The Pawn's Gambit
MatureYou're the prize in a high-stakes race, and every step decides who controls the only water for miles.
The great expedition barons have wagered everything on you. Caught between two ruthless houses, you must race through a hostile wilderness to win your freedom—but the only water source for a hundred miles will be the winner's prize. Every choice you make tips the scales, but neither side trusts you to succeed, and both would see you dead rather than let the other win. Can you outrun your captors, or will you become the pawn who breaks the game?
The story begins
The canyon walls threw your voice back at you, a stranger's echo that didn't belong to your throat. You pressed your back against the sun-scorched rock, the sealed leather pouch — Baroness Vex's message — heavy against your ribs, and counted the dust motes drifting in the shaft of light where the path bent.
Three days. You'd crossed the Cut in two before, when the rains still came. Now the riverbed was bone-dry, and the only water you'd find would be at the bottom of a dead man's canteen.
Hoofbeats. Slow. Deliberate. Whoever rode into the canyon wasn't running.
You slid your knife from its sheath, the blade catching the light. The sound stopped.
"Navigator." The voice was calm, unhurried, a woman's. "Baroness Vex sends her regards. She'd rather you not reach the source at all than reach it with Hark's message intact."
Wren. Scarred, dry-witted Wren, who knew every pass and every shadow, and who'd never once called you by name.
What happens next is up to you.
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