“You saved our lives,” Kio said.
“I lost control,” insisted Scorch with a shake of his head.
“Your Guild Master doesn’t know your true nature,” Vivid said slowly, like he was sorting through the sentence for something that made sense.
“No,” Scorch said. “He would never have sent me on such an important task if he did. I wouldn’t be alive if he did.” He sighed.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It’s exhausting to watch.” Scorch scoffed, and Vivid ignored him. “Julian might have thrown your body in a sack and dragged you to the Queen, but he’s dead, and I have more important concerns than whether or not you’re going to set yourself on fire.” Vivid gestured at the vast mountain stretching above their heads. “I’m going that way.”
“I’m going that way,” Scorch declared.
“I don’t care what you do.” Vivid turned and started walking without a second glance.
Scorch rushed after him. He didn’t need to check if Kio was following. He knew she was.
****
The maps Scorch had studied as a boy never mentioned an exact height of the mountain. It had only ever been, to Scorch, a triangle inked onto a piece of parchment. He tilted his head back and couldn’t even begin to see the top of that triangle. The tip of the mountain was cloaked in clouds, and Scorch wondered what kind of woman the High Priestess must be for her to live so far away from everyone and everything. And what kind of person would want her dead so badly they’d cross such hell to reach her? He decided that everyone was mad, and left it at that.
His thin-hide shoes didn’t boast much of a grip on the rocks of the mountain trail, especially when their mountain trail was nothing more than a succession of rocks that looked the least likely to crumble beneath their weight when they climbed over them. Vivid was in front, his lithe body scaling rocks like he was raised among mountain goats. Scorch supposed he could have been—it wasn’t as if he knew anything about him to assuage the possibility. Vivid’s shoulder seemed to be better, because even though he still favored his right arm, his left was quite mobile and capable, and Scorch watched him stretching those capable muscles as he lifted and climbed, rock after rock.
But the mountain trail wasn’t all rocks and climbing. Occasionally, the ground would even out and they would be able to walk without fear of falling to their deaths. Scorch liked that time the best, mostly because he wasn’t as worried about exposing his bottom to the others when he had to lunge across a difficult rock face, a trying feat when one was attired in a thigh-high sheath of fur. Vivid had gotten an eyeful about a mile back and had refused to look anywhere but straight ahead ever since.
It was during one of their smooth sections of mountain climbing when Kio turned to Scorch and asked, “Couldn’t you fly us to the top of the mountain?”
“I don’t think it works that way,” he answered with a mixture of surprise and apology. He still couldn’t believe Kio and Vivid hadn’t killed him, and now she was asking him if he could use his elemental powers. “I think it might be an only-if-my-life-is-in-danger kind of thing.”
“Or Vivid’s life,” she said, softly enough so only Scorch could hear.
“What?”
“You could have changed any time we were being chased by the cannibals,” Kio ventured lightly, “but you didn’t change until they grabbed Vivid.”
“Erm,” Scorch stammered, “I don’t think that was a factor.”
“Hmm,” was Kio’s sole response.
He was relieved when, shortly after, they had to start climbing again, because everyone was concentrating too hard on not falling to say anything else embarrassing. They didn’t have to climb far before the air began to change. The temperature was dropping and the air was thinning, and though the cold didn’t bother Scorch’s overheated skin, he knew it would become difficult for Vivid and Kio to handle. They wouldn’t be able to travel come nightfall, and they wouldn’t be reaching the top before then. Scorch started looking around worriedly, wondering where they were going to rest for the night. They would need shelter. Scorch found comfort in the fact that they still had hours of daylight left before shelter would become a necessity. But then, well before the first sign of sunset, the snow arrived.
At first, it spiraled daintily down in crystalline flakes, pretty and feather-light. But in minutes, delicate snowflakes made way for dense, fat drops of icy gloom, soaking their clothes and masking their view with a white, impenetrable veil.
Scorch hollered ahead at Vivid, whose dark form he could barely see. “What did you say the final test was?”
