Chapter 22 | Part 5

They’d outrun the hunters. Barely.

The morning found them in a clearing where ancient oaks had been felled by some long-ago storm, their trunks creating a maze of natural barriers. Eldric had chosen the spot for its sight lines. Fallen wood on three sides, a steep slope on the fourth, only two approaches wide enough for a group. Defensible. Temporary.

Maris couldn’t stop shaking. Her nose bled through the cloth she’d pressed against it, soaking through the fabric, dripping onto her hands. The run had pushed her further than she should have gone and her body was making her pay. Xandor sat beside her, one hand on her shoulder, the other holding fresh cloth to replace the ruined one.

Eldric’s sword arm was bleeding from a cut he’d taken during the flight, a branch or a blade. Dulint couldn’t tell which and Eldric didn’t seem to care. He bound it himself, one-handed, and kept his eyes on the treeline.

Balin sat on a log. When Eldric passed, he looked up.

“We can’t keep running,” Balin said.

“Agreed,” Eldric replied.

“And we can’t keep going slow.”

“Also agreed.”

“Then what?”

Eldric looked at Dulint. The soldier’s expression wasn’t hostile anymore. It was tired. The kind of tired that came from fighting the same fight too many times without resolution.

“A middle path,” Dulint said. The words came out heavy, each one a concession he didn’t want to make. “Faster than I’ve been choosing. More cautious than you’ve been wanting. We follow the Beacon’s heading but we don’t sprint for it. We move with purpose.”

“Purpose isn’t speed.”

“No. But purpose has direction. What I’ve been doing…” He trailed off. Swallowed. “What I’ve been doing hasn’t been purposeful. It’s been reactive. You were right about that.”

The admission cost him more than the run had. Eldric heard it. The soldier nodded, slow.

“We follow the Beacon north,” Eldric said. “Steady pace. No more detours unless the threat is confirmed, not suspected. We stay under canopy when possible but we don’t sacrifice heading for cover.”

“And when the hunters find us again?”

“We fight,” Eldric said. “We escaped the Grukmar. These hunters keep finding us. Next time, we choose where to stand.”

Dulint looked at the sword on Eldric’s hip. At Balin, who gripped his own blade with hands that were calloused now, hard in places they hadn’t been when they left Stonehold. At Maris, who was bleeding from places people shouldn’t bleed and refused to stop walking.

“Agreed,” he said.

Xandor helped Maris to her feet. The seer swayed, steadied, and met Dulint’s eyes with a clarity that cut through her physical deterioration.

“The vision is getting closer,” she said. “Not just clearer. Closer. Whatever the Beacon is reaching toward, the distance is shrinking. I can feel it.”

“How much distance?”

“I don’t know. But the person I see, the drow, he’s not just in danger. He’s in motion. Going somewhere. And wherever he’s going, it connects to wherever we’re going.” She wiped blood from her upper lip. “The Beacon isn’t just looking for fragments. It’s looking for him.”

Dulint absorbed that. Filed it alongside the seer’s prophecy and the hunters’ message and the fragment that had made everything louder, everything clearer, everything worse.

“Then we follow it,” he said.

They packed and set off north under the trees. Dulint let Eldric choose the pace.

Eldric led. Dulint walked behind him, close enough to talk, far enough to think. Balin flanked Maris, whose steps were careful but determined.

Xandor brought up the rear, his old eyes scanning the forest behind them with an attention that never wavered.

The Beacon pulsed. North. Always north.

Dulint walked and carried his secret and tried not to think about his nephew’s face in the pre-dawn dark, the trust that had been waiting for words that never came. Balin had seen his uncle’s fear. Real fear. The kind you couldn’t explain away with caution or wisdom or age.

What were you going to tell me?

The seer’s prophecy. The absolute certainty of failure without parameters, without timeline, without a shape he could plan around. Just the knowledge that somewhere between here and wherever they were going, he would fail. Not might. Would.

His delays were already costing him Balin’s trust. He could see that much without a prophecy.

For now, he kept pace.

It wouldn’t be enough. He knew that. But it was better than the alternative, which was watching his nephew learn that the person he trusted most had been told that trust would break.

They walked north.

The Beacon pointed the way.

And behind them, in the forests they’d fled, the hunters regrouped and followed.

End of Chapter 22.5 —> 23.1: The Debt Anticipated: The Guide