The Assassin’s Blade: Novella 5 – After (2)

She had been in the wagon for two days now, watching the light shift and dance on the walls. She only moved from the corner long enough to relieve herself or to pick at the food they threw in for her.

She had believed she could love Sam and not pay the price. Everything has a price, she’d once been told by a Spidersilk merchant in the Red Desert. How right he was.

Sun shone through the wagon again, filling it with weak light. The trek to the Salt Mines of Endovier took two weeks, and each mile led them farther and farther north—and into colder weather.

When she dozed, falling in and out of dreams and reality and sometimes not knowing the difference, she was often awoken by the shivers that racked her body. The guards offered her no protection against the chill.

Two weeks in this dark, reeking wagon, with only the shadows and light on the wall for company, and the silence hovering around her. Two weeks, and then Endovier.

She lifted her head from the wall.

The growing fear set the silence flickering.

No one survived Endovier. Most prisoners didn’t survive a month. It was a death camp.

A tremor went down her numb fingers. She drew her legs in tighter to her chest, resting her head against them.

The shadows and the light continued to play on the wall.

Excited whispers, the crunch of rushing feet on dried grass, moonlight shining through the window.

She didn’t know how she got upright, or how she made it to the tiny barred window, her legs stiff and aching and wobbly from disuse.

The guards were gathered near the edge of the clearing they’d camped in for the night, staring out into the tangle of trees. They’d entered Oakwald Forest sometime on the first day, and now it would be nothing but trees-trees-trees for the two weeks that they would travel north.

The moon illuminated the mist swirling along the leaf-strewn ground, and made the trees cast long shadows like lurking wraiths.

And there—standing in a copse of thorns—was a white stag.

Celaena’s breath hitched.

She clenched the bars of the small window as the creature looked at them. His towering antlers seemed to glow in the moonlight, crowning him in wreaths of ivory.

“Gods above,” one of the guards whispered.

The stag’s enormous head turned slightly—toward the wagon, toward the small window.

The Lord of the North.

So the people of Terrasen will always know how to find their way home, she’d once told Ansel as they lay under a blanket of stars and traced the constellation of the Stag. So they can look up at the sky, no matter where they are, and know Terrasen is forever with them.

Tendrils of hot air puffed from the stag’s snout, curling in the chill night.

Celaena bowed her head, though she kept her gaze upon him.

So the people of Terrasen will always know how to find their way home …

A crack in the silence—spreading wider and wider as the stag’s fathomless eyes stayed steady on her.

A glimmer of a world long since destroyed—a kingdom in ruins. The stag shouldn’t be here—not so deep into Adarlan or so far from home. How had he survived the hunters who had been set loose nine years ago, when the king had ordered all the sacred white stags of Terrasen butchered?

And yet he was here, glowing like a beacon in the moonlight.

He was here.

And so was she.

She felt the warmth of the tears before she realized she was crying.

Then the unmistakable groan of bowstrings being pulled back.

The stag, her Lord of the North, her beacon, didn’t move.

“Run!” The hoarse scream erupted out of her. It shattered the silence.

The stag remained staring at her.

She banged on the side of the wagon. “Run, damn you!”

The stag turned and sprinted, a bolt of white light weaving through the trees.

The twang of bowstrings, the hiss of arrows—all missing their mark.

The guards cursed, and the wagon shook as one of them struck it in frustration. Celaena backed away from the window, backed up, up, up, until she ran into the wall and collapsed to her knees.

The silence had gone. In its absence, she could feel the barking pain echo through her legs, and the ache of the injuries Farran’s men had given her, and the dull stinging of wrists and ankles rubbed raw by chains. And she could feel the endless hole where Sam had once been.

She was going to Endovier—she was to be a slave in the Salt Mines of Endovier.

Fear, ravenous and cold, dragged her under.