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

was done. I waited for him to return, but finally I fell asleep, alone beneath the
stars.
We spent the next few days in the areas surrounding Chernast, scouring miles of
terrain for signs of Morozova’s herd, drawing as close to the outpost as we
dared. With every passing day, Mal’s mood darkened. He tossed in his sleep and
barely ate. Sometimes I woke to him thrashing about under the furs mumbling,
“Where are you? Where are you?”
He saw signs of other people – broken branches, displaced rocks, patterns that
were invisible to me until he pointed them out – but no signs of the stag.
Then one morning, he shook me awake before dawn.
“Get up,” he said. “They’re close, I can feel it.” He was already pulling the
furs off me and shoving them into his pack.
“Hey!” I complained, trying to keep back the covers to no avail. “What about
breakfast?”
He tossed me a piece of hard tack. “Eat and walk. I want to try the western
trails today. I have a feeling.”
“But yesterday you thought we should head east.”
“That was yesterday,” he said, already shouldering his pack and striding into
the tall grass. “Get moving. We need to find that stag so I don’t have to chop
your head off.”
“I never said you had to chop my head off,” I grumbled, rubbing the sleep
from my eyes and stumbling after him.
“Run you through with a sword, then? Firing squad?”
“I was thinking something quieter, like maybe a nice poison.”
“All you said was that I had to kill you. You didn’t say how.”
I stuck my tongue out at his back, but I was glad to see him so energised, and I
supposed it was a good thing that he could joke about it all. At least, I hoped he
was joking.
The western trails took us through groves of squat larches and past meadows
clustered with fireweed and red lichen. Mal moved with purpose, his step light
as always.
The air felt cool and damp, and a few times I caught him glancing nervously
up at the overcast sky, but he drove onwards. Late in the afternoon, we reached a
low hill that sloped gently down into a broad plateau covered in pale grass. Mal
paced along the top of the slope, ranging west and then east. He walked down
the hill and up the hill, and down it again, until I thought I would scream. At last,
he led us to the leeward side of a large cluster of boulders, slid his pack off his
shoulders, and said, “Here.”