The Lady of Toryn Anthology (Lady of Toryn trilogy) (38 page)

“Yes,” he said. “The conversion
to vampirism takes weeks, even months, and requires several instances of
blood-drinking.”

To cover up the way her stomach
twisted at his response, Ashlyn stomped around and pulled herself up onto the
horse, fuming silently for several long moments before she looked down at him
again. “Are you coming? We need to find Skye.”

He paused for a moment, looking
as though there was something more he wanted to say, but eventually he shook
his head and swung up onto his own horse.

They rode in silence for quite
some time, with Ashlyn seething quietly. Drinking blood was gross enough in
itself, but it had been a necessary thing, given the situation. Yet somehow
he’d made her feel dirty with his reluctance to admit to the act- almost like
she wasn’t worth the effort. Knowing Drake and his ever-changing moods, she
wasn’t sure whether to be offended or just chalk it up to his usual lack of
manners.

“Where do you think we’ll find
Skye?” she asked finally.

“He was leading them west,” Drake
said. “If his plan succeeded, then he should have been able to drive them back
again and escape into the forest.”

“Using the
earth
stane,” Ashlyn said, nodding as she remembered Skye’s uncanny
skill with combat magic. During their battle with the general of the DEMON
Army, Skye had save her from falling to her death by using
earth
. If anyone were able to escape the
shift
army using magic, it would have been Skye.

“He planned to circle back and
head east to meet us, once he was certain he’d not been followed,” Drake
continued.

Ashlyn remembered the
reveal
stane then, and turned to untie
her shuriken from the back of the saddle. “Hang on just a sec,” she said, and
flipped the shuriken over, taking a moment to admire the familiar gleam of
reveal
within its slots. With everything
that was new and frightening, it was comforting to see that some things were
still the same. After a moment, she pulled the
heal
stane out of her armlet and swapped it with the
fire
stane from the weapon. She’d had
too many close calls, and she didn’t want to keep relying on
shift
to save her every time she lost
her shuriken.

Focusing on
reveal,
she silently willed it to lead her to Skye. The glittering
trail of orange fireflies materialized in front of her, causing her horse to
toss its head in surprise at its sudden appearance.

“
Reveal,”
Ashlyn said when Drake gave her a questioning glance.
“I…um…borrowed it?”

“Borrowed,” he said, and there
was a hint of a smile around his lips.

“Yeah. Well…” She urged her horse
on, following the glittering path, which was significantly less sparkly in the
late afternoon sun that streamed through the branches overhead than it had been
in the darkness of night.

Drake’s horse matched pace with
hers as they wove their way through the trees, each watching vigilantly for any
sign of Toryn ninjas.

“It was just you and Skye?”
Ashlyn asked suddenly, remembering the note she’d left behind the night before.

Drake glanced over at her,
clearly understanding what she was asking and seeming to consider his response.
“Vargo stayed in the city,” he said at length. “The Spartans are assisting
Restlyn in assuming temporary leadership of Toryn.”

Leave it to Drake to know exactly
what she was thinking. Ashlyn knew she shouldn’t say anything more about it,
but her curiosity got the best of her. “Was Vargo…mad?” she asked, dreading the
response, but taking a perverse kind of pleasure in asking Drake for details.

Drake made a noise in his throat,
almost like a growl. “No one in FLD approved of your actions, Ashlyn.”

Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t
want to hear lectures from him. “I knew you and Skye would come after me.
Well…Skye, anyway.”

He was silent for a moment, and
then said, “Only you would question my allegiance in circumstances such as
this.”

“Only you would tell me you don’t
feel
anything after spouting off
about rainbows and destiny,” she retorted, glad for a lead-in to the inevitable
argument. “Do you make a habit of seducing people with pretty words and then
rejecting them, or is it just me?”

He looked affronted. “I
healed your wounds
.”

“Oh yes, that makes it all
better. Ease my suffering by letting me drink your blood. Newsflash, Lockhart,
that only works on fixing broken bones, not broken hearts.”

