Page 71 of Slaying the Shadow Prince
‘We should go on foot from here,’ Drue told him.
They left the horses in a deep, sheltered part of the woods and together, they crept through the trees.
Talemir moved as silently as any predator of the night, a dagger unsheathed in his hand at the ready. Drue followed suit. There was no way of knowing what they were walking into, or if they’d be set upon at any moment. But they met no such obstacles, and they covered the woodlands quickly, finding themselves at the crest of a ridge, looking down into the former town below. There, they lay on their bellies, watching the raider activity unfold.
‘Depending on where that unit came from, they might have realised that their men are missing by now,’ Talemir said, surveying the handful of buildings sprawled in a dying field.
‘I should have questioned the one in the stream,’ Drue ground out. ‘I let my anger get the better of me.’
Talemir scoffed. ‘You had a single body at your feet. I think out of the pair of us, it was me who could have shown more restraint and interrogated one of them.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
A muscle twitched in Talemir’s jaw. ‘I… I saw that bastard go after you, and after that… Well, I killed them without a second thought. All I could think of was if he got his hands on you —’
‘I had it under control.’
‘So I discovered.’
‘If I can nearly fell a Warsword of Thezmarr, a meagre bandit is surely easy pickings?’
That muscle twitched again. ‘It’s not that I doubted your abilities.’
‘Good.’
‘Thanks to you, we have their plans and maps. They’ll do nicely, by the looks of things,’ Talemir said, pointing. ‘They’re using the village as a fortress. The main hub of movement is coming from that old warehouse to the east.’
Drue followed his line of sight and immediately saw what he was talking about. There were many comings and goings in the larger building.
‘How organised do you think they are?’ she wondered aloud.
‘Hard to say from here. It doesn’t look like there are guards stationed anywhere. If these are just former citizens of Naarva, they might not be so disciplined.’
‘Let’s stay here for a while, see if we can discern any sort of pattern, and then I want to get closer. We might be able to get a look inside, to get a better layout to report back to Adrienne. What do you think?’
‘I think you could have been a general yourself. You have a keen mind for strategy, for weighing up the risks…’
‘If only Thezmarr allowed women to wield blades,’ she said quietly, suddenly aware of the press of her sword at her spine.
‘Perhaps one day it will again.’
As they spied upon the village of raiders, Drue noticed Talemir toying with the sapphire around his neck. It seemed strange, for until now he had not been one for fidgeting. What was it that his mother had said upon gifting him the jewel? Drue sifted through her memory.
‘Sometimes, to love someone, we have to let them go… In order to go where we need to, we must turn away from one path, onto another…’
Is that what Talemir is thinking about now?she wondered, the idea making her shift uncomfortably. Was it unease she sensed within him? Was it regret?
He noticed her looking, catching her gaze. But when his eyes met hers, there was something so earnest there, something that clamped around her heart.
They had watched the raiders long enough, she decided.
Talemir had been right in his suspicions that the bandits were not overly organised. It was easy enough to sneak into the village, easy enough to scale the walls and navigate the rooftops. They found the perfect vantage point to peer into the warehouse from the roof of a nearby building and took stock of the layout inside.
It was immediately clear that it was the hub for all their activity. She could see that it held all their supplies, both weapons and rations, with several men moving about within.
But what Drue hadn’t been expecting was the cage.
Her body went cold as she spotted it through the window.
