All Chapters of Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Amara He came at first light, the way the worst things always come. The boy who didn't sleep gave the warning. He came down off the high rock without a sound and put his hand on Aldric's shoulder, and Aldric was awake and standing before the boy finished the word. "East approach," the boy said. "A lot of them. Moving slow. In order." We stood the camp to in the time it takes to lace boots. The Seventeen moved into the places Aldric had set the night before... high rock, the throat of the east approach, the two blinds Bram had built. No one ran. No one shouted. Gorin had trained these people, and three years of running hadn't shaken it out of them. Sela caught me at the foot of the rock, a stolen knife in her hand and a look on her I'd never seen. "Don't you dare," she said, before I'd said a word. "Whatever he offers down there. Whatever bargain. Don't you take it." Bram hadn't stopped her taking his spare blade; that told me something too. "You're my sister. I picked you. He does

Zane This wasn't a fight. Not at the start. At the start it was forty trained wolves coming up a throat barely wide enough for four abreast, straight into ground we'd spent a night making cruel... and for about ninety seconds, it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen Bram do. His snares took the front rank off their feet. The two blinds opened up from the sides, and the Seventeen who could put an arrow through a moving wolf did exactly that, and the throat that Corvus had to send his people through became a place where the front kept dying and the back kept pushing and nobody could go anywhere. We held. For ninety seconds we more than held. I should have known better than to feel good about it. Corvus didn't waste men out of stupidity. While the throat ate his front rank, he sent a dozen up the bad slope... the broken left face that no sane commander assaults, the one we'd left light because climbing it should've cost him more than it bought. It cost him four. He spent them wi

Bram I went over the side of the rock before anyone thought to tell me to. There's a way down the broken face if you know rock, and I know rock. I'd marked it the first hour we made camp. I went down it fast and ugly and skinned both hands to the meat, and I didn't feel that either. Forty feet. Maybe more. People don't walk away from forty feet. I found the wolf first. It had gone down under her... she'd ridden it over, the mad brave fool of a girl, put it between herself and the ground on purpose or by luck, and I'll never know which and it doesn't matter. It was dead. Its body had broken her fall, and its body had paid the whole price for it. And under the dead wolf, wedged half into a cleft where the slope had caught her, was Sela. I've seen a great many people at the bottom of a great many falls. I knew before I touched her what the odds were. Her leg was wrong. Her arm was wrong. There was blood at her ear... the kind of blood you don't want to see... and her breath came sha

Amara I woke in a place I'd never seen, which is the surest sign that other people have been keeping you alive while you weren't around to help. A deep dry overhang of rock, a fire set well back from the mouth, the smell of pine pitch and someone's cooking. Daylight at the entrance, the wrong angle for the morning I remembered. I'd lost time. More than a night. I knew before I sat up that something was gone. I felt lighter. A strand of hair had fallen across my face, and it was white. I held it up and looked at it a while. Ash-white, at the temple, where there'd been dark my whole life... all three of them. Nobody needed to explain it. I'd felt it go, down at the bottom of the holding, before Aldric's voice found me in the dark and reminded me I was allowed to come back. This was the part that hadn't. "You're awake." Zane. Against the rock a few feet off, his bad arm bound clean now, splinted and slung. He'd been there a while — I could tell by the way he didn't jump up. "How l

Seraphine The scouts brought it to me before they brought it to him. They're not fools. "They've turned south," the lead said, voice down. "The whole band. The survivors, the old woman, all of it. South, into the dead ground." He waited. "Toward the ruins." I sent him for water and food before he reported on. I wanted the half hour to think before the order came down that I already knew was coming. When I gave him the report he went very still. Then he did a thing I had not seen him do in nine years. He laughed. Once. "Of course," he said. "Of course she turned south. Where else would she go." He looked at the map without seeing it. "She remembers what the ruins are. She'd remember it from the first time we..." His jaw shut on the rest. I marked it. The first time. He'd said it on the road north too. As though the ruins and the girl and he all shared a history that began before any of the rest of us were born. "How fast can we reach it," he said. "Four days. Three, if we ruin