Page 165 of The Priory of the Orange Tree

“I will remember this kindness, Margret.”

Margret embraced her, so tightly Ead could not breathe. “I know there is little chance of it,” she said thickly, “but if you should meet Loth on the road—”

“I know.”

“I love you like my own sister, Ead Duryan. Wewillmeet again.” She pressed a kiss to her cheek. “May the Saint go with you.”

“I know no Saint,” Ead said honestly, and saw her friend’s confusion, “but I take your blessing, Meg.”

She left the chamber and made haste through the corridors, avoiding the guards. When she found the portrait, she descended the stair beyond and emerged in a passage with a window at its end. She hurdled through it and into the night.

Inside the Royal Mews, all was dark. Valour, a gift to Margret from her father for her twentieth birthday, was the envy of every rider at court. He filled the stall at eighteen hands. Ead placed a gloved hand on his blood-bay coat.

Valour snorted as she saddled him. If rumor had it true, he could outrun even Sabran’s horses.

Ead wedged her boot into the stirrup, mounted, and snapped the reins. At once, Valour wheeled out of his stall and charged through the open doors. They were through the gates of Ascalon Palace before Ead heard the cry, and by then there was no catching her. Arrows rained in her wake. Valour let out a whinny, but she whispered to him in Selinyi, urging him on.

As the archers stood down, Ead looked back at the place that had been her prison and her home for eight years. The place where she had met Loth and Margret, two people she had not expected to befriend. The place where she had grown to care for the seed of the Deceiver.

The guards came after her. They hunted a ghost, for Ead Duryan was no more.

She rode hard for six days and nights through the sleet, stopping only to rest Valour. She had to stay ahead of the heralds. If Combe had his way, they would already be taking word of her escape through the country.

Instead of taking the South Pass, she traversed country lanes and fields. The snow began again on the fourth day. Her journey took her through the bountiful county of the Downs, where Lord and Lady Honeybrook had their seat at Dulcet Court, to the town of Crow Coppice. She watered Valour and filled her wineskin before returning to the road under cover of darkness.

She focused on anything but Sabran, but even the swiftest riding left room for thoughts to prey. Now that she was sick, she was even more vulnerable than she had been before.

As Ead urged the gelding across a farmstead, she damned her own folly. The Inysh court had softened her heart.

She could not tell the Prioress how it had been with Sabran. Even Chassar might not understand. She hardly understood herself. All she knew was that she could not leave Sabran at the mercy of the Dukes Spiritual.

When dawn broke on the seventh day, the sea bruised the horizon. To the untaught eye, the cliffs simply fell away, land planing seamlessly into water. One could look at it and never imagine that a city stood between them.

Today, smoke betrayed its presence. A thick, dark cloud of it, billowing skyward.

Ead watched for a long moment. That was more than chimney smoke. She rode to the edge of the cliffs and surveyed the rooftops below.

“Come, Valour,” she murmured, and dismounted. She led him to the first set of steps.

Perchling was a mess. Cobblestones splashed with blood. Bone char and melted flesh, oily on the wind. The living wept over the remains of their loved ones, or stood in confusion. No one paid any mind to Ead.

A dark-haired woman was sitting outside the remains of a bakehouse. “You there,” Ead said to her. “What happened here?”

The woman was shivering. “They came in the night. Servants of the High Westerns,” she whispered. “The war machines drove ’em away, but not before they did . . . this.” A tear dripped to her jaw. “There will be another Grief of Ages before the year is out.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Ead said, too softly for her to hear.

She took Valour down the stair to the beach. Catapults and other artillery lay wrecked on the sand. Smoking corpses were littered here and there—soldier and wyrm, tangled in eternal battle, even in death. Cockatrices and basilisks were strewn about in grotesque contortions, tongues lolling, eyes pecked by gulls. Ead walked alongside the gelding.

“Hush,” she said when he whickered. “Hush, Valour. The dead have made their beds upon this sand.”

From the looks of things, all the Draconic creatures involved in this attack had been killed, either by the war machines or the sword. Sabran would know about it soon. Fortunate for her that her navy was stationed at ports all over Inys, or the whole fleet might have burned.

Ead crossed the beach. The wind blew down her hood, cooling the sweat on her brow. Perchling would ordinarily be full of ships, but each one had been set on fire. Those that were intact would need work before they could sail. Only a rowing boat looked untouched.

“Lost, are you?”

A knife was in her grasp before she knew it, and she spun, poised to throw. A woman held up her hands.

---