07.17.08

23: Cold Pursuit

Posted in Pages at 3:56 pm by Alexandra Erin

Jace had long since lost track of just how long they’d been running, though he remained quite sure that it was not, as Sheiral kept insisting, long enough.

They’d followed the goat path until it reached the stream, but Jace, in a fit of brilliant improvisation, had made Sheiral cross the stream and continue on the path, then go off it into a thicket, and then double back to the stream. She had complained loudly at being made to splash through the chilly water in the first place, and she very nearly balked entirely at the prospect of not just going back into it but wading through it.

“Do you want to get caught?” Jace asked her.

“How exactly will freezing my legs off help me escape?”

“It’ll make you harder to track,” Jace said. “Now, come on, it’s not even that cold.”

The fact was, Jace had no idea how cold the water actually was to her. Sheiral’s feathers weren’t like his fur. They kept her insulated from the cold, but only when they were dry.

“Well, you go where you want, but I’m going this way,” he said, pointing upstream, and Sheiral had little choice but to follow. She shrieked as her foot plunged into the icy water, her voice a shrill call that echoed off the mountain.

“Oh, that’s helpful,” Jace groused.

“It’s cold!” Sheiral yelped.

“Come on,” Jace said. “We’ve got to move. With any luck, they’ll just think you’re a loon.”

“Who’re you calling a loon?”

They splashed onwards and upwards, the brilliant moonlight transforming the splashing water into diamonds. The brightness of the night made it easy to pick out obstacles like drop-offs or rocks that jutted out in their path, but when they reached a gap in the tree line it gave Jace a reason to halt their flight. He’d never once in his life looked up the mountain on a moonlit night to see how easy it was to pick up a pair of fleeing figures, but he had a feeling it was easier than he would have liked.

He held up a hand to stop the princess.

“Wait here,” he said.

“I’ll wait on the bank, thank you,” she said.

“Whatever,” he said. “Just stick to the trees.”

Staying low, he made his way to the edge of the woods and looked down the slope of the mountain in the direction of the bay. Like a swarm of fireflies, tiny points of light were darting out from the town.

“They’re spreading out to look for us,” he reported. Worse, a heavy concentration of the glowing pinpoints seemed to be heading for the very mountain they were climbing. The echo would have made it impossible to determine exactly where the shout had come from, but he had to assume they’d think to check the path.

“They won’t find us, though, because we followed the stream, right?” Sheiral asked, a desperate edge in her voice “I mean, that’s why we spent all that time splashing around in the cold in the first place, so they wouldn’t be able to follow our tracks?”

“No, but they can still follow the stream,” Jace said.

“Then what was the point?”

“Quiet,” Jace said. “Into the woods, quick. We’ll try to get around to the other side and look for shelter.”

“I hope this shelter comes with food,” Sheiral said. “They only fed me once a day, and that was hours and hours ago.”

“I’m sorry, if I had known I would have waited until after breakfast.”

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