BLOOD,CURSE&CROWN

Clean and Fast

Riven looked at him for a moment — this twenty-three year old who'd kept three letters because he'd decided they were worth keeping, who was emerging from two weeks

of a garrison cell with curiosity still intact and apparent enthusiasm undimmed — and felt, unexpectedly, something that was almost like affection. "Yes," he said. "They were. Now move." They moved. Nine minutes and forty seconds after they'd entered the cell level, they were out the window, across the courtyard, and into the shadows of the town's eastern lane. Riven counted the seconds until they cleared the garrison's sight lines, and when the count reached safety he let out the specific breath he'd been holding since the window and turned to look at Darian. Who was grinning. "You came from the borderlands," Darian said. "Petra found you in the borderlands." "Petra found me in the borderlands," Riven confirmed. "There are others like you out there." "There are." "Can I—" He paused, looked at Riven with the particular assessment of a young man deciding whether a question was worth asking. "Can I come back with you?" Riven thought about Caelan, who'd said *the borderlands can use a young man who works in a records office and has an instinct for keeping things worth keeping.* He thought about Darian's grin in the corridor outside a garrison cell, the curiosity intact, the enthusiasm undimmed. "Caelan thought you might ask that," he said. "Who's Caelan?" "The man who thought you might ask that," Riven said. "Yes. You can come." Darian's grin widened into something that was, Riven thought, going to be a considerable amount of trouble in the best possible way. He turned and led them out of the town toward where Petra was waiting with the horses, and felt the wolf nature settle into the satisfied readiness of a present problem successfully resolved. One down. One very large, ancient, five-century-old future problem still to come. He found he was, for the first time in a long while, genuinely looking forward to it. --- Petra was exactly where he'd left her — twenty yards east of the town's boundary marker, holding three horses with the patient stillness of a woman who'd understood, when they'd laid out the plan, that her role in the extraction was to be ready rather than present, and who'd made peace with that without requiring it to be negotiated further. She saw Darian before she saw Riven, and what happened in her face when she did was the specific, total relief of a person who'd been carrying something for two weeks and had finally been permitted to set it down. She didn't say anything — she crossed to her brother and pulled him into an embrace that lasted long enough to say everything the words hadn't had room for, and Riven stood a respectful distance away and looked at the dark sky and thought about the Binding and the princess and the journey back, which was going to be three days of relatively straightforward travel if nothing went wrong. He thought about what Darian had said in the cell corridor — *the letters were worth keeping* — and about the particular quality of a person who could grin in the aftermath of two weeks of arrest with curiosity still fully intact. He'd been right to write back. He'd known he was right at the time and the knowing had been insufficient to prevent the guilt that Petra's arrival had briefly produced, but standing outside a town in the borderland dark with Darian safely extracted and three horses waiting, the knowing felt like something simpler: he'd done the right thing, the consequences had been manageable, and the young man emerging from his sister's embrace was going to be, as Caelan had correctly anticipated, an asset. Soren appeared at his shoulder with the silent efficiency that was one of his more quietly unnerving qualities — present without having appeared to arrive, the specific quality of someone who moved through space as though it were a formality rather than a constraint. "Clean," Soren said, which was his version of an operation debrief. "Clean," Riven agreed. "We leave in ten minutes. I want to put distance between us and the garrison before they find the cell empty at the next rotation." "Forty minutes," Soren said. "Seventeen-minute rotation, the guard is currently at minute four. Twelve minutes until the next check, roughly twenty-eight until the alarm, accounting for the time it takes a provincial garrison to organize a response. We have more than ten minutes." "We leave in ten," Riven said. Soren almost smiled. "Of course we do." They rode through the night, not at the desperate pace of pursuit but at the steady, purposeful pace of people who had somewhere to be and were making good time toward it. Darian, it turned out, was a competent rider — he'd grown up in the same provincial territory as Petra, where riding was practical rather than recreational, and he found his seat quickly despite the stiffness of two weeks of limited movement. He also, predictably, had questions. "The Binding," he said, when they'd been riding for an hour and the night had settled into the particular vast quiet of open borderland terrain. "I read about it in the palace archives — I had access through the records office to a subset of provincial historical documentation, and