Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Cerin

“Damn it!” Sam shouted in irritation. Cerin grinned beneath his hood in wry amusement.

“How did she out run us?!” Sam kicked a tree, a few stray leaves floating down serenely upon his agitated figure.

“Calm down,” Jared sighed. “She probably out maneuvered us rather than out ran.”

“But how?!” Sam clipped throwing his arms in the air. 

“We last saw her right before we entered the clearing,” Cerin put in. He was throughly impressed that she had out managed to evade them. It wasn’t easy to out maneuver, as Jared had so aptly put it, two kingsmen and an apprentice. They had lost her after crossing a meadow and riding hard for 5 minutes or so. When Cerin realized they were no longer following anyone, he’d stopped their mad dash. 

Now Sam paced between two old evergreens, fuming. Sometimes his temper got the best of him, but they were working on that. 

“Let’s back track to the meadow. With the passing of the storm, it should be easy to track her, even at this time of night. Besides, she couldn’t have gone far,” Jared declared.

“We’ve been relentlessly pursuing her for three days now, she’ll need to rest soon. She will be easy prey,” Cerin said turning his horse northward. 

“She may need rest, but that horse is fresh,” Jared noted.

“Speaking of rest,” Sam commented as he remounted his horse, “I would really like a good night’s sleep, so can we speed things along?” 

Cerin snickered. Sam’s impatience was another thing they were working on. Nudging his horses sides with his heels, Cerin started back towards the medow. He had to admit, she had been cleaver.

“In answer to your earlier question, Sam,” Jared said, his face a mask of neutrality, “she most likely used the cover of those guards’ racket to change course without our knowledge.” 

Very cleaver, Cerin thought. Without the noise of those guards crashing through the forest after her, the three of them would have been able to follow her by ear alone. Then it would only have been a matter of time before they wore her out and captured her… if she hadn’t stolen a Nahati Desert horse that is. That changed everything.

“And yes,” Jared continued, “we will find her and capture her. Tonight. I grow tired of this hunt.”

Hopeful words, Cerin thought before chuckling at his friend, “I never thought I’d hear those words from your mouth Jared.” Jared looked at him coolly before resuming his stalwart position. Cerin knew that look. It was Jared’s don’t even look, the one that told Cerin if he continued he’d be in for a fight. If Jared decided to hold on to his anger, that is. He didn’t do that often, but when he did it never ended well for Cerin. To be safe, he wouldn’t chance it. Cerin chuckled softly one more time before settling comfortably into a companionable silence. 

After a few minutes, Jared clicked his tongue and pressed his heels lightly into his horse’s sides, urging him into a brisk trot, Sam and Cerin following his lead. As they neared the clearing where she had evaded them, tension washed over their group. The scuffling of horses and angry voices of men permeated the air. It hadn’t been long since they first passed through the meadow, so it was no surprise to find the guards still milling around aimlessly. Two of them were arguing about which direction the girl had gone. From what Cerin could make out as they broke through the tree line, the guards had spread out in search of her only to return empty handed. 

Sam began muttering under his breathe about the incompetence of the guards. Even beneath his hood, which he had pulled up before they left the trees, Cerin could make out the contorted look disgust on his face. Jared sat tall and proud, the very sight of a Kingsman. He had left his hood down, his face now a mask of authority. Cerin was happy to let Jared deal with the guards. He was never good at dealing with people the way Jared was. 

Silence rippled through the men assembled as they bowed to the three of them riding through the group. Neither Jared, Sam, nor Cerin acknowledged any of them as they passed. Sam and Cerin flanked Jared as they finally reached the arguing captain and his subordinate. 

“How could you have not located her trail?!” the captain shouted.

“Like I said,” the guard growled, “the only trails leading out of this meadow are that of a herd of deer, our path leading in, and the Kingsmen’s path leading south.”

“For that matter, why were the kingsmen here?!” the Captain asked no one in particular.

“Because that girl is our prey,” Jared answered cooly. The captain jumped, turning to look up at Jared, perched on his horse. His face blanched as he realized exactly who sat before him. While his cloak marked him as a kingsman, the delicately crafted Silver pin of the kinsmen’s crest clasped neatly over his left breast marked him as a Second Kingsman. Like Jared, Cerin also bore a silver pin over his left breast. Their’s was the first generation where two Second Kingsmen existed at once, much to the protest of the First Kingsman. But the king reigned supreme and he had allowed both of them the rank of Second. 

“My lord,” the captain sputtered, bowing deeply, the other guard quickly following suit.

“Enough,” Jared’s impatience beginning to ooze. “Tell me exactly what you found,” Jared ordered the guard. And so he did. He recounted how they had lost the girl after entering the meadow, their search through the surrounding forest for a sign of the thief departure, and their seemingly useless findings: the kingsmens trail, their entry point, and a few scattered trails of spooked game, specifically, a noticeably large herd of deer. 

Out of the corner of Cerin’s eye, Sam twitched, his only sign of excitement and anticipation. Jared turned from the guards and nodded at them. They split off to scout the perimeter, checking the guards account and adding to it. While they double checked the guards’ findings and made addition observations, Jared finished his interrogation of the guards. When Sam and Cerin both completed a full circuit of the meadow and the first few steps into the forest, they headed toward her obvious trail. Meeting there, Cerin had Sam relay all his findings. 

