Shadow Weaver (Back on Wattpad 2020!)

Chapter 53

Several days later, news comes from the Ruby Court that Prince Jakut is engaged to the Etean King's eldest daughter. They are to be married the following spring. The wedding is part of a negotiated truce, though it is Queen Usas who remains on the throne and Jakut will not be crowned. War on the Etean border has come to an end.

I try to avoid thinking about the Prince. When I am not resting, I spend all my time with Kel and his friends, basking in my brother's happiness. Sometimes, I catch myself remembering times the Prince and I were together, and wondering how different things would have been if I had known all along I could trust him. But it is foolish to ruminate about what cannot be changed. No matter what, I was always going to leave the Red City, and he would still have been obligated to marry the Etean Princess to end the war.

On our tenth day in Lyndonia, Kel wakes with eyes like any other six-year-old child. The last flecks of gold have faded. It is time for us to find our parents.

The sun is a low disk on the horizon as we clop under the arched entrance and across the drawbridge, the fort of Lyndonia receding behind us. Kel's friends come to wave us off. The Duke and the Duchess do not.

We camp in forests, remaining hidden from the roads, hiding our horses behind shelters of pine leaves, and lighting few fires. News of the King's death has spread and the north is more restless than ever. We are safest avoiding people.

Tug suggests leaving Kel with a friend at a place he calls the meadow, while we search the far north for my parents. He says Kel will be safer there from looters and mercenaries. He has even suggested I stay with my brother, and he journeys alone. I am tempted to accept his offer. I am tired and cannot imagine leaving Kel again. But assuming Pa is in good health, he will be looking for us. If somehow he recognizes Tug before Tug sees him, there is a chance the outcome will be ugly.

Despite my unwillingness to commit to a decision, one afternoon I find us all sitting on our horses facing down a hillside. The valley is a wide stretch of grassland, uncultivated, wild. Part of it is scattered with flowers, another part appears to be bog.

A memory flutters to the surface of the mind-world.

She holds a purse of leather heavy with coin. Behind her the scraggly, undulating grassland still covered in snow. Long curls of hair drape around her slim face. Her skin is pale in the blue winter half-light. When she looks up there is pain in her eyes.

"You're not coming back."

"It is just for safe keeping," Tug replies.

I gaze at the wilderness, trying to give Tug the privacy of his own thoughts, when it suddenly comes back to me. I remember the day in Blackfoot Forest when I shot Tug's dog and he and Brin snatched Kel. Kel and I were by the frozen river, looking at the fish he'd dug up, when a memory grazed the mind-world, like a whisper on the wind. The first sign that we were not alone.

Ruffled blankets. Wreaths of curly brown hair. Twilight glowing on wooden tumbledown walls.

It was the same woman as the woman in Tug's thoughts now.

"This is your meadow," I say, the realization dawning on me.

Tug gives a short nod, and gets down from his horse. Kel dismounts and comes to help me down, as I mentally piece together these fragmented memories of Tug's complex world.

The last time Tug was here, he had given the woman with auburn hair a purse with five times more coin than he could have earned in a season hunting with Brin. She had believed he would not come back. What unknown path had he designed for himself before he crossed Kel and me in Blackfoot Forest, and why had it meant not returning?