Daughter of the Sword

11 || The Ambush

THE CARRIAGE CURTAINS ARE sewn tight, thin enough to let in light, but taking no chance in revealing who sits inside.

I lean back in the seat, my knee bouncing. I have not been able to stop the tremor since he broke the news over a week ago, migrating from my hands to my feet to my knees as I went to my room and threw up, readied myself for travel, and was discreetly ushered into a carriage in the dead of night. We've been riding ever since, rarely stopping; I have since learned to sleep in a moving carriage despite the indignity, even as the road cracks and fractures and gives way to dirt, peppered with potholes and ridges and treacherous bridges. 

Before we left, though, I asked Beckett for a map.

He was sent ahead, in a faster company for an urgent reinforcement. Anxious at my travelling without him, without men who understood my predicament, he acquiesced without so much as a question. My fingers flutter to the back of my right hand, to the spot where his hand had brushed mine as he had handed me a scroll, tightly bound with care. The concern in his eyes as we stared at each other said far more than our words ever could... or would be allowed to. 

I study it in the thin evening light, brighter now that we have cleared the forest belt and enter the mountains--at least, that is what I can devise given the rivers we have passed. Much of this is newer territory, conquered within the last few decades, the borders of its former occupants smoothed over to join the singular empire. Thin, dotted lines are all that remain to mark the former territories, and I trace my finger over them, curious. Everything comes down to these lines, as the borders of property and policy and people. And they can be overwritten in a single afternoon.

The carriage grinds to a stop. Muffled voices, a horse's whinny as they guide them away for water in the stream just large enough to show on the paper before me. It's also one of the only times they can allow me outside to relieve myself—after days of extraordinary discomfort, I have finally adjusted to their schedule. The carriage lock clicks.

The door swings open, and a guard holds out an arm. I take it and step down, still not used to the lack of skirts weighing me down upon these steps. There is nothing to lift when my boots press down into mud, nothing to pull forward with me as he shows me around a large stone hill into a copse of trees to go about my business. In fitted black pants and a simple tunic, my hair tucked up and under a black cap, the outfit helps me blend in, but it also makes me feel more exposed, more vulnerable. In a proper soldier's uniform, the shape of my body is far too visible. He recedes to give me what little privacy he can, leaving me, as he does every evening for the briefest of moments, completely alone.

I have come to love these few minutes, gulping down the fresh air, digging my heels into the still ground beneath my feet. I finish up and pause for a moment, just a moment, my eyes roving the horizon of green behind us, swallowing the road on which we have passed. And in front of me, perhaps another day's ride away, reaching for the sky amidst a haze of low-lying clouds, lie the mountains. Cloaked in sparse forests and carved with deep ravines, I recognize the former border between Hallar and Lyria. The Mallrath Mountainline. My powers pulse inside me, uncurling amidst the fresh, cool air. It is far quieter than normal, even the birds silent as I steal my last few seconds of solitude. 

Footsteps crack over twigs, and I turn my back on the sight, letting myself be guided back to the carriage before the men of our section return from watering their horses. My powers protest as I climb back into the carriage and the lock clicks behind me, writhing in my body like a ball of anxiety, and I sigh, tipping my head back against the seat. Then I hold up the palm of my hand, and summon a small flame.

With so little to do in this new cell, and only so much to read on a map, my idleness over the past week has turned to experimentation. At first, a single spark, brought on by accident when the carriage wheel broke through a rotten plank on a wooden bridge. The past months of training had provided a channel, a focus for them, away from the elements and towards my own strength. But now, with my legs begging to run and my hands itching to swing, my cushioned seat has become a torture sentence, and after a few days, I felt like I had at the manor, terrified as I clutched my charred nightgown, praying I would not set the fields on fire. It roiled in my stomach, threatening to snap at a creak of the wood or a neigh of the horses.