“Good,” Cerin said.

“What did I miss?” Sam sighed. He’d learned months earlier that ‘good’ always meant he’d seen almost everything but missed something.

“You miss calculated the number of deer,” Jared said as he met up with them, just inside the tree line. 

“What!?” Sam exclaimed searching the ground again. He growled, “Stupid! Rookie mistake. There were six of them. Looks like three adults and three fouls.” 

“Yes,” Cerin said. “Their zig-zagging made it appear that there were more. Never assume the information you’ve been provided is entirely correct. The guards were incorrect in their assumption that this was a large herd. It’s quite average, actually.”

“And why are we meeting here?” Jared quizzed.

“Because it’s obvious that she followed this herd to mask her trail,” Sam pointed to the distinct prints of the horse’s hooves overlaying the herd’s path.

Jared nodded, “Let’s go.” 

Oh boy Cerin thought as he remounted. He prayed that she had kept moving, because Jared wasn’t playing anymore. She would not get any third or fourth chances. Jared was determined to end this. Tonight. 

~

Cerin, Jared, and Sam sat around a meager campfire having silently finished their meager meal of two rabbits and a handful of tubours. The stream near by burbled happily in stark contrast to the atmosphere hanging over them. Tempers that had been simmering for days were beginning to boil over, preparing to erupt. Tension thickened the air into syrupy, anxious molasses that threatened to drown them all. 

“So… what now?” Sam asked demurely, all his bluster gone. Silence filled the space between Sam’s question and the heavy air. Neither Jared nor Cerin answered, eyes locked on one another in a staring contest that may or may not end in injury. Cerin couldn’t figure Jared out. Clearly he was angry, but why was he directing it at Cerin. He thought over the past few days, not daring to break eye contact with his friend and partner.

Despite picking up her trail quickly after she had evaded them, they had lost track of the sun child completely. Cerin could bet that Jared felt just as ashamed as he did, if not more, by that irreversible fact. But it didn’t really make sense. Even with her newly acquired horse, she shouldn’t have been able to evade them. Not with their training and expertise in the art of tracking. It was ludicrous, the idea that two trained kingsmen and an apprentice could loose their prey. Cerin could imagine the disgust in the first kingsman eyes when he heard. But Cerin was used to that, it was Jared that would take this the hardest. He was the First Kingsman’s favorite after all. The son he wished he’d had. And the First Kingsman’s disappointment would no doubt wound Jared. 

Although, this whole situation could hardly be blamed on them. It wasn’t like they purposely ignored the girls trail. Quite the opposite in fact. They had scoured the area searching. But all their efforts at this point were futile. 

Shortly after discovering her horse’s tracks mixed in with the deers’, a series of unfortunate events befell their sorry little trio. Mere hours after returning to the meadow, Sam’s horse stepped on a sharp rock and went lame. Cerin had doubled up with Sam, but their progress had slowed significantly with the lame horse hampering their movements. And the slower they’d had traveled, the more strained Jared’s mood had become. When Sam’s horse finally recovered a couple days later, they ran into a new problem. So close to Nafaret, the winds off of the desert were strong and the border terrain consisted of more rock than dirt. If it had just been the rocky terrain they would have been able to follow her trail, but no. Sometime before they arrived at the border, High winds off the desert wreaked havoc on the vegetation and little visible dirt, erasing all signs of her direction. 

And now, Jared was looking murderous form across the fire. He glared at Cerin meaningfully and asked, “Yes, Cerin. What now?” 

He watched Jared knowing that they both had given her that night in the woods. But the way Jared’s eyebrows lifted accusatorially… it was as if Cerin had orchestrated her escape himself. They had been partners for years, but this was a side to Jared Cerin hadn’t seen since they were young. He never got angry like this anymore. He was always calm and composed, a model kingsman. Cerin was the flaky one, the loose canon.

But Jared had let the girl go. That in and of itself was an anomaly. One Cerin had previously ignored. Now that he was really thinking about it he wondered why Jared hadn’t insisted they capture the girl when they first spotted her up in that water logged tree. It hadn’t been Cerin that turned and led them away from the girl in the trees. That had been Jared. In the moment, he had brushed off the confusion whispering through him, and instead focused on how it had worked in his favor. But now… Was Jared testing him? Did he know something? 

Still locked in a deadly staring contest, Cerin inhaled and straightened his shoulders. “We go west,” he said, lifting an eyebrow in challenge at Jared. Jared scowled. “We know she didn’t travel south or east,” he continued finally breaking eye contact and looking to Sam, “and rumor would have reached us if she had gone north… too many patrols cover that area and that horse is to remarkable to go unnoticed.”

“It’s just desert to the west,” Jared voiced.

“Not even a watering station for two days. That would have been suicide,” Sam mentioned incredulously.

Cerin flicked his eyes back to Jared, studying the unreadable mask had fallen over his features. He paused, waiting for Jared to rebut his plan… but he didn’t.

“There’s a town half a days ride from here. If she did head into the desert, she would have had to stock up on water at least. We resupply and do reconnaissance before heading west,” Cerin announced, standing and kicking dirt over the fire.

Author's Note

WIP, would love feedback about content; characterization, scene vs summary, and anything you are left wondering as a reader. I plan to finish this book and then go back in for my 2nd draft revision.
Thanks!!