Vivid turned on the rock, his hair whipping around his face. His nose was red. “Fortitude.”
“Right,” Scorch mumbled. “Fortitude.” He glanced around them. It was already nearly impossible to see. He reached a hand out in front of him, groping for a firmer purchase on the rocks. His fingers brushed up against something round and firm, but decidedly not rock-like enough to avoid getting swatted at by Vivid. “Gods! Sorry!”
“If I could see you, I’d throw you off the mountain,” Vivid growled, and then, a moment later, “Take my hand. My hand, not my ass.”
Fingers slid against his palm and Scorch clutched at them. Vivid’s hand was frozen and he squeezed with his heated fingers. With his other hand, he reached behind him. “Kio?” She found his hand and grabbed it. Her face was a teeth-clattering blur. Scorch followed Vivid’s tugs, keening to the left of the rocks. Kio slipped, and fell into the snow, but Scorch’s hold kept her close and she ambled back to her feet.
“Where are we going?” Scorch asked Vivid as they slowly traversed their way across a plateau of jagged rocks. They weren’t vertical anymore, but he still couldn’t see through the onslaught of snow farther than a few inches. Scorch would have felt extremely disconcerted by their predicament if Vivid weren’t leading him with a stalwart grip.
A blast of strong wind cleared the snow long enough to illuminate a dark depth in the mountainside, and Vivid was leading them right to it.
“Can’t spell fortitude without a fort,” Scorch mused.
“It’s a cave, not a fort.”
When they stumbled into the cave, Vivid dropped Scorch’s hand like it was on fire—it wasn’t, he checked—but Kio kept hold of Scorch, shivering fiercely. He turned to face the mouth of the cave and the raging blizzard outside.
“Is it going to be like this the whole way up?” he asked. He gave himself a shake and his furs released a spray of water.
“I hope not,” said Kio. “I’m freezing.” Her eyelashes were fringed with snow. Behind them, Scorch could hear Vivid rummaging through the cave. His grumbles of disapproval echoed.
“I’m assuming you can’t help light a fire, since you’re basically useless,” Vivid said after a moment.
Scorch wondered if he would ever get used to the casual mention of his powers. It was odd to hear, especially coming from Vivid. “I don’t have that kind of control. I think it only works when I’m feeling threatened.”
“What if I threw you off the side of the mountain?”
Scorch gulped.
“I have the flint in my pack,” Kio said. “Is there anything to burn?”
Vivid was bent over, scrounging through a pile of debris that had come from Gods knew where. With their luck, they were probably in the murder den of some foul mountain beast that only preyed on fools who came looking for the High Priestess.
“Something nested here a while ago,” Vivid said. “Whether it’s too damp to catch fire, we’ll have to see.”
Kio dropped Scorch’s hand and approached Vivid with the flint. Vivid took it from her and threw Scorch a pointed glance before kneeling. Scorch crept closer to watch him ignite the heap of shriveled leaves and twigs and matted feathers. He flexed his fingers as the sparks caught the kindling. He should be able to wave his hand in front of anything and make it burn, like his mother did when he was small, like she still did in his dreams. She would hold her hand over the kindling and
it would catch the perfect flame. Perhaps if she had lived, if his father had lived, Scorch would have learned. The fire inside him spit jealously as Vivid worked the sparks over more of the kindling, and soon the pile was smoking and crackling, tiny flames leaping to action.
“This won’t burn long,” Vivid said. He sat down in front of the fire and held out his hands. They were purpling at the fingertips.
Scorch felt guilty for his preternaturally high temperature. He wished he could share his heat. And then, with a smirk, he decided he could. He sat between Kio and Vivid in front of the small fire and stretched his long limbs. His side smarted, but the balm Kio gave him had worked wonders on his long list of maladies.
Vivid was a shivering wall of apprehension, and he glared at Scorch’s brazen proximity. “Don’t touch me,” he hissed when Scorch’s arm bumped into his damp hair.
