Kingdom's Fall

Chapter 18, Part 2

Gray stomped the solid ground under his feet in satisfaction. The marsh had been passable, almost to the point of being unrecognisable in places, but he hadn't revelled in the experience. There was something chilling about the standing pools drained down to muddy scoops of earth, reeds pale and shocked by the suddenness of their exposure, of being able to walk almost unhindered across miles of territory that should have seen him dead or forced back before the second day. That, and he was nowhere near as young as he used to be. The long strides had taken their toll on his legs, straining along his calves and down the inside of his thighs until they felt stretched past breaking point. Long before they reached the Carelian side of the marshes, stabbing, prickling pains had formed in his shins, climbing up from somewhere in his ankles until both legs were burning numb with the effort of each step.

He'd been glad to let Cuan slog along behind him, simply because it gave him time to catch his breath every time he had to stop and wait for the boy to extricate himself. After their talk, though, he had been compelled to show him the trick of spotting the dry patches, of always looking ahead to the next spot of dry ground. Although halting at first, Cuan had taken to it well and made good use of his long legs and youth. The tables were turned, and Gray found himself directing the boy onward while he did his best to keep up, and hide the fact that his legs were killing him.

He'd wanted to tell the boy more of it. He'd come close to spilling the whole thing - the Kingdom and Carelia, Varion and Baird - but had held back. The queen came first. The truth could come later. There was no point in muddying the water when Cuan's loyalty was already strained close to breaking point.

I'm not a soldier. That was what he'd said. It wasn't true. Gray could see the man he was turning into, and not just in the long, tireless strides that he took as he surged ahead. He was thinking things through, weighing up the cost of the lives they turned away from - the people they had left - and trying to gauge it against the balance of what lay ahead. Gray shouldered the burden of having made the choice, but Cuan could see the shape of it, was beginning to guess how much it would press upon him when the time came. Gray knew that weight. He'd made Cuan a soldier because he thought he could give the boy a chance at a decent life. He wondered if he hadn't passed on a curse, instead.

The lad had got one thing right. They weren't an army. We're pawns, Gray had thought. Lined up, we have power. Alone, we're useless. The mountains loomed closer, and the dam with them. But if we cross the board...

Gray had always hated chess.

              

South of the marsh, the river was just as Gray had suspected it to be. The shallow flats that had once fed into the marshes were completely dry, with only the sleek brown earth and the water-smooth stones to show it had been underwater at all. Somewhere upriver, the Carelians had stemmed the flow and stopped it from filling the marshes. How long had it taken them? It seemed too easy to link it back to the Kingdom's failed incursion, but then why else would the Carelians have gone to so much effort?

"We follow the river bed," he said to Cuan, before giving in to the needs of age and bending down to massage some feeling back into his shins. The mountains were closer now, but they still had days of walking ahead of them. The lowland terrain was easy enough, but Gray sincerely hoped that whatever they were looking for lay well below the hard slopes of the veil mountains. He had never been far enough south to experience them, but the Carelian traders avoided them with good reason. From what he knew, the slopes were rocky, and what tracks existed were prone to sliding downhill in a shower of scree.

"This was a river?" Cuan stepped down into the dry bed and picked up a round, flat stone, turning it over and looking as if he expected the river to be hiding on the other side of it.