Sinner by Sara Douglass. Book One of The Wayfarer Redemption

StarDrifter stared at her. “He raped Zenith. How can you-”

“No,” Niah said, and now her eyes were hard and determined. “No. Only Zenith perceived that as rape. I did not. WolfStar lay with me with my full consent and encouragement.”

“Then you raped Zenith as much as WolfStar did!” StarDrifter shouted and stalked over to the door.

“Zenith was dying even then,” Niah said. “If she felt pain, it was for her own death.”

StarDrifter slammed the door behind him.

He walked to the southern cliffs of the Mount and stared at the wild seas beyond.

Was she right? Had Zenith never existed?

No, he could not believe that. He might not have seen Zenith much in recent years, but he’d known her well as a child and teenager. The Niah woman waiting back in that room had shown expressions and emotions that StarDrifter had never seen cross Zenith’s face. No, there had been a Zenith. A different woman to the one who now used her body.

Which meant that, if she hadn’t been completely destroyed, Zenith was still alive somewhere.

Trapped. Lost.

StarDrifter felt two emotions coursing through him. One, a desperate need to help Zenith. But the second was far more destructive. StarDrifter needed someone to blame.

WolfStar, certainly, for it was his machinations that had seen Zenith possessed by the spirit of the dead Niah. But in a vague and as yet undefined way, StarDrifter also blamed Azhure. Azhure had bred this trouble – but hadn’t Azhure been bred by WolfStar and Niah?

StarDrifter stood at the lip of the cliffs and wondered what he could do.

After a while he realised he was crying.

The wind blew cold at Leagh’s back, and the last of the Skelder birds had flown overhead two days ago. Now there was nothing but high grey cloud scudding above her, the thin sunlight shimmering on the weapons of the men who surrounded her, and the man who had lied to her by her side night and day.

He’d told her that he, Herme and Theod were making a point.

If Leagh wasn’t so heartsick she would have smiled at that. Did Zared call seizing a castle “making a point”? What was he doing? Surely this would end in war?

She didn’t understand his reasoning, and didn’t understand his own sense of betrayal at the new taxes imposed by Caelum. And Leagh certainly didn’t understand what Herme and Theod – and some eight thousand of their men – were doing here, either.

But most of all Leagh did not understand how Zared could have lied to her. “Come to Severin and be my wife,” he had said, and then pulled her into his bed.

But they weren’t travelling to Severin at all, they never had been, and she was not sure when they would happen across a public notary who could legalise her shame.

I feel like an army whore, she thought, keeping her face expressionless and her eyes dead ahead, travelling with a man who throws me apples in return for the use of my body.

Except that her body was worth a trifle more than that of the average army whore, wasn’t it? Did he love her, or did he love the inheritance implanted in her womb?

For three days they had ridden south-west from the small valley where Zared had led her to view his… his army. There was no other word for it. It had been a military march, no comforts, no quarter given. They’d camped at night under the hard stars on equally hard ground, and the only reason she consented to lie wrapped in Zared’s blankets was for the added warmth his body gave her.

At least that’s what she told herself.

They’d risen each day before dawn, broken their fast on dry bread, warmed gruel and tea, and then mounted and ridden until mid-morning, when Zared had ordered an hour’s halt. Then on to mid-afternoon, when they’d halt again, then ride until the stars came out and it was time to make yet another cheerless camp.

At least Leagh had been cheerless, but the men about her had seemed remarkably high-spirited.

What is it about war that makes men smile so? she asked herself each evening about the camp fire. What is it about war that causes men to lust so?

She could find no answer.

Now they were approaching the Azle again after its great sweep west, and here they would have to cross into Aldeni. From there, Leagh supposed, they would ride due south and then east until they reached Kastaleon.

It was noon, and Zared decided they could accomplish the fording before dark. And then a day’s rest the other side, he said, for this crossing would tax men and beasts.

At this point the Azle was still wide, but its waters had deepened and were muddy and turbulent. Leagh sat her mare to one side as Zared had waved the majority of his men across – and with Herme’s and Theod’s men that must have amounted to at least fourteen thousand.

They struggled across slowly. Occasionally a horse and its rider would slip and be cast into the muddy waters. Both would disappear, then reappear twenty or thirty paces downstream, battling the current, battling for their lives.

All of those who fell managed to achieve the other bank – eventually.

All this Leagh sat and watched impassively, hunching further inside her cloak as the northerly wind grew sharper, wondering if even the Azle conspired against Askam.

Zared broke her reverie eventually, riding up to her and pushing the hood back from her face so he could see her eyes.

“Leagh? We will wait the night this side of the river. It is too late now to try and cross, and the river will be quieter in the morning.”

She tightened her hands about the reins, and booted her mare viciously in the flanks. “No!” she cried as the mare bolted for the river. “I will go now!”

Even as the horse plunged into the icy water Leagh was wondering why she’d done such a stupid thing. It was her way, she supposed, of hurting him when he’d hurt her so badly.

“Leagh!” she heard him scream, and then she had no thought for anything else but the swirling, hungry river.

The horse sank to her belly almost immediately, half swimming, half plunging. Leagh was soaked to her waist as waves smashed against them. Gods! Why so strong this time of the year?

The mare struggled and snorted, plunging gamely forward, her neck outstretched, her eyes rolling, seeking the far bank.

They had fought perhaps halfway across when the riverbed fell away beneath them and both horse and rider were instantly submerged. Leagh felt herself being swept away from the mare and, her eyes tightly shut underwater, she struck out with a hand, grabbing a handful of mane.

The next instant both surfaced, spluttering, instinctively striking out. Leagh kept a firm grip on the horse, knowing that if she were swept away from the mare’s strength she wouldn’t be able to survive for long.

Was that Zared shouting? Or her imagination? Leagh could vaguely see men lining the far bank, but her eyes were blurred with the water and the cold and her own fear, and she did not know if they could help her.

She became aware that her grip on the horse’s mane was slipping, and so she tried to wrap her fingers more securely, but they were cold, so cold, and they only fumbled ineffectively. Dimly Leagh was aware that she was sliding down the mare’s body. She grabbed at the reins, and missed. She grabbed at the stirrup leather as it floated past her face, and missed. Her hands slid along the mare’s rump until they finally tangled in the horse’s tail, and she hung on with all her might.

Leagh might have made the far bank safely at that point, save that the mare, in her panic, kicked out, and one of her hind hooves struck Leagh in the rib cage.

Shocked by the blow, and then the flaring pain which made it impossible for her to breathe, Leagh let go, and was swept away by the waters.

Over and over she tumbled, the cold now as devastating and cruel as the waters, and Leagh -somewhere in a part of her mind that was still functioning – knew she was dying.

In her own way, she was happy. Better she die here than betray her brother and Caelum.

But then something grasped her hair, and then her waist. She tried to cry out, for whoever had her was paining her bruised ribs, but she choked instead, and that was so loathsome that she began to struggle… struggle against the man who held her and against the water that was trying to kill her.

Suddenly her head was out of the water and she heaved in a huge breath, then gagged as she coughed up gouts of muddy water. The man who had her now had found his feet, and was dragging her through waist-deep water, cursing with each step that she only hung limply on his arm, and then other hands had her, stretched her out on grass, and then rolled her onto her stomach and were pounding her back in an effort to make her cough up as much water as possible.