there were references to a pre-kingdom pact involving the Valdris bloodline and four—" He stopped. "Oh," he said, and looked at Riven with an expression that suggested several things had just arranged themselves into a new configuration in his head. "You're one of the Four." "We've covered this," Riven said. "I thought that was a title," Darian said. "Like, a descriptive thing. I didn't realize it was a specific — oh." Another reconfiguration. "All four of you are in the borderlands." "All four of us are in the borderlands," Riven confirmed. "And the princess—" "Is coming, yes." Darian was quiet for a moment, absorbing the full picture. "The Mark is spreading," he said, finally, in the tone of someone who'd had access to provincial records and had apparently been piecing together more of the current situation than Riven had assumed. "I saw a report, about six months ago, a physician's quarterly update to the provincial health records — routine documentation, but it mentioned the Ashen Mark's progression in clinical terms. The rate of spread had accelerated." Riven looked at him sharply. "How accelerated?" "I don't know the baseline precisely," Darian said. "The comparison was to the previous year's documentation. Whatever the rate was then, it had increased by roughly thirty percent." He paused. "She has less time than people think she has, doesn't she." Riven thought about the wolf nature's reading of the Binding — the warmth of something recognizing its own kind, the specific readiness of something that had been waiting — and thought about nineteen years old and one year left, and thought about thirty percent acceleration. "She has less time," he said, and urged his horse to a slightly faster pace, because present problems were what he was best at, and the present problem had just become more urgent than it had been five minutes ago. Soren rode up beside him. "You heard," he said. It wasn't a question. "I heard," Soren said. "I'm thinking about it." "And?" "I'm thinking that we need to be back before we thought we needed to be back," Soren said. "I'm thinking that whatever the Binding requires of us specifically — the mechanism, the actual action that breaks the Mark — we need more information than we currently have, and the only source of that information is her, and she needs to be here for us to access it." "And she needs to be alive when she arrives," Riven said. "She needs to be alive when she arrives," Soren agreed. The borderlands moved past them in the dark, the terrain familiar to Riven in the way of a landscape he'd spent five years learning from the inside, and the wolf nature hummed with the particular, focused urgency of something that had just understood a deadline it had previously treated as approximate was considerably more specific than it had appeared. Three days back to the settlement. The princess perhaps two weeks out, perhaps less if she moved as quickly as the decision the Binding had registered suggested she was capable of moving. He thought about what Petra had said in the guest quarters, before the dawn. *Someone is going to arrive and you're going to realize that the thing you couldn't do for me — the staying — isn't actually a thing you can't do. It's just a thing you haven't found the right reason to do yet.* He'd said *maybe.* He thought, riding through the dark with the wolf nature running warm and certain through him, that *maybe* was doing less work than it had been doing an hour ago. The settlement. The others. Caelan's pattern-reading certainty. Soren's careful, thorough patience. Zephyr's particular, sideways knowing. And coming toward all of them, from the west, a nineteen year old with a mark on her skin and a year left and the specific, uncompromising refusal to accept the shape of the problem she'd been given. He was ready. He had been ready for a long time. He was simply, finally, beginning to understand what he'd been ready for. --- They made it back in two and a half days, pushing the horses to a pace that was firm without being cruel, sleeping in three-hour intervals rather than full nights, eating on the move. Darian adapted to the pace with the philosophical acceptance of someone who'd spent two weeks in a garrison cell and found almost any external activity a significant improvement. He was, Riven discovered over those two and a half days, exactly the kind of person the letters had suggested he was — curious to the point of being occasionally annoying about it, possessed of an instinct for significant information that was going to be genuinely useful in a community that ran on intelligence and assessment, and entirely without the particular self-preserving social caution that most people developed by twenty-three. He asked questions about the settlement, about the Binding, about the wolf-nature and what it was and how it worked, with the specific, systematic thoroughness of someone who'd worked in a records office and understood that understanding something required the full picture rather than the highlights. Riven answered what he answered and declined to answer what he declined to answer, and Darian accepted the limits with a reasonable grace that suggested he'd understood they were limits rather than evasions, which was itself a mark in his favor.