Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo (z-lib.org).mobi

When I’d finished, Mal said, “You shouldn’t have listened to Baghra.”
“How can you say that?” I demanded.
He turned suddenly, and I almost ran right into him. “What do you think will
happen if you make it to the Fold? If you make it onto that ship? Do you think
his power stops at the shore of the True Sea?”
“No, but—”
“It’s just a question of time before he finds you and slaps that collar around
your neck.”
He turned on his heel and marched up the trail, leaving me standing, dazed,
behind him. I made my legs move and hurried to catch up.
Maybe Baghra’s plan was a weak one, but what choice had either of us had? I
remembered her fierce grip, the fear in her feverish eyes. She’d never expected
the Darkling would really locate Morozova’s herd. The night of the winter fete,
she’d been genuinely panicked, but she’d tried to help me. If she’d been as
ruthless as her son, she might have dispensed with risk and slit my throat instead.
And maybe we all would have been better off, I thought dismally.
We walked in silence for a long time, moving up the mountain in slow
switchbacks. In some spots, the trail was so narrow that I could do little more
than cling to the mountainside, take tiny, shuffling steps, and hope the Saints
were kind. Around noon, we descended the first slope and started up the second,
which was, to my misery, even steeper and taller than the first.
I stared at the trail in front of me, putting one foot in front of the other, trying
to shake my sense of hopelessness. The more I thought about it, the more I
worried that Mal might be right. I couldn’t lose the feeling that I’d doomed both
of us. The Darkling needed me alive, but what might he do to Mal? I’d been so
focused on my own fear and my own future that I hadn’t given much thought to
what Mal had done or what he’d chosen to give up. He could never go back to
the army, to his friends, to being a decorated tracker. Worse, he was guilty of
desertion, maybe of treason, and the penalty for that was death.
By dusk, we’d climbed high enough that the few scraggling trees had all but
disappeared and winter frost still lay on the ground in places. We ate a meagre
dinner of hard cheese and stringy dried beef. Mal still didn’t think it was safe to
build a fire, so we huddled beneath the blanket in silence, shivering against the
howling wind, our shoulders barely touching.
I had almost dozed off when Mal suddenly said, “I’m taking us north
tomorrow.”
My eyes flew open. “North?”
“To Tsibeya.”
“You want to go after the stag?” I said in disbelief.