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“They might have died needlessly,” I said, offering him a hand and pulling him up to another rock, “but I’m sure they died bravely.”
Lucius merely nodded and concentrated on pushing forward.
We all did. It took us hours to make our way across the expanse of jagged rock. I slipped and cut my hand at one point, but it wasn’t bad enough to stop. Appius fell once when a stone shifted under him, but I was able to grab him before any damage was done. All of us struggled in different ways, but before the sun was at its zenith, we reached the far side of the avalanche and climbed down to another stretch of the pass that looked perfectly ordinary.
“Now I understand why the kingdom is cut off from the frontier,” Darius said, catching his breath as we moved off to a patch of shade by the side of the road to rest. “It will take years to clear those rocks away.”
“Or to build a bridge over it,” Mara suggested.
My brow inched up. “That’s an idea. I wonder which would take longer.”
“Wouldn’t they want to recover the bodies of the fallen soldiers from under the rocks?” Appius asked.
We were all silent at that suggestion. I wasn’t honestly sure that King Julius cared about recovering bodies.
Then again, with everything going on in the Old Realm, I didn’t think King Julius would want to put any effort at all into clearing the mountain pass. The longer we walked, the more I felt like people would flee King Julius’s tyranny in a heartbeat if they thought there was an easy way to the frontier.
Which was probably why he’d had the palisades at the end of the pass built. I was beginning to think that they weren’t a serious barrier, they were a sign and a warning.
We took an hour to rest. Mara and Lucius went off in search of more game, but they came back empty-handed. Appius managed to find a few edible shoots, and even though they were bitter and didn’t sit well in my stomach, they were enough to help stretch the supplies we had.
We came across another, smaller avalanche site halfway through the day, but that one was easier to climb over. After that, we walked as far as we could before making camp for the night. We were much higher up than we’d been when we started out, and the wind picked up as we made our beds for the night in a hollowed-out section of a cliff wall. Wat and I had slept in similar waystations on the way to the Old Realm, and I truly appreciated whoever had thought to make them now. They were designed to ward off the wind. All the same, it was a cold night.
And if that wasn’t worrying enough, halfway through the next morning, we reached our biggest obstacle yet, the second bridge.
ChapterFifteen
“What the ever-loving fuck are we supposed to do about that?” Leander asked as he and Darius came to stand on either side of me.
We all looked out over the vast chasm in front of us.
“I have no idea,” I said, shoving a hand through my dirty hair.
The chasm was easily fifty yards across. Unlike the one from two days ago, its sides were steep, and when I ventured a glance over the side, my stomach twisted sickly at how sheer and jagged the walls were. The drop was so far that I couldn’t calculate the distance, and the space between the cliff walls at the bottom was little more than more jagged rocks with a distant, rushing river between them.
My mind shut off entirely at the prospect of descending into that kind of hell, somehow finding a way across, then climbing up the other side.
But even more of a mind-fuck was the fact that the bridge hadn’t been completely destroyed, only one half of it had been. Not one side, onehalf. A narrow, splintered, precarious stretch of planks that were fastened to a suspension chain and looked like they’d been split in half spanned the entire wide chasm.
“How stable is it?” Appius asked, wedging his way between me and Leander. “Can we…can we walk across it?”
My bowels quivered at the thought.
Then again, if it was a choice between trying to cross the remaining sliver of bridge or climb all the way down the chasm, then all the way back up again, I’d risk the bridge.
And probably fall to a violent and bloody death if the bridge broke while I was on it.
I swallowed hard and turned to look at the bridge’s anchor point on our side of the pass. As long as it was, the bridge was really just a simple suspension bridge. Two huge towers had been built at either end, and thick chains with massive links stretched between the towers. They had been more than enough to hold the bridge when it was intact, and I’d remembered feeling as secure as if we were on solid ground, when Wat and I had crossed it last summer.
“It’s too bad we’re all healers instead of carpenters or bridge-builders,” Darius said, sounding entirely too cheerful for what we faced.
We all gaped at the chasm, the bridge, and the choice in front of us for a long, long time.
“We’ve got to cross it,” Mara said at last in a resigned voice. “If we don’t, we’re stuck.”
That was it, really. We had no choice. We could only go forward.
I took a deep breath, then let it out decisively. “Right,” I said. “I’ll go across first to see if the bridge is stable enough to support our weight.”
