Eyelids flickering, Finn could barely make out the distant silhouette of their bodies. Wrapped together, arms around one another, they were only a few feet away from him, entwined together while he lay unconscious nearby.
“I am yours, but we cannot do that, Bren. Gwendoliir said he must help me face the serpent. We all three have to be there…”
“But that could take years. Are we to live a lie? If you bond with him, I don’t think I can…”
“I can hold him off forever. String him along, keep telling him I’m just not ready and he’ll never be any the wiser. It’s not like he’ll get bored of me and move on. His bond to me is absolute.”
“Still, maybe you should have been firmer with him from the start, made it clear you wanted to be with me. Why did you have to lead him on? What if…?”
“You sound like you actually care about his feelings.” Her laughter was callous, cold and sharp, carving through him and cutting his insides to ribbons.
“If his feelings overwhelm him, he could hurt you? He’s dangerous, unpredictable…”
“And easily manipulated. Think about it, Bren. Would he even be here if he thought for a second I had no interest in him? We need him and that’s all there is to it. If that means a few kisses here and there, so be it. It’ll be worth it to get what we want, to end this cycle and be together as we are meant to.”
“Maybe so, but it fills me with dread every time I think about the two of you alone together. You’ve let him touch you, kiss you…”
“But I gave myself to you before we left Dunvarak. I told you from the start it had to be this way…”
“I know, but I get so… jealous,” he growled. “The thought of his hands on you, it makes me want to explode.”
“He means nothing to me. Less than nothing. All that matters to me is you.”
“I’ll be so happy when all of this is over and we can be together.”
“Me too, my love. Me too.”
Finn shot forward, spikes of pain and pressure surging through his skull as he brought his hand up to clutch his forehead and ward them off. He groaned and attempted to shake off the disorientation, but moving his head only made it worse. And there were sharp thoughts in there, rattling around and making parts of him he didn’t know he had ache.
He forgot where he was and couldn’t understand why there was no light, then her hand came down on his shoulder, edging him backward again and whispering, “Here. Bren gave me a tonic for when you woke.”
Shoving her away, he pushed upward again, ignoring the pain and taking a certain amount of pleasure in her startled gasp. “I don’t want any of the mage’s poison. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” she sighed. “You’re obviously in a lot of pain. I can feel it, Finn. The drakoren, it’s really needling at you. You’ve been so angry for hours.”
Of course, she would say that. Pretend to be concerned, act like she gave a damn about his feelings. He was expendable, just a means to an end. She cared nothing for him and hadn’t from the start. She led him on, all the while sneaking around with the mage. They’d even fought about it just before finding Yovenna in her cottage. She’d gone off to meet with him while he slept, had been so defensive when he questioned her about it…
“Of course I’m angry. I’ve been lied to, set up… Taken advantage of.”
“What are you…? Finn, what are you talking about? No one’s lied to you.”
“I’m not stupid, you know. You think I’m dim, easily manipulated, but there is more to me than someone like you could ever possibly understand.”
“Wolf, that’s enough!”
“What are you going to do, magic me unconscious again so the two of you can have some privacy?”
“I’m sorry for that, Finn,” the mage countered. Gods, the lament in his voice sounded so genuine, so well-practiced. How could he not have seen it before? “I reacted without thinking. We’re all on edge.”
“Right,” he snorted. “Everyone’s just a little bit edgy. Next time you better hope you kill me. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Finn, stop, please. Listen to yourself.”
“I hear myself. For the first time since I met you, I’m making perfect sense. I should have left you in that field…”
“Lorelei is not the source of your ire, and neither am I. The monster is inside your mind, working at you. Rather successfully, I might add. You are not this weak.”
“You’re damn right I’m not weak!” he roared.
“Then fight it.”
“Oh, there you go!” he roared. “I’ll fight while the two of you stab me in the back.”
“Finn, no one is stabbing you in the back. We made a promise to each other,” she reminded him. Her tentative hand reached out again, lingering on his chest as if waiting to be pushed away. “We blood swore, promised to protect each other.”
“We should have made our terms clearer. Does that include protecting each other from each other?” he shot back. “I can’t remember.”
“There’s no reasoning with him!” She threw up her arms. He heard them slap back down atop her thighs. “It’s like he’s possessed. Isn’t there something you can do, Bren?”
“Yes, Bren. Maybe you could kill me, since that’s what you want. So you can be together the way you were meant to be.”
“There may be something, I don’t know. Maybe there is some way…” The mage paused in mid-thought, as if the suggestion he was about to make went against everything he believed in. “Maybe there is something you can do, my lady. The two of you share a bond. Two halves of the same whole. Do you feel his emotions?”
“Yes and no. Sometimes I feel him, but I can’t always grab onto his emotions. Right now all I feel is anger, resentment, suspicion.”
“Your… you mean the two of you… You haven’t established your mate bond yet?”
“Meaning…?”