“Did it mean nothing to you?” he
snapped, wheeling his horse about and facing her. “A bond exists between us now
that cannot be severed. This is not something to be taken lightly.”

“No, and nothing involving you
ever is, is it?” she burst out. “That’s why we’re so
horribly different,
and that’s why it was dumb of me
to even
wonder
if you could feel something for an immature brat
like me! It’s never that simple with
you, you can’t just let go and let things
be.
I’ll tell you what, Drake, I
wish
I’d
lost my free will, because at least then I wouldn’t have to feel responsible
for my stupid decisions and my stupid
emotions!”

They stared at each other for
what seemed like an eternity, but was probably just a few moments, her dark
eyes boring into his red ones, the tension between them a tangible thing. Eventually
Ashlyn turned away, and began to follow the path again. She urged her horse
into a slow lope, letting the wind sting her eyes and whip any semblance of
tears away.

As they rode and the minutes
ticked by, Ashlyn’s anger began to ebb, and very soon she was feeling quite
foolish over her outburst. She had left Toryn in the middle of the night, and
rather than chastising her for her stupidity, Drake had come after her. He’d
not only rescued her, he had also healed her, an act of magic that took far more
skill and concentration than she herself possessed. It seemed awfully petty to
beat him up over his lack of romantic interest in her.

Besides,
you’ve already got a man interested in you,
a little voice in her head whispered to her, and
Ashlyn stifled a smile, her cheeks warming as she once again recalled the
passionate kiss that she and Vargo had shared before she’d sneaked out of Toryn
yesterday. It was hard to believe that her feelings had done such a turnaround
regarding the red-haired Spartan- a man who had, three years ago, been her
sworn enemy. But things had changed since Lord Angelo’s defeat. The Spartans
were working for Jackson now, in support of the Free Lands Democracy. And Vargo
had made no secret of his interest in her.

No, if Ashlyn was being honest
with herself, in the grand scheme of things, if one had to suffer rejection at
the hands of Drake Lockhart, then getting kissed senseless by Vargo immediately
afterward was probably the best consolation prize anyone could ask for. She
still wasn’t quite sure how to label her feelings for the assassin, having only
just moved on from ambivalence to genuine affection, but she supposed there was
plenty of time to figure that out after the war was over.

A flash of movement caught
Ashlyn’s eye, and she quickly halted her horse and murmured a command to the
reveal
stane, extinguishing the trail of
fireflies. Drake drew up beside her, staring intently in the direction that
she’d seen the disturbance. The only significant hiding place was a large
cluster of bushes, big enough to hide several men, but a little too obvious for
Ashlyn’s taste.

“It would be very easy for Toryn
ninjas to spring an attack on you right now,” a familiar voice came from behind
them, and Ashlyn relaxed, recognizing Skye’s even tone.

“Not all of them are as stealthy
as you are,” she said, turning to meet the swordsman’s obsidian eyes. He
smirked up at her as he stepped out from behind a tree, but the jerkiness of
his movements as he walked towards her belied the gesture. She could tell he
was angry.

His clothes were torn. The fabric
was too dark to see any stains, but there was dried blood smeared on his arms
and the exposed bits of his torso. Ashlyn swallowed, a lump in her throat. She
knew she had to apologize, but she wasn’t exactly eager to do so.

Skye led his horse out from
behind the bushes they’d been looking at earlier, and mounted up quickly. “Your
father’s army is sure to be regrouping,” he said to Ashlyn. “They’ve lost at
least a quarter of their forces- perhaps more. It’s very likely that they will
relocate, and even more likely that we will lose them if we don’t start
tracking them now. How are you feeling?”

“Fine…thanks to Drake,” Ashlyn
said quietly, and sighed. “Skye, I’m sorry. I thought if I could get in and
challenge my dad, I might stop the war without any further bloodshed…” She
trailed off, uncomfortably aware that this was the same speech she had given
Skye when she’d run away from Cosmea. That hadn’t gone according to plan.

