Sinner by Sara Douglass. Book One of The Wayfarer Redemption

She said she’d done it for love, but Drago could not quite bring himself to believe that.

“Can this mist trap us?” he asked, once Zenith was breathing easier.

“I don’t fully understand it, but, yes… I think that it could.”

“How much farther does it extend?”

Zenith ran her hands back through her hair, lifting it out of her eyes. “Another hour or two on foot, perhaps.”

“And then where?” he asked softly.

She was silent for a while before she answered. “The Island of Mist and Memory.”

“What? Gods, Zenith! How do you expect us to get there? It’s a hundred leagues… more!”

“Drago -”

“Stars! You might as well have left me back in the -”

She grabbed his wrist, furious at him. “Back in your cell? Except you wouldn’t be in the cell now, would you, Drago? You’d be a skewered mess on a litter being carried to the corpse yard!”

He pulled his wrist away, but he did so gently, and when he resumed speaking his voice was more even. “Why the Island of Mist and Memory?”

“StarDrifter is there.”

Drago sat and thought about that. StarDrifter might well be pleased to see Zenith, and gods alone knew she’d be glad to see him, but would their grandfather be pleased to see him?

But where else could he go? At the least he could hide in the jungles that covered the greater part of the island.

He grunted, thinking of living his life as a wild man of the jungle. He was sure many would think it a fit end for Drago the Treacherous. Stay away from the jungle, children, or Drago the Treacherous will eat you!

“I thought we would go through the forests,” Zenith said softly. “Cut across into Minstrelsea once we are out of the Urqhart Hills.”

“They’ll have captured us long before then.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Drago…”

“I know. WingRidge.”

“Why did he help us? He is supposed to be devoted to Caelum.”

Drago chuckled, and Zenith caught her breath. Drago so rarely smiled that she’d forgotten how it lit up his face.

“Then I admire WingRidge’s’devotion’,” Drago said, still grinning, and Zenith found that her mouth also had curved in a small smile.

“But I don’t know, Zenith,” Drago continued, his grin fading. “WingRidge was ever the mystery. Frankly, I have never understood him. Sometimes I caught him staring at me with such a strange expression on his face…”

It was the strangeness of that expression that had unsettled Drago the most. He’d learned to deal with looks of loathing, contempt and even fear – but WingRidge had been so unreadable that Drago had avoided him whenever possible.

Zenith noted the discomfort in her brother’s eyes and decided to change the subject.

“We’ll get to the forest, Drago. We will,” she said firmly.

“And it will protect us,” Drago said slowly. “No armed patrol is going to be able to ride through it, and Caelum can’t send hunting hounds through there. And shadows are ever good for fugitives. We’ll be safer there than anywhere else.”

The trees of Minstrelsea hated weapons above all else -save, perhaps, hunting. The magical forest was full of creatures so fey and precious that any man who went near the forest with a weapon or a hound rarely survived the touch of the first shadow along the forest’s shaded walks.

Zenith’s eyes slipped to the sack Drago still held tight under one arm. “What’s in that sack, Drago? I cannot scry it out.”

That brought a smile to Drago’s lips. “Well, well, so the SunSoar power does have its limits, does it? And as to what this sack contains, that’s neither here nor there for the moment, and I have no intention of opening it within this enchanted fog.”

He looked at his sister. “Come,” he said, rising to his feet and holding out a hand to Zenith. “It’s time to go.”

For another hour they struggled through the mist. The sunlight penetrated the fog, but only weakly. Rocks and chasms alike loomed up suddenly, so that both had to be careful that an unwary step did not plunge them into a gorge. Zenith moaned occasionally and clutched at her head, but whenever Drago asked she insisted she was well enough to continue.

But just as they reached a deeply shadowed section of the rocky valley they were traversing, Zenith suddenly groaned and, falling forward, clutched desperately at the back of Drago’s tunic.

“Zenith! What is -”

He broke off as he saw her face. It was deathly pale, and shone with a sickly sheen that couldn’t be totally blamed on the mist.

“Zenith?” He slipped an arm about her.

He could feel her heart thudding crazily against the wall of her chest. “Zenith;”‘

“Zenith,” she whispered. “Is that my name? No, no, it sounds wrong somehow.”

Drago tightened his arm about her. “What are you saying?”

She raised her head and stared at him. “What am I doing here? I have my duties to attend to. The First should not be so far away from the Mount.”

She wriggled in his grasp. “Who are you to touch me as you do?”

And then she moaned as if sick almost to death, and half collapsed onto the ground. “No! No! My name is Zenith!”

She took a deep breath, shuddering with the effort, and then she managed to straighten and smile at her brother. “Why do we stand here? Come, there are surely only a few more minutes left of this mist.”

Two long hours later, almost mid-morning, they broke free of the mist. Drago did not know whether to stand and take great gulps of the sun-drenched air, or crouch down to peer overhead for the Strike Force scouts he was certain would be searching for him.

Behind him Zenith stumbled into the sunshine. Her fine gown was shredded about the hemline, and her cloak had a great tear in it, but she had managed to regain some of her composure. “Where are we?”

“In the hills above Gundealga Ford, I think,” Drago replied slowly, although he wasn’t completely sure. It had been years since he’d ridden through these ranges. He studied Zenith carefully. There was something badly wrong with her. Her mind, he thought, because apart from a few scratches and bruises there was nothing wrong with her body.

“Zenith, look, there is a sheltered spot in the glade beyond the rock outcrop. You need to rest. We both do.

We are free of the damned mist, and perhaps it would be better to wait for the night to continue moving.”

She didn’t even hesitate. “Yes… will you take my arm, Drago? I do not know how much longer I can walk.”

He helped her across the rocks and into the dappled shade of a small grove of golden ash trees. As soon as she sank to the ground, Zenith curled into a tight ball.

“And when you wake, Zenith,” Drago said quietly, “you are going to tell me what is wrong.”

“Mmmm,” she murmured, and let sleep claim her.

Hugging his sack tightly to him, Drago sat by his sister through the hours of the day, watching her, wondering, watching the sky and the lower Urqhart Hills, wondering.

Thinking.

Here he was a fugitive, running from those determined to kill him.

He had never felt freer in all his life.

His fingers tightened momentarily about the sack, and he smiled slightly.

Drago relaxed against the trunk of a tree, daring to think that he and Zenith might escape, daring to think that he might actually have a chance to take control of his own life. What would that be like, to be whoever he wanted?

He’d said to Zenith in the kitchens that even if he left Sigholt, word would spread that Axis’ untrustworthy and evil son, Drago, was travelling the land and that doors everywhere would be closed to him. He’d said he would have no chance at a life anywhere.

But was that true? What if he dyed his hair, grew a beard, assumed a new name, a new identity? What would it be like to wander as a travelling pedlar, or seasonal labourer?

What would it be like to be liked’}

Apart from Zenith, and to a lesser degree Leagh and Zared, Drago had never known what it was like to be extended friendship and love. He’d first come to an awareness of his unenviable spot in Sigholt’s life when he was about three. He could remember the day clearly. He’d been playing alone in the courtyards of Sigholt, toddling about among the piles of hay and manure the stable lads were mucking out of the horse stalls, when he’d suddenly spotted the cook’s wife carrying her six-month-old infant into the sunshine.

She’d had a blanket over one arm, and she spread it out and sat herself and her baby upon it. After a few minutes the cook had called from the kitchen, and the woman had gone inside after checking that her baby was safely asleep.