“Take these men back to the Circle and bury your dead,” she said to Domeniq. “I’ll tell the guards we’re looking for a pack of Pembuka raiders—at least one archer and two men skilled with a blade. We’ll follow the Natha west toward the glass kingdom.”
Dom straightened. “Let the Hunters search the river. The glass tribes don’t know the Natha like we do—we’ll catch up to them within a day. And, Your Grace.” He grinned. “You must admit your royal river craft is no match for ours.”
“True, true. Our boats announce themselves like a pack of lumbering elephants. You Hunters do have a gift for stealth. Very well. You take the river. The guards and I will cut them off by land.” She whistled at the dogs. “Beo! Wulf!”
“Your Grace.” Dom rested one hand on the mare’s flank. “We’ll find your brother. If he were dead, we would have found him already. He has more value to them alive.”
“My brother will one day be king.” Mia couldn’t read the emotion that swept over Karri’s features. Was it pride? Envy? “Do not forget that, while he may have value alive, he also has great value dead.”
She galloped out of the glade, the dogs trotting dutifully along behind.
Quin’s shoulders sagged, his body heavy against Mia’s. Could she blame him? What his sister said was true: as heir to the throne, someone would always want him dead. He was drooping, both their grips faltering on the tree. They were too weary. She didn’t know how much longer they could hold on before they revealed themselves.
Dom was very still. He gazed across the river at nothing, deep in thought.
She wondered if he was thinking of his father. Just days before Mia’s mother died, Dom had found his father’s body on the banks of the Natha, long black braids steeped in mud and dark umber skin sapped of its color. There was no blood, no obvious wound. Dom didn’t like to talk about it, but Mia had heard the Hunters discussing the details: when Dom had touched his father’s face, he found his tongue frozen to his teeth, his mouth coated with frost despite the warmth clinging to the air. The Gwyrach had turned the breath in his body to ice.
Domeniq was left with his father’s cerulean stone around his neck and fury in his heart. Judging by the two corpses bleeding out on the riverbank, more fury than Mia had known.
But why would he kill his own brothers in the Hunt? The men who were trying to hunt the Gwyrach who had murdered his father? She didn’t know the answer. She hated not knowing.
Dom bent forward, picked up a smooth pebble, and skipped it across the black water of the Natha. The stone skimmed the river like a raven, elegant and light, landing with a soft crack against something wooden.
On the far shore, Mia saw a scoop of pale yellow, camouflaged so well behind a copse of white-bark birch trees she never would have seen it.
The Sunbeam.
Dom craned his neck, that lovely crooked smile lighting up his face. In the moonlight his teeth shone bright white against his warm ochre skin.
Was he staring up at her? His face twitched, and Mia’s pulse slammed through her body as he turned on his heel and strode out of the clearing.
She could have sworn he winked.
Chapter 17
Merely Girls
THEY WAITED FOR WHAT seemed like hours to drop down from their hiding spot, though it was probably only minutes. Stealthily they swam out to the boat, the cool river lapping at their flesh, and heaved themselves aboard.
Mia was grateful for the silence. Her thoughts, normally etched down one smooth line of logic, forked into channels and streams, eddies of unanswerable questions that only led back into themselves.
Dom had killed Tuk and Lyman but saved her. He had lied to Karri, thrown the guards off their trail, and fabricated a narrative to send the search party in the wrong direction. Not only that: he had led Mia directly to his father’s boat.
But why?
If it was Domeniq who’d put an arrow in Quin’s back in the Chapel, he could have easily finished the job in the forest with a mere flick of his wrist. No, Dom wasn’t the assassin. But why had he helped them escape? There was something more at play. Something Mia wasn’t seeing.
The Natha sluiced over the bow of the Sunbeam, slicking off the moss and dust that had accumulated after who knew how long. The coracle, shaped like half a walnut shell, was spliced together with split and interwoven wood—willow for the laths, hazel for the weave—then waterproofed with bullock hide and a thin layer of yellow tar. Coracles were perfect for rivers: their flat, keel-less bottom hardly disturbed the water, and one person could easily maneuver the craft.
Mia sat tall in the Sunbeam’s stern with an old, splintered oar, one insistent sliver digging into her palm. Despite her exhaustion, she felt invigorated by her new theory. If her mother’s cryptic message was true—All you seek will be revealed—and what she sought most was Wynna’s murderer, then she was finally on the right path.
“I’m tired.” Quin was slumped against the Sunbeam’s starboard side. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Extremely.”
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?”
“I know we’re going east.”
“The depth of your knowledge astounds me.”
“Perhaps it’s time you get some sleep.”
Their exhaustion had made them ornery. Mia wasn’t sure what had drained her more, healing the prince or watching Tuk and Lyman die, but she knew her body had never felt so ravaged. A bone-deep ache swelled up inside her, expanding in her ribs, hips, and shoulders. She’d felt like this once before: when she was blossoming into a woman. As if her skeleton were no longer large enough to contain her.
She had an unsettling thought: Was this what it felt like to “blossom” into a Gwyrach? She shut her eyes to quell another queasy wave. Her father had told her you were either born a Gwyrach or you weren’t—there was no middle ground—but that sometimes the dark magic could lie dormant for many years, stewing and simmering until triggered under just the right conditions. He said this magic was most often coaxed out during fits of extreme passion: rage, terror, love. Mia wondered which one had caused her magic to reveal itself. Perhaps all three: rage at her father, terror of her impending marriage, and love for Angelyne.
Another, more unsettling, thought occurred to her: Had her father been telling the truth?
“Humor me on something,” Quin said. “My demonology is rusty, but isn’t a Gwyrach the child of a human and a god?”
“My mother did not lie with a god, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Not at all,” he said evenly. “I don’t believe in gods. Even if I did, it seems highly unlikely they would gallivant around the world with human . . . parts.”
Mia flushed. She had zero desire to discuss the mechanics of lovemaking with Prince Quin.
She said, “You know the origin myths as well as I do. In olden times, when one of the four gods lay with a woman, she bore him a Gwyrach daughter, a demon with the wrath and power of a god mixed with the petty jealousies and wickedness of a human. The daughter had daughters, and those daughters had more daughters, and on it goes. Demons all the way down.”
He was studying her. “What do you believe?”
She opened her mouth to fire off an answer but came up short. If she subscribed to the popular belief, then, yes: Mia was the descendant of a long-ago coupling between a woman and a god. Truth be told, the origin myth had always struck her as a little far-fetched, but she’d also never felt a burning need to question it. Of course, that was when she was hunting Gwyrach, not being one.
“If you believe the myths,” Quin said, “then your mother was a Gwyrach, too.”
She didn’t want to accept it. Couldn’t accept it. She knew her mother: she was grace and generosity and love. In no way did she resemble the depraved demons Mia had been studying for years.
“Let’s talk about something else,” she said.
“Let’s.” Quin didn’t seem to need much persuading. “Did you know I have never been on a river? Not once.”
“And you call yourself prince of the river kingdom.” It came out more snippily than she’d intended.