Frustrated, she shrugged and
smiled awkwardly. “I’m not going to apologize any more. I wasn’t thinking,
and…circumstances being what they were last night, I felt I had a better chance
of sneaking in and challenging my dad to a Leadership Duel myself.”

“What circumstances?” Skye
demanded. “You came up with the plan to leave this morning. What changed
between the time I left your house and the moment you decided to sneak out of
Toryn?”

“Nothing.”
Everything.
Blame it on hormones and misguided thoughts of romance.
She’d tried to confess her feelings to Drake and he had summarily refused her,
and even after Vargo had swooped in to save the day, Ashlyn’s heart was
smarting enough that she wanted to avoid traveling with Drake.

Although looking at her current
situation, that plan hadn’t worked out so well either.

“I knew you would come after me,”
she said for Skye’s benefit, “so if something went wrong you would be there to
help. Leaving without you showed poor judgment on my part, but...at the time I
was feeling a little overwhelmed. Emotionally.” She glanced up at Skye again.
“Kou is still alive. The bear that was attacking me- that was him. Did you kill
him?”

Skye, still looking unsatisfied
with her excuses, shook his head. “There’s no way to be sure. I was moving
pretty quickly. Are you sure it was Kou? Getting shot and falling off Na
Michico- surviving that seems unlikely.”

“I don’t know how he survived,”
Ashlyn admitted, “but he did. It was him.” She fidgeted with her reins,
shifting her weight in the saddle. “He’s lying to the soldiers he is leading,
though. They didn’t seem too keen on attacking me once I claimed to be the
Elder Heir. I’m sure they all still think I’m dead.” The only reason that Lord
Li had adopted Kou as his heir- according to Kou, anyway- was because the young
man had claimed to have a “vision” of Ashlyn being killed by a wolf in the
Heavenly City. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that the soldiers had all been
told the same story.

“Did you see your father?” Drake
asked, speaking for the first time since Skye had joined them.

Ashlyn shook her head. “Nope. I
was inside the cave, trying to find him, but Kou recognized me.” She paused. “I
did challenge him to a Leadership Duel, but he denied my heritage. I’m not sure
he’s going to follow any of our customs. I mean, this whole time I’ve been
trying to avoid getting anyone else involved, but it’s looking like I’m going
to have to.”

“You’re certainly going to have
to let us help you,” Skye said in a clipped tone. “No more running off. If we’d
gone with you, we might have been able to help you before you were injured.
You’ve got to start thinking like a leader, Ashlyn, and leaders don’t abandon
their followers.”

Ashlyn nodded, lowering her chin
and sneaking a peek at Drake through her eyelashes. Skye was right, of course,
but that didn’t stop her from wanting to blame this entire incident on a
certain vampire and his unpredictable behavior.

“I guess I need to work on my
impulsiveness,” she said, genuinely apologetic and hoping she sounded like it.
“But I’m here now. I think…I think we should track my father’s army and try
again. They’ll be on higher alert now, but it’s still our best chance at
getting to my father and Kou and…well…cutting the head off the snake.” She
didn’t like the thought of killing either one of them, particularly her father,
but her options were becoming limited.

“That’s probably a good idea,”
Skye said. “Would you like to use
reveal
to
show us the way?”

Oops. “Of course,” Ashlyn
answered, offering a weak smile. Well, now he was definitely aware that she had
stolen it three years ago. At least the stane was coming in handy now. Grabbing
her shuriken, she activated the magic and urged her horse towards the glowing
path that sprang up before them.

“Are we planning to capture
Devlyn and Lord Li?” Drake spoke up as his horse fell in behind Ashlyn’s.

“Capture if possible,” Ashlyn
said, and hesitated for just a moment. “If it’s not possible, then we’re…just
going to have to do what we can. The soldiers can’t fight for long without a
leader, so if it comes to that, I am…um, aware that my father might not be
taken alive.” Her heart chilled as she said the words, but she ignored the
feeling. Now was definitely not the time for emotions. The situation with Drake
had already made that exceedingly clear.