“Have I bedded you, Princess?” Suddenly it was funny. Maybe even the funniest thing he’d ever thought about. “He’s too polite to ask, though I suspect he already knows full well the answer to his prying question. No, Mage. There is no bond between us and there never will be, so she’s all yours…”
She surged forward in the dark, closing the space between their bodies and stealing into his unexpected kiss. It was such a forceful maneuver he winced as his lip caught between her teeth. The pain signaled something else. Awakening. He was suddenly overwhelmed again by her emotions. She was terrified and angry with him, flabbergasted he would ever believe she’d intentionally hurt him. Her feelings swam through him, edging from her body into his until he almost wasn’t sure anymore where he began and she ended.
“I love you, you stupid idiot,” she murmured across his lips as she started to withdraw. Hand sliding down his cheek, bristling through the stiff hair of his beard, she pulled back and then she slapped him to drive that admission home. The sting of her open palm spread across his skin and through his jaw merged with the painful throbbing he still felt in the back of his skull.
“Ow,” he barked. “Hey!”
“Did you feel that?” she hissed. “Was it loud and clear enough for you, or should I start taking off my clothes?”
“I feel it, all right.” Rubbing along his jaw, it pulsed beneath his hand. “I’m not going to protest if you want to get undressed, but honestly, Princess, I’d much rather wait until I can watch you do it.”
“Well,” Brendolowyn huffed uncomfortably, “that was effective enough, I suppose, but we can’t stop every time he starts to get prickly so you can kiss him and make him better.”
Finn reached for her. He didn’t need to see her to know where she was; he could feel her. The heat of her body, the pulse of her heart, the flow of her emotions. They’d always been there, but they were muted before by a whispering that had suddenly become absent.
Drawing her close, she was a breath away from another kiss when he said, “Once should just about do the trick, but let’s go for a second just to be on t
he safe side.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The service platforms were few and far between, but they took refuge on every one they were lucky enough to locate. There were outbuildings on some of them, probably storage sheds, but the web and dust encrusted doors were sealed shut, making it impossible in the pitch to attempt to actually open them because they couldn’t see.
They searched each landing for more torches to stuff into their packs, and though they were lucky enough to find a few, the meager light they put off was hardly a comfort in that impenetrable and heavy darkness.
Huddled together with their backs to the walls they waited for the inevitable.
Nothing came. No skittering feet upon the stone. No ghastly moans of long-forgotten spirits in the murky depths. Only internal terrors plagued them as the guardian beneath the mountain plumbed the depths of their souls, digging deep into the mind and heart to discover their most intimate fears. It dragged those terrible things to the surface of their awareness until even the subtlest of terrors festered like an infected wound.
Of the three of them, Finn was least affected. Having already endured the darkest of his fears, only an occasional grunt of anxiety escaped him as he swore he glimpsed the glint of a thousand arachnid eyes gleaming in the dark and plotting to strike, but there were no spiders and it seemed Finn had no fears worth exposing beyond his worries about losing Lorelei.
Lorelei, on the other hand, was a well of terror, and the drakoren drew upon her fears as if scooping them in buckets and raising them to the surface. She worried aloud about her sister’s whereabouts, and Brendolowyn found himself wondering if the raising of that fear was an attempt to terrorize both of them in a single swoop.
His own guilt was overwhelming. He knew where her sister was, or at least where she’d been, but his promise to withhold that information hung over him like an axe about to drop. As she propped against the wall at his back, muttering and whimpering in her sleep, the mage stared into the nothing and clenched his jaw tight. He should have told her while they were still in Nua Duaan. He should have refused to keep The Silver-Tongue’s promise and stormed from that meeting to find her and drag her away from the city below the city. But he hadn’t. He’d made a promise that more or less called his loyalty to her into question, and when she learned the truth she would never forgive him.
Either way he looked at it, he would find himself living in a world where she loathed him. If something happened to her sister… No, he didn’t want to think about it. Jonolov’s plan was solid. As they delved deeper into the mountains, Mirien of Leithe was on her way further north, toward the Isle of Dorayne to live among the Sacred Sisters.
Finn shuffled up to stand beside him in the dark, but even when he turned to acknowledge the U’lfer’s presence he could barely make out his profile.
“You know,” Finn started thoughtfully, “I keep expecting there to be… I don’t know, things in this darkness. Creatures, spiders, bats, something we have to fight. Ghosts, even. Where are all the ghosts? Dvergr died here, didn’t they? The fact that there is nothing at all is just a little disturbing.”
“It has been more than an age since this mountain has seen life. After a while, even ghosts move on when there is no one left to haunt.”
“I get that, but where are the spiders? Don’t bad things sort of cluster together? Isn’t evil drawn to evil?”
Lorelei slept fitfully at their backs and for a second her whimper stifled their conversation. When she became silent again, they just stood there waiting, but nothing else came of it.
The wolf refused to take rest beyond the occasional closing of his eyes. Neither of them slept in what felt like an eternity, and Brendolowyn could feel the oppressive heaviness of exhaustion pressing down upon him. It became harder to maintain the wisps of light he summoned to guide them after their torches flickered out, and he was more than grateful when a quick forage through the mining equipment on their current landing provided several old torches buried beneath layers of sticky old spider webs and dust.
