Soulwoven

Chapter Thirty-Seven

~37~

Animal!

Monster!

Get it! Get her! Catch them! Don’t let them through!

Run!

Run!

RUN!

Dilanthia Lonecliff grabbed for the thin, braided ropes that lined the Rokwet’s gangplank. Her hands shook. Her shoulders sweated and strained. Her pack and her beaten, chipped bow hung from her back.The Rokwet floated on turquoise waters behind her. Its sails were furled. Its crew was nowhere to be seen.

Her memories of blood and death on its deck were raw and real and painful.

Stop it, she told herself, but her mind didn’t listen. It kept coming back to the kobolds and the way the Aleani had called them animals, monsters, and beasts.

Dil had listened to their words, when she could understand them, and she’d felt smaller and smaller every day.

Because she had once been called animal, too.

Calm, she told herself. Be calm.

The city of Mansend shimmered before her under an azure sky. A sea of bronzed Nutharians in gauzy, bright-colored clothes surged between buildings of cream-colored sandstone within it. The crowds rolled through dusty streets, over hills, and around the wide semicircle of a harbor. Blue stone towers guarded bluffs on either end of a long ridge that encircled the city. A palace topped by a glittering, yellow dome sat halfway between them.

Quay issued a quiet command behind her, and she moved into the city. The prince’s words had been softer since the kobold attack, but he was still Quay, and he was still driving them onward. He meant for them to march fast and hard, rejoin the Iron Highway, and then retrace the route by which they’d come west in the first place. He’d said he wanted to return to Eldan City.

He hadn’t said why, but Dil didn’t much care.

The sun flashed in her eyes, and as she shaded herself from it, her breath caught in her throat.

The road would take them past her home.

She would see Lurathen again. If she was lucky, she would feel the warm, craggy embrace of her grandfather. So many times, she’d been sure that she was going to die without getting the chance to tell him goodbye, or even where she’d gone.

And somehow, she was going to make it back.

Cole’s shoulders bobbed up and down in front of her. She wanted to grab his arm and explain to him again how much it meant to her to go home.

But he already knew. She’d told him. And he had smiled with strange sadness in his eyes and said that he was glad she was going home too, and she’d wondered why his words had seemed so cold and far away.

Dil let her attention drift.

Once, the Aleani had told her, Mansend had been a small mountain village. When the dragon had smashed the kingdom of Mennennar and drowned it beneath the waves, the little settlement had found itself on the edge of a new sea. It had grown big, fast.

It’s just a story, she told herself, but it was an easy one to believe. The city streets were haphazard and chaotic. The hill that lay under them slanted up toward the ridge around it as if the harbor had been carved by an enormous impact.

Dil took a deep breath. She’d heard other rumors, too. One sailor had said that Ryse had seen the void when she’d looked into Litnig’s eyes. Another had whispered that he’d died in the battle but made a pact with the dragon to get his life back. A third had said that he was a kobold, or worse, a Duennin.