All Chapters of Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Amara I woke knowing what I was, and it changed the shape of the morning. The fire was the same, the cold was the same, Sela still got to the food first. But I moved through it differently. For three lives I'd carried myself like a thing waiting to be thrown out. That weight wasn't gone. It was lighter. I'd set part of it down at Maren's fire and hadn't picked it back up. Aldric noticed. He notices everything... he just handed me the tin cup before I reached for it, and held my eyes half a beat longer than he needed to, and that was the whole conversation. Zane noticed me notice Aldric, and grinned at me over his own cup, and I felt heat climb my neck, which was new and unwelcome and not entirely bad. "We can't keep drifting," Bram said. He'd been up before any of us. He had that look. "Maren's right that he'll come hard. So we stop being a thing that runs, and start being a thing that's ready for him." "Ready where?" Zane said. "We're five people and a woman older than the trees

Zane We ran hard for two days after the cleft, putting country between us and the trap Seraphine had tried to herd us into. Corvus was coming... Maren said it, Amara said it, and the new rope in my chest said it, the one I hadn't known was tied to me until two nights ago. But a man can't run scared forever. The body needs a fire and an hour. We took one on the third night, in a stand of pine thick enough to swallow sound. I had the middle watch. Amara came and sat with me. I'd felt her choose Aldric in the dark, up on that cliff. "You're quiet," Amara said. "That's my line." "Conserving my material. Big day tomorrow." "You're conserving nothing. You've got an endless supply and we both know it." "True." I fed the fire. And then... because the dark does things to a man, because she was sitting close and not asking anything. "Can I tell you something I've never told anyone?" She went still. "You don't have to," she said. "I know. That's why I can." I made myself start. "The n

Amara Bram came down from the high ground at dusk and didn't sit. "It's him," he said. "Not a unit. Not Seraphine. Him. Three days out, maybe less. And he's not moving like a man hunting careful anymore." He looked at me. "He's coming straight at us." Nobody spoke. The fire did its small work. Three days. Maybe we'd live through what was coming. Maybe we wouldn't. I looked at the two of them across the flames. Zane, who'd handed me a true thing in the dark and let me hand one back. Aldric, who'd kissed me in a crack in the rock and asked first, the way he always asked. I wasn't going to let them ride at that man not knowing who they were riding for. "Sit down," I said. "Both of you. There's something you need before he gets here. I'm only going to say it once." Sela was asleep. Maren was a shape at the edge of the light, awake... but she didn't come closer. This was for the three of us. So I told them. I won't set it all down again the way I said it that night. Saying it took

Amara We went east before dawn, and we went hard. Two days to the Seventeen. Three, maybe less, before Corvus reached the ground we'd left behind. The calculation was simple and ugly... every hour we spent walking toward allies was an hour he spent walking toward us. The only way the sum worked was speed. So we didn't talk much, and we didn't rest much, and Maren kept the pace better than a woman her years had any business keeping. Midday of the first day, I stopped. The land had funneled... a narrowing between a rock shoulder and a steep wooded drop, the only fast way east unless you wanted to add a day going around. The fast way. The obvious way. "Don't," I said. "Not through there." Aldric stopped beside me. "What do you see." "Nothing. That's the problem." I pointed. "Two birds went up off that ridge a minute ago and nothing put them up. The brush on the left's been moved and set back, in a hurry, by someone who wanted it to look untouched and didn't have the time. And that.

Amara I'd waited for the right moment, the way I'd told the old man I would, and the right moment turned out to be the worst one... the last quiet we were going to get. The camp had done everything it could. Bram had set the snares. Aldric had walked every approach twice and then a third time. The Seventeen slept in shifts, and the ones awake didn't talk. Corvus was a day out. Maybe less. I took the letter to the high rock at the back of the bowl, where I could see east, and I sat with my back against the stone and the moon doing its wrong, endless work overhead, and I broke the rest of the seal. His hand was plain. A soldier's hand. The letters pressed hard into the page, like he'd meant every one of them. To the one who keeps coming back. I'm sorry the world keeps making you. I don't know your name. By the time you read this you'll have had three of them, maybe more, and I'll have been gone long enough that names won't matter. So I'll call you what the old woman called you,