“I mean, there were obviously spiders here once, right? Everything is covered in their webs, so thick in some places we could probably make really sticky blankets out of them if we got too cold, or pad our armor with it. But where are they now?”
“Maybe the guardian’s warning kept new wildlife from trying to make a home here?” he suggested. “You said yourself the passage you found was terrifying.”
“Maybe, but… I don’t know, there was life here once. Long after the Dvergr died out. What the hell happened to it all?”
“I don’t know, Finn,” he grumped. He just wanted quiet so he could wrestle with his guilt in peace. “What happens to all life eventually? It dies. Maybe the darkness swallowed it up, or maybe the drakoren fed upon all the life in this mountain until there was nothing left. I’ve never been here before, so I have no idea.”
“I don’t think anything could last here in this darkness,” he muttered. “Hey, how long do you think that thing could live without food?”
Irritably, he sighed and lifted a hand into the braided mass of his hair. His fingers stuck in the tangles, but he worked them slowly through until his hand arrived to rest on the back of his neck.
“Centuries? I don’t know,” he sighed. “I know only a little more about it than you do because I read up on it in Nua Duaan, but a textbook depiction hardly makes me an expert on drakorens, or mountains, or anything for that matter.”
“You don’t have to get testy,” he grumbled. “Are you feeling all poked and prodded in there? Something eating away at you we should talk about? Do you need an intervention?”
“I’m fine. I’m just… tired.”
And guilty.
He was at the core of his companions’ fears, Finn’s jealousy overwhelming him, Lorelei’s uncertainty about her sister’s fate tearing at her from within. Yovenna told him the guardian would do anything to tear them apart because united it could not stand against them. He had the power to assuage Lorelei’s apprehension regarding her sister with a few well-placed words, but he feared her response. They’d come far enough there was no turning back, but he knew they couldn’t afford another rift between them. He had to fight it. He needed to keep what he knew to himself.
“Do you even feel it at all? Or am I the only weakling here?”
“I feel it,” he assured him. “And so does Lorelei. Even now it haunts her dreams.”
As if to cement his assessment, she muttered unintelligible protest at their backs. Finn turned over his shoulder to look at her, even though she could barely be seen beneath the weakened ball of light hovering just over where she’d taken rest.
“She is terrified for her sister,” Bren lamented. “She feels helpless to aid her. Sometimes she says the girl’s name, as if she’s chasing after her, always just one step away from reaching her.”
“Oh, I know all about her fears. I couldn’t turn them off even if I wanted to.”
“You are doing your best to keep her calm. I respect that, Finn.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” he seemed to shrug, but the space between them made it impossible for him to discern more than the simplest outline of the U’lfer’s frame in the darkness. “What about you?”
Brendolowyn returned his unseeing eyes toward the darkness laid out before them like an endless field of absence. “What about me?”
“What is it that terrifies you and makes you feel helpless?”
“Myself,” he whispered. “My shortcomings, my inability to do the right thing even though I know I must.”
“The right thing in making sure I don’t die, you mean?”
“It’s more than just that. By the standards of your people I’ve lived a long life. I have seen much, done a lot of things I’m not proud of, but they become habits in time. Turning a blind eye, shutting out the voices of reason… it’s easier. Even when I know I should do the right thing, it all too often feels simpler to do nothing at all.”
�
��Lazier, maybe, but I hardly think it’s simpler.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“So, what have you done that’s so bad it’s eating you alive?”
The half-elf tilted his head back, felt the stone brush through his hair as he tipped into the wall behind him and stared into the emptiness.
“I haven’t always been honest, most of all with myself, but I’ve withheld things when I knew I shouldn’t. Important things that sharing with the right people might mean the difference between life and death for some. I trick myself into believing everything will work out for the best, all the while knowing in the deepest part of myself that is not true.”
“We all have our secrets,” Finn said.
“And sometimes those secrets keep us alive,” he agreed. “But there comes a time when holding onto them no longer serves us and the keeping of them starts to kill us like a poison.”
“Come on, Elf. It can’t be that bad.” The thoughtfulness in his tone was an unexpected surprise. “Sure, we all have things that nibble away at us, but they are only a small part of who we are. Sometimes they aren’t about us at all, but we make them about us because we don’t know what else to do with them. Holding onto them and feeling bad about it doesn’t make us better people.”
“That’s…” he paused, an unexpected grin forming at the corner of his mouth. “That’s uncharacteristically wise of you, Finn.”
“What can I say? I’m full of surprises. Or maybe I’m just delirious from lack of sleep. I don’t know. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference.”
“You should take some rest.”
“Not a chance. I won’t rest easy until our job here is done. I can get plenty of sleep when I’m… dead. Or when I’m not dead. I’d prefer not to be dead, just for the record.”
Brendolowyn drew in a breath and felt his nostrils flare wide with it. He held it in until the pressure began to rise to his head and then he exhaled. “You are not going to die, Finn. I am going to do the right thing, no matter what it takes.”
Sorrow's Peak (Serpent of Time Book 2) Page 51