Page 37 of Winds of Destiny

“I’m from Huridell. My men and I stayed with you not a month ago,” I tell her. “We’re making our return trip and had hoped to stay the night here. Our arrival now is pure chance, I promise you. We don’t intend to harm you.”

There’s a long silence, then, “Fine. But we’ll still be on our guard!”

“Fair enough.” I slide my lower half through the hole, then my upper, which takes far longer than it should thanks to the broadness of my shoulders. I end up scraped on both sides but make the fall fine.

In the darkness, I can barely see their faces. I conjure a spark and let it grow between my hands, taking in the survivors. There’s one grown woman, lying on the ground with a spear in her hands that’s pointed straight at me. One of her legs is badly twisted. Two teenagers flank her, nervously pointing their long knives in my direction, and the rest are children anywhere from ten years old to swaddled babes. All of them are silent, wide-eyed, and numb.

I hold up my hands, taking the light up with me. “I swear to you, we only want to help.” Overhead, I hear Camrael shouting in the distance—he must be getting close. “Will you let me bind your leg in preparation for getting out of here?”

The woman grimaces but nods. “Get the children out first, then do it.”

It takes some time for my men to put together a sling. While we wait, I do my best to distract the children—the horror of what brought them to this hiding place and the pain that their only adult is in clearly frightens them, but once I’m sitting down it’s not too hard to persuade one of them to put my cloak on. “It’s a little big for you,” I tell a girl who can’t be more than five years old, and—wonder of wonders—she smiles at me. “Maybe we can share it with someone else, hmm?”

She nods, and I lift up part of the fabric that’s pooled on the ground and hold it out to a boy. He’s more cautious, and the rock clenched in his hand tells me he’s prepared to lash out if he feels threatened, but eventually he comes over and settles beneath it. The cloth is still warm from my body, and after a second he makes a little whimpering noise and tucks it in around himself and the girl.

A shivering child who can’t be more than two, face streaked with tears, forgoes the middleman and plops herself right down in my lap. She turns her face toward my chest, then frowns. “Ow,” she says.

“Too hard?” I ask.

She nods.

“Hang on.” It takes a few minutes, but I manage to get my breastplate off and set the pieces aside. When she leans against me again, she closes her eyes with a comfortable sigh, and then there’s a rush of movement as the other young children either find a place beneath the cloak or curl up against my body. I even have one lad draped across my back. The teenagers are sticking with the injured woman, but even her expression is grudgingly approving.

“Is everything okay down there?” Cam calls.

“Fine,” I say.

“We’ve almost got the sling ready.”

“That’s good,” I say.

The little girl in my lap shakes her head.

“No, it’s not good?”

“Scary,” she whispers.

My arms are occupied, but I bend my neck down until I can rest my head on top of hers. “Not anymore,” I tell her. “The scary people are gone.”

She perks up a little. “Mama?”

Oh, shit.This is a question I’m not ready to answer. Lucky for me, the sling arrives just then, and soon my men are lifting children up and out of the hole. The woman goes last, pale and trembling after the pain of setting and splinting her leg. There are tears in her eyes, and she grips me hard for a moment as I set her in the sling. “Did anyone else survive?”

I shake my head. “Not that I saw. I’m so sorry.”

She closes her eyes and bites her lower lip so hard it begins to bleed. Then she’s being lifted up, and it’s too late to say something to comfort her. What comfort could I give, anyhow? There’s no mitigating a pain like this, no making it better.

The question is, what do we do with them now? We could bring them to Huridell with us, but when I mention it, the woman—Miya, she says—barks “No” in a firm, uncompromising voice. “We’ve been refusing the king of Huridell’s demands to swear fealty and abandon our home for over two years now,” she snaps. “I will not give in and go there just because our home is gone.”

Swear fealty? That’s news to me. I knew my father was interested in expanding our influence, but I had no idea he was applying so much pressure to our neighboring settlements. That he wouldn’t share this with me, his eldest son and heir, sits poorly, but I’m also not that surprised. It’s been a long time since I’ve fully trusted my father, ever since he delayed my coronation to remain in power. That period of delay is coming to an end, but I still don’t believe he’s prepared to step aside without me forcing him. My marriage to Cam will help do that, will show the powerful among our people that I’m taking my role as their next king seriously. My father won’t like it, but he’s going to have to accept it.

Unsurprisingly, Turo is the one who comes up with the idea of what to do with the refugees.

“You can go to Zephyth,” he says. “We have a spare wagon that will accommodate all of you, and we can give you rations that will suffice as long as you’re cautious with them over the next week.”

“But—our rams!” Rusen exclaims. “We can’t just give them away!”

“Would you rather yoke the children to the wagon and let them pull it?” Turo asks in a calm but dangerous tone of voice. “Because that’s the other option that I see. That, or all of us turning around and accompanying them there.”

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