort of conversation we all needed after everything we’d been through, and it carried us through the rest of the day and the camp we made that night.
That night, for the first time in our journey so far, we laughed and swapped stories around the fire. It felt more like a holiday camping trip than a desperate flight from tyranny into the unknown.
