Page 130 of Falling Princess

With great reluctance, I let go. Raina and I got back on our tired mounts and kicked them up the steep pathway. Dawn painted the sky gray, then the palest of blues. We pushed as hard as the exhausted animals would tolerate.

From well behind us came a deafening crash. Raina twisted to look back the way we came. When she swiveled back to me, our eyes met and held.

“He could be hurt.” I heard my own fear, belied by determination.

“If he is, we’re the only people who can help him.”

We turned our horses and trotted back down the hill, the way we’d come.

CHAPTERFORTY-ONE

My heart stopped at the sight of Lorcan’s inert form bleeding from a gash on his head.

“No, no,no,” I muttered, sliding off my horse while it was still trotting.

“Wait. Don’t move him. Let me check his spine first.” Raina bent, gently prodding his dust-covered body.

I clenched my shaking hands at my side. “Is he okay?”

He is clearlynotokay.

Raina sat back on her heels. “No way to know. Long odds, but head injuries are weird. A minor one can kill you. Some people make a complete recovery from a severe wound, like this. The sooner he gets proper treatment, the better his chances.”

“We’ve lost Cata,” I said quietly. “We don’t know whether my father is still alive. Your father can protect River Bend but not the entire country. I’m no strategist. I barely started learning how to prepare for war three months ago.”

She nodded slowly. “You want me to save his life. If I can.”

I nod. “Do we have another choice?”

“Not really.” Raina sighed. “Every town and village we’ve seen has been on fire. Maybe the more remote outposts like Tenáho are untouched. If we’re lucky.”

Luck has never been kind to me before. No reason to expect anything but the worst from it now.

Yet fortune has always favored bold-as-brass Lorcan. Perhaps it hasn’t favored me because I’ve been too timid; my efforts to rebel too small in scope. The goddess doesn’t want much to do with her living vessel, but if she exists, she certainly watches over him. Maybe that will be enough to spare him.

“We need to get to a safe place and regroup. Figure out who’s still standing, and where.” Raina sighs. “At least they don’t have good mobile communications, either. We have satellite phones. The invaders probably do, too, and they might have walkie-talkies, if our intelligence gathering is accurate.”

“What are walkie-talkies? Are they as stupid as the name sounds?”

My friend smiled faintly.

“Handheld portable transceivers. Little radios with antennas built in. Short-range, but useful.” Raina mimed a rectangle shape. “We have some, just none with us. In retrospect, that was a failure of planning. We relied too much on the sat phones. Wouldn’t it be great if we could call for help right about now? Neither of us can lift him, much less carry him very far. We’re pinned down.”

In other words, Raina was torn between leaving Lorcan to die and risking our lives to save him. We both regarded him with pure misery. She loves him as much as I do. Every option we have is bad.

I wanted to throw myself onto his body and weep. Instead, I leaned close and whispered, “You’re still alive, Knight. You made me a promise, and I will not release you from it. Come back to me.”

I swear his eyes flickered open briefly. I felt the barest brush of his finger against mine. An involuntary movement, most likely, but I prefer to think of it as a sign that he heard me. I kissed his cheek, then moved away from his body and told Raina, “Do whatever you have to do. Keep him alive.”

My first-ever order was to keep the man I loved alive.

“He might not thank you for it. He might not be the same when he wakes up.”

“I have to take that risk.”

She knelt at his side, already working. I couldn’t do anything to assist, so I edged toward the lip of the cliff and peered down to see what Lorcan accomplished before his injury. A tangle of broken Sentinels lay at the bottom, covered in rocks and gravel. He did it. He lured them into a place they couldn’t climb out of and caused a rockslide to stop them. Lorcan and his explosives. I smiled.

One machine beeped to life. It focused on me. I rolled away from the edge as it shot the place my head had been half a second ago. Rocks fell, narrowly missing Raina, who’d gone back to washing out Lorcan’s wound with water from her canteen.

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