“I have to dry my fur,” Scorch insisted, nestling in as closely as he dared. He’d been told by his tosses in the Guild that his body was akin to a furnace, and it must have been true, because despite Vivid’s brutal gaze, he wasn’t moving away.
Kio had no qualms indulging in Scorch’s heat. She pressed up against his side as she held her hands to the fire. Her clothes were the wettest out of all of them after her slip, and she was shaking worse than Vivid.
“You know what would make this cozier?” Scorch asked.
“You being quiet,” Vivid supplied.
“No. Whiskey. Guild-brewed whiskey. I had some with me when I started out, but—”
“I can’t imagine how much more intolerable you would have been if you’d been drinking this whole time.”
“If you were nice to me, I’d share with you.”
“Your furs are touching me.”
“I might have something in here,” Kio cut in, digging through her pack. “There’s a flower that grows on the mountainside. It’s said to imbibe one with inner warmth.” She presented a tiny blue flower in the palm of her hand. “I picked it from the base of the mountain. We can make our own whiskey.”
“Mountain Flower Whiskey,” Scorch laughed.
Kio popped the top of her canteen open and dropped the tiny flower inside. She gave the canteen a shake and handed it to Scorch.
“I think I already have inner warmth,” Scorch said, giving the flower water a sniff. It smelled like musky cave, but he sipped it all the same. It was cool going down his throat, but when it hit his stomach, he felt his heat rise. Not in a disastrous way, but in a flushed face way. He smiled broadly and handed the canteen to Vivid.
Vivid held it up to his nose and gave it a sniff, the way he’d smelled the bowl of water in the Circle cage. Kio’s brew must have passed whatever aromatic tests he had, or maybe he was just that cold, because a second later he took a small sip. Scorch watched his face, looking for the moment when the heat reached Vivid’s stomach, knowing it had once his lips curved into the barest bones of a smirk. He tried to pass it back to Scorch, but Scorch wouldn’t take it until Vivid had taken a larger sip.
“A little more inner warmth won’t kill you,” Scorch told him, and Vivid indulged in a hearty gulp. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and passed the canteen off to Scorch, who passed it to Kio.
They took turns finishing off the Mountain Flower Whiskey, which turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable beverage despite having no alcohol and no flavor. But Kio’s words proved true; Scorch was practically beaming with inner warmth. The cave had transformed before his eyes into the coziest place in Viridor, though nothing had changed except his perception of it. He laughed until his abs were sore, and when his knee brushed against Vivid’s leg, Vivid didn’t jerk away. Scorch appraised him unabashedly and was pleased to see that Vivid was no longer shivering, and a normal color had returned to his fingertips. He was staring into the fire, the muscles in his face relaxed. That thick lock of hair fell over his eye and Vivid blinked at it but made no effort to move it. Scorch, resonating goodwill and lacking good sense, reached out and brushed the hair from Vivid’s face, tucking it behind his ear.
Vivid turned his head from the fire and stared at Scorch.
“You’re lucky I’m filled with inner warmth right now or I’d kill you,” he said. His voice crashed like thunder in the echoing cave, but it was the kind of thunder at the tail end of a storm, whose menace had moved so far away that you no longer feared its lightning.
“I’ve been having a pretty lucky few weeks,” Scorch answered with a grin.
On his other side, Kio rested her head against his shoulder and he could feel an odd vibration.
“Are you giggling?” he asked her.
Her breath was a warm puff against his bare shoulder. “You’re a Fire,” she wheezed, “who can’t even light a fire.”
He joined her in her laughter, because it was pathetically hilarious. Kio clung to his side, and when she splayed out on the floor, Scorch went with her, stretching out on his back. It was one of the more unexpected moments of his life when he tugged at Vivid’s back buckles and Vivid sprawled out beside him with no more than a grunt of complaint.
Scorch sighed contentedly, because for the moment, he was content. He was lying between the only two people in the entire world who knew who he really was. They had known for a whole day and hadn’t tried to kill him. Instead, they had helped him, hunting him down new clothes, tending his wounds, and holding his hand when he couldn’t see through a blizzard. A word floated up from the warmth of his belly and he mulled it over in the increasing fuzziness of his head: friends. Well, Vivid hated him, so it was more like friend, singular, but still. He felt warmth from every angle, inward and outward.
He also felt sleepy.
“I’m sleepy,” he informed the ceiling.
“Then shut up and go to sleep,” Vivid grumbled. Scorch made his head roll to the side so he could look at the grumpy man lying beside him. Vivid’s eyes were already shut. His eyelashes were long and curled.
“Pretty,” Scorch whispered. He felt Kio snuggling up to his side. He smiled, and then let his own heavy eyelids surrender to the irresistible beckoning of happy sleep.
The High Priestess
10
Scorch could count the number of times he had gone to sleep with the world one way, only to wake up and find it in shatters. People came to kill his parents, to kill Flora, and now, as the Mountain Flower Whiskey swam in his head, they came again.
He did not stir quickly, didn’t jolt abruptly into wakefulness, gasping and crying out. Rather, he slipped into consciousness, one foggy thought at a time. His neck hurt and his head was draped heavily between his shoulders. Awareness was a slow fight. His feet were moving beneath him, but he wasn’t walking. He heard voices in his head, but it wasn’t his voice, or Kio’s melodic hum, or Vivid’s thundering growl. Heat nestled in his stomach, but the air around him was cold and wet.
When Scorch did finally find the strength to open his eyes, he did so gradually, groggily. The sudden light was too much and he shut them again. Shouldn’t he be lying on the floor of a cave, with Kio and Vivid at his side? Shouldn’t he be dry and sleeping?
He tried to lift his head, and his hair stuck to his forehead. Drops of ice dotted his lips and he wetted them with his tongue, tasting snow. He couldn’t remember leaving the cave. He grasped out with his hand, feeling for Vivid. If Scorch was in the snow, Vivid should be beside him. But he couldn’t find him. He was reaching blindly.
Scorch forced his eyes open, squinting against the light, made brighter by the harsh reflection of snow on the mountainside. His first look was at the sodden ground, and though the muscles in his neck creaked painfully, he made himself lift his head, made himself take in his surroundings. They were not as they had been before he slept.
He was no longer in the cave, that much was evident, but neither was he scaling the sharp rocks. He was on a narrow, winding path, and he wasn’t alone. Robed men stood on either side of him, holding him up by the arms, and dragging him down a frosty road. His swor
d was gone.
“Vivid,” Scorch groaned. His voice was scratchy. He coughed and tried again, louder. “Kio?”
The robed men at his side said nothing, but Scorch heard a weak rumbling behind him.
“Vivid?” He tried to make his feet stick to the ground, but the men just kept dragging him and dragging him and he couldn’t get a foothold. He twisted his head back, desperate to see. There were more robed men walking behind him, but in one of their arms, Scorch saw a dark-haired man, cradled and unconscious. “Vivid!”
A whimper fell from Vivid’s lips, but he didn’t wake. Scorch pulled down his arms until his knees hit the snowy path, bringing the robed men down with him. They were up a mere second later, but now Scorch had regained his footing, and he walked instead of being dragged. Their grips were strong and Scorch’s muscles felt weak. He thought quickly. Even if he could escape the two robed men holding onto him, he wasn’t sure about the others, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to carry Vivid far, light as he was. And he wasn’t leaving Vivid.
He searched for Kio, but she was nowhere to be seen. There were more robed men walking behind Vivid, but Scorch couldn’t see well enough to make out if she was with them. He tried calling out her name again, but his voice was lost on the wind.
“My friend,” he said, turning to one of the men holding him and realizing he was, in fact, a woman. Her hood cast a dense shadow over her face. “Kio. My friend. Where is she? Is she okay? Please. Please, tell me,” he begged, but the robed woman was immovable. She stared straight ahead with no expression. It reminded him of Vivid’s brand of indifference. And then a thought struck him. “Are you the Priestess’ Monks?” he asked.
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