The mountain rose so steeply out of the Sea of Olives that it appeared without warning as we came out of the trees. Suddenly in front of us sunshine was falling on the piled rubble at the base of the cliff. The magus pulled up his horse and dismounted.

“Not many people know about the trail. If we can get up the cliffside before they see us, they might not know where we’ve gone.”

“Doesn’t Eddis begin here? Won’t we be on neutral ground?” Sophos asked.

“Only if there’re enough Eddisians to insist on it,” said the magus, and slapped his horse with the riding crop, sending it down the alley between trees and mountains, followed by the other horses. “Get moving,” he said to the rest of us.

“Not me,” I said, intending to find a safe hiding place to wait until the hunt flowed past. It was past time for me to be going my own way. Once they were free of pursuit, the magus and Pol might turn their attention to ensuring my return to Sounis and prison, and I wasn’t going back to prison, or to Sounis for that matter.

The magus was astonished. Then he was angry. “What do you mean, not you?”

“I’m not going back to prison or the silver mines or some other hole in the ground. I’ll take my chances in Attolia.”

“You think I would take you back to the prison?” the magus asked.

“You think I would trust you?” I answered, unfairly. He hadn’t given me any reason not to trust him, but everyone remembered my comments in the mountains about the probability of a knife in the back.

“The Attolians will kill you just the same,” he said, “more painfully probably.”

“They’ll be too busy chasing you.”

The magus glanced over at Pol.

“You don’t have time to waste forcing me,” I pointed out.

He threw up his hands. “Fine!” he bellowed. “Go die on the swords of the Attolians. Be drawn, be quartered, be hung, I don’t care. Spend the rest of your life in one of their dungeons. What possible difference would it make to me?”

I sighed. I hadn’t intended to offend him. “Leave me a sword,” I said without thinking, “and I’ll do my best to slow them down.” I could have bitten off my own tongue, but the magus didn’t take me up on my offer. He snorted in disbelief and turned away.

The others followed, but Sophos turned back after a few hesitant steps. He awkwardly pulled his sword free from its scabbard and offered it hilt first in my direction. “It’s not any use to me,” he explained truthfully.

It was a beginner’s sword, lighter than a regular one but better than nothing. I took it by the blunt part of the blade just below the hilt and raised it to him before he turned to hurry after the magus, who had looked back once to snort in contempt before disappearing between the boulders.

I chose a nearby boulder and climbed up the side of it. Once I reached the top, I was above the eye level of any passing horseman, and it was as good a hiding place as any. Any pursuers would ride by without being aware of me, unless of course I jumped down on them, waving a sword.

I couldn’t imagine what had possessed me to suggest such a thing to the magus. I’d sworn to the gods from the king’s prison that I wasn’t going to embroil myself in any more stupid plans. Of course I hadn’t actually believed in the gods at the time, but why should I care what happened to the magus and his apprentices? I spent ten minutes sweating in the sun, reviewing all the reasons I didn’t like the magus and everything he stood for, and trying to ignore a grisly image of all of them being beheaded.

There was a jingle of bits, and several hundred yards away the Attolians appeared one by one from the cover of the trees. They paused to look at the hoofprints leading toward the main pass, then ignored them, riding directly toward the magus’s secret trail. They weren’t the garrison from Kahlia; like the soldiers we’d met earlier, they were dressed in the colors of the Queen’s Guard.

I told myself one more time as they passed beneath me that the only reasonable thing to do was to wait until they passed, so I could sneak down the far side of the boulder and disappear into the trees. Then I jumped onto the shoulders of the second rider from the front. The other horses were moving too quickly to stop, and as I hit the ground on top of the Attolian, I saw a hoof land on the turf several inches from the end of my nose. The Attolian struggled up on top of me, just in time to be hit by a following hoof. The horse came down as I scrambled away on all fours, dragging Sophos’s sword. I’d managed not to stick the Attolian, his horse, or myself. I got to my feet and ran.

Once I was among the olives I could move faster than the men still on horses, and I was well ahead of those who’d been thrown. I was heading for a patch of dry oaks I’d seen from the clifftop ten days earlier. The oaks grew low to the ground, and I counted on their tightly packed leaves to hide me. Without dogs, the pursuers had little chance of dragging me out and I could stay undercover until nightfall, then disappear in the dark.

The solid mass of oak trees was visible between the trunks of the olives, and I was slowing down, trying to pick the best place to dive into the cover of their leaves, when a second party of horsemen appeared and cut off my escape. Unable to outdistance them for long, I swung back toward the mountain, hoping to get among the rocks, where I couldn’t be ridden down. If I could climb the cliff face, and if they didn’t have crossbows or, gods forbid it, guns to shoot me with, I might get away or at least surrender without being killed first. I pounded across the hard-packed dirt under the olives, and some small part of me that should have been thinking something more sensible noticed that my strength had returned since I’d left the king’s prison.

I made it to open ground, but my pursuers caught up with me just before I reached the rocks. A horse moved in front of me, and I had to turn to avoid it. There were horses everywhere, and shouting. Everyone seemed to be shouting.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I HEARD THE TUMBLERS CLICKING as the guards unlocked my cell door before opening it to wave the magus in. Without turning my head, I could see him silhouetted in the doorway with Sophos beside him. Once the door was closed and locked behind him, the cell was dark. I lay quietly and hoped that he hadn’t seen me.

“Magus?” Sophos whispered.

“Yes, I saw,” the magus answered, and my hopes sank. I heard him taking small, careful steps across the floor. When he got close to me, he squatted down and reached out with his hands. One of them brushed my leg and then my sleeve and followed it down my arm until he touched my hand very quickly, to see if I was warm and alive or cold and dead.

“He’s alive,” he told Sophos as he put his hand back over mine and squeezed it. It was meant to be comforting.

“Gen, can you hear me?” he whispered softly.

“Go away.”

In the dark he found my face and pushed the hair that had been lying across it out of the way. He was very gentle. “Gen, I owe you an apology. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t answer. Only a short time before, I had floated to the surface of the pain that had swallowed me up. I didn’t care much about his apology.

Sophos kneeled down beside me in the dark. “How did you get here?” he whispered, as if the guard were lurking outside to hear the prisoners’ conversation.