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“We are,” Uriah confirmed with a nod.
“But the forest is still so wild here,” Pasha, one of the other men Dushka had charged with taking me across the mountains said, joining me and Uriah. “We can’t be that close to civilization.”
“We are,” Uriah said with a shrug. “For all its claim to be the closest thing to the Old Realm on the frontier, Tesladom is a tiny city.”
“Who governs it now?” Pasha asked with a frown.
“Yates Rivers was in charge, last I heard,” I answered. It was one of the things the Sons had discussed on the day of the coronation, before everything fell apart. “And Boris and his lover, Igor, have taken over in Neander.”
“I never liked Boris,” Uriah said, shaking his head and moving back to where supper was being doled out from a pot over the brazier. “He was always a troublemaker, but too spineless to own up to the trouble he caused.”
That fit with what I knew of the man too.
“I wouldn’t mind steering clear of both cities,” I said as I joined him. “Can we go around them and make our way straight to the mountain pass?”
Uriah nodded. “We can and we will. The sooner we get away from the influence of any other wolves, the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
I agreed with him. I just wanted to get to the Old Realm with as little distraction as possible, and the way things were on the frontier these days, I was certain that if we ran into Boris and Igor or Yates, there would be trouble of some sort.
I had a harder time sleeping that second night on the boat, mostly due to anticipation of trying to slip past Tesladom unnoticed the next day.
That lack of sleep didn’t help me at all when we kept rowing the next morning and made it to the debarkation point near where the Wolf River separated from the Kostya. Uriah was wise to get us up and rowing before dawn.
He and Pasha were to be my escorts until we reached the village Dushka had told me about halfway along the mountain pass. From there, I would hire a guide to take me down the other side of the mountains, to a village called Aktau, where the main road that led to Royersford, and the king’s city of the Old Realm beyond that, began. Or ended, depending on which direction you were going.
The sun was just beginning to peek over the mountains when Uriah, Pasha, and I stepped off the boat and onto the rocky riverbank just a few miles from Tesladom. And right from the start, I had the feeling something wasn’t right.
“Are those footprints and hoof marks in the dirt over there?” I asked Uriah as we started away from the river through the thick underbrush.
Uriah went over to have a look, scowling at what he found. “They are,” he said, uncertainty clear in his voice.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if wild wolves came up this far when they need water or fresh supplies,” Pasha said, not as worried as Uriah or I seemed to be.
“But very few of the wild wolves have horses,” Uriah said, rubbing his chin like he did when he was anxious about something.
I hadn’t thought of that. I wasn’t sure if it made me feel better or worse that whoever had been at the riverbank—recently, by they look of the tracks, but perhaps not very recently—probably weren’t wolves. That meant they were from the cities, though, and if something had happened to pry city-dwellers out from behind their walls, we might have cause to be very anxious indeed.
“Let’s keep our eyes open and give the city a wide berth,” Uriah said as we continued on.
I glanced back over my shoulder at the tracks, wondering who had made them. There were too many for lone wolves and they all looked to be the same age. That meant a large group of men with horses had been in the area not that long ago.
I kept my eyes peeled for signs of danger around us as I followed Uriah through the trees. He seemed to know where he was going, which was reassuring. I might have lived with the wolves for almost two years now, but I was still cityish at heart. I would have gotten hopelessly lost between the river and the mountains if I’d been on my own.
For a while late in the morning, after we’d been walking for hours, I worried that Uriah had lost his way, forest experience or not. We walked and walked, but everything around me looked the same. The forest felt abandoned, and because the trees were so thick, I was certain we were going in circles.
The only thing that reassured me we were on the right track was the way we seemed to be constantly walking uphill. I supposed as long as we kept heading up, we would be going toward the mountains and away from the river.
We stopped for lunch, then kept walking. Again, I worried that leaving Dushka and the things I knew had been a terrible idea.
But then, several hours after noon, we emerged from a clearing and onto a narrow strip of cleared land with a well-traveled road running through it.
“Ah, here we are,” Uriah said, as though we’d just been wandering through someone’s back garden. He glanced up and down the road, then smiled and pointed in the distance, toward the sun. “There. That’s taken us all the way around Tesladom without issue.”
I glanced to where he pointed and was stunned to see the outline of a city on the western horizon. Tendrils of smoke rose up from the buildings, but it was too far to make out individual people.
“You’ve avoided everything,” I said, hardly believing what I saw. I had to laugh. Uriah was a genius.
“And that, my friend, is why Dushka entrusted me to take you on this journey,” Uriah said, slapping my back before heading on down the road.
