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“Me,” she confirmed happily. “And Astrid.” I marvelled at this tiny Quarehian casually referring to the fucking queen of Mazekhstam by her given name. “And Zovisasha and Lilia and Alina and Olga and…” She continued to rattle out names that didn’t mean a fucking thing to me, and I had no idea how she’d found the time between arriving at the castle yesterday and us leaving barely two hours later, but her visible excitement was kind of endearing.
“You didn’t think we were going to implement a law to help women without speaking to them first, right?” Mathias asked grumpily.
I couldn’t answer, for the healer was already chattering to him about who else they’d planned to ask when we returned to Quareh. The feisty little señorita and I might never have seen eye to eye – mostly my fault for hoisting onto her my shame of what my father did to me, but I’dhatedanyone seeing me so vulnerable – yet the insightful way she was speaking was making me see her in a different light. Mat was incredibly fond of her company, but I’d thought it born from their shared shitty circumstances of living at other people’s wills.
Yet from the animated way they were both speaking now, throwing out ideas to have them delightedly built upon and refined by the other, they clearly bettered each other mentally as well as emotionally. I could practically hear the melteddripas my heart thawed just a little more.
They both glanced at me during a pause in their discussion and I cleared my throat.
“Well,” I said awkwardly, intently watching the carriages draw closer across the gravel drive so I didn’t have to look either of them in the eye. “That’s all assuming we get Quareh back.”
“You will,” Starling said softly, and I was so busy waiting for the remainder of the sentence and the insult I was sure was coming butdidn’t,that I barely noticed Velichkov ushering me into the first of the carriages.
“Wait, you’re leaving those two alone?” I said in horror as Dima’s unconscious form was laid in the other carriage by Parvan, and Mat and Starling climbed in after him. “Do you know what utter fucking catastrophes they could wreak?”
Velichkov patted my head like he would his wolf, and I smacked his hand away before he could crush the wildflowers my boy had found and carefully threaded through my hair this morning. “Relax, Aratorre. It’s just a few hours.”
-
Just a few hourswasn’t a term that applied to Nathanael Velichkov, not really.
He’d consumed my every thought and sentenced me to drown in unceasing, burning obsession within minutesof meeting him. Mere seconds in his presence could light both my soul and body on fire.
If I thought about how much he’d changed me in the weeks we’d known each other, then I really shouldn’t have been surprised thata few hoursproduced innovative theories on an entirely new system of educational governance, scrawled down excitedly – and almost incomprehensibly – across scraps of loose parchment that he or Starling had somehow scrounged up while stuck in a moving carriage. But his fervour was infectious, the ideas thrillingly intriguing, and to my great shame when I hauled Mat away that night it was not to a bedroom but a small study, where we found writing supplies and a lantern full of oil. We talked well into the night, expanding on the initial concept of universal childhood education, and when Mathias fell asleep at my feet with his head in my lap, I carried on working until dawn, stroking his hair and crafting those grand and aspirational ideas into something that could be feasibly implemented without emptying the treasury and requiring more hours from the teachers than the day allowed.
And the next couple of nights were much the same, leaving me exhausted but in a pleasant, satisfied sort of way. I’d even let Mat take charge when we’d finally collapsed into bed together, too tired to issue orders about where I wanted him.
Although he’d put himself there anyway.
Now we were approaching the Mazekhstam-Quarehian border after several days of constant travel, and Starling had just roused Dima from the artificially-induced coma she’d been keeping him in. The healer had kept his body healthy but confessed the torment of his mind was beyond her gifts, and the chaotic ramblings the Hearken had already sunk into as he glared at each of us were evidence enough that the brain was not something easily fixed, even for the magic of the Blessed.
If Dima had been driven tomolchaniyeby only mine and Mat’s presence, I couldn’t imagine what the combined thoughts of our motley group were doing to him. The two Mazekhstani drivers had departed back north with the carriages, but that still left five people able to fuck him up by doing nothing more thanthinking.
Well, four. Velichkov had disappeared a short while ago into the descending fog to scout out a surreptitious route across the border, leaving Parvan and Wolf to keep an eye on his brother. And the rest of us, I supposed.
“It hurts, it hurts,” Dima muttered, clutching at his head, and although Starling anxiously pressed sparking fingers to his temple, it didn’t seem to help. “Too many, so loud, just make itstop…”
Fuck. Maybe we should have tried harder to find his box ofmolchaniyeleaves from wherever I’d dropped it on the mountain when I saw Mathias fall into his vision, or else sourced some from Stavroyarsk before we’d left. Although we needed the man conscious now that we’d be travelling on foot, perhaps it wasn’t the worst idea in the world to let him take the edge off…
The Hearken’s head swivelled to mine and he gave me a frenzied, expectant look. His pupils were blown and his fingers were seized into claws.
“We don’t have any,” I said aloud, unnecessarily. He groaned, slumping against Starling, and I was forced to catch his arm to stop the man’s weight from sending them both to the ground.
Then Velichkov appeared from the mist, silent and wraithlike despite his size. “This way,” he hissed with an urgent note to his voice, waving a broad arm. “I’ve found a boat.”
The border in these parts lay along a body of water that was too narrow to be called a river, but fast and wild enough to form an effective boundary between the two countries. Further to the east and west, particularly where there was contestation around the city of Algejón, the border was defined by guardposts on the road, but those areas were also a lot more heavily watched. We’d hoped that crossing here, where both Quareh and Mazekhstam primarily relied on the rivulet to keep the other’s armies out and we could more readily sneak through the patrols, would keep our return to the south secret long enough for us to reachla Cortina.
And then we stumbled down to the water’s edge and I saw the craft that Velichkov had generously termed a ‘boat’. Because to me, the word suggested a sturdy vessel…or at least hardy,something with a prow and stern and the capability to you know, fuckingfloat.
This thing was sitting barely an inch above the water line, encrusted with tar and algae and looking as sorry for itself as was possible for a bunch of rotten boards held together by optimism. It was also tiny, capable of fitting maybe four people but certainly not our whole party, and I gave the dozen yards of swirling water between us and Quareh a dubious glance as we strode up to the end of the little dock the boat was roped to.
“In you get,” the northern heir said cheerily, peeling Dima off my arm and dumping him unceremoniously on the back bench. The boat bobbed, seemed to consider sinking for a moment, and then remained resolutely aloft. I could practically hear it gritting its little boat teeth.
I peered inside. There were several inches of muddy water washing across the bottom, along with a large frog, which promptly hopped out onto the dock. When even an amphibian wouldn’t take its chances, I knew us land-dwellers were fucked.
“That’s okay,” I said graciously. “I’ll…”
“Just move your ass,” Starling muttered, shoving me in the back so I had no choice but to clamber in. I narrowed my eyes and she gave a half-curtsy as she settled herself beside me on the middle, widest bench. “My prince.”
