by Emily L K
Beside her Rowan nestled down too, ready to sleep. He also shifted closer so their sides were touching. She didn’t make a comment or move away, but she fell asleep with a small smile on her face.
She didn’t dream of dragons that night.
“CORI, WAKE UP, TIME to go.” Rowan shook her shoulder gently and she groaned, opening her eyes to a blue sky and a vista of white, frozen ground.
She lifted her gaze