Changer of Days by Alma Alexander

“Back,” he said at last, but his voice was flat, and there was no hope in it. “Back to the horses. I don’t know where we can run that he can’t follow, but I will not wait for Sif to simply pluck me like a trapped pheasant. I plan to give him as much trouble as I can.”
    But Anghara sat back on her heels and turned steady gray eyes on him. “Take the others, and go for the forest,” she said, very quietly.
    He whipped around to face her, not knowing whether to be angry or simply baffled. “And you? What of you? You don’t think I’d just leave you for him, do you? I didn’t snatch you from Sif’s dungeons to hand you back to him on a silver platter!”
    “I’ll make for the coast,” said Anghara, with only the briefest of hesitations. “There will be a ship at Calabra that will bear me.”
    “You would never make it,” began Kieran, and then the import of her words struck him. “Calabra? Where would you go? Kheldrin?”
    “Would you set me on the throne in Sif’s place, Kieran?”
    “I wanted to find you, to make sure you were safe,” said Kieran, after a slight hesitation. “I did not think beyond that, not in detail, but yes, that is what I would do.” His eyes blazed with love and loyalty. For the men he led, Anghara’s name had been a symbol, a word to conjure light with when Sif’s darkness became too great to bear. For Kieran, a part of her had always been, would always be, the little foster sister to whom he had once given his cloak in the rain. If she were a queen, that was something over and above this—but when Kieran had ridden the length and breadth of Roisinan, keeping Anghara’s name alive, it had not been Anghara Kir Hama he sought. It had been a little girl he had once loved.
    “I came back to claim Miranei,” Anghara said, with a brittle laugh. “It was time, the Gods said. But it isn’t time, Kieran. Not yet, not now. Would you let a cripple rule Roisinan?” Something swirled in her eyes for a moment—pain, wrath, madness—then it was gone, but Kieran knew what he had seen. He shivered suddenly, not from the cold, from a prescience that was bone-deep: she was wounded, and Kheldrin was the only place that could heal her.
    He fought the knowledge; it went against everything he had always believed, but he knew it for truth, and at last he squared his jaw and met her eyes. “You’ll never make it,” he repeated. “Calabra of all places will be watched. But there is always Shaymir.”
    “Shaymir?” Anghara repeated, genuinely puzzled for a moment, and then her face cleared with comprehension. “You mean the mountains?”
    “The Khelsies come. Somehow,” Kieran said, shrugging his shoulders.
    “But I don’t know the mountains,” Anghara said slowly. “I don’t know the way.”
    “If there is one, it can be found,” he said steadily. It struck a chord with her, as though she had heard the words before; and then she remembered. It already seemed like centuries ago, but al’Tamar had said it to her beside the ocean at the foot of Gul Khaima. Paths can be found.
    “As for the mountains…you won’t be alone.” Kieran reached up to the boulder on which she was still perched, and swung her down to the ground beside him. “I will be with you.”

5
    I n retrospect, Kieran almost wished Anghara had argued harder. Or that he had listened. The trek to Kheldrin had always sat ill with him; but the closer they came to their goal, the worse he felt about the whole thing, even given that strange, soul-deep knowledge which kept telling him Kheldrin was the one place she would find healing. Yet even so…the closer they drew, the stranger Anghara became. Kieran glanced across the campfire where she lay sleeping restlessly, her bandaged arm folded across her belly, and frowned, crushing between suddenly savage fingers a sprig of Shaymir desert sage he had been rubbing against his palm. The sweet scent of the herb lanced him, as always; it acted like a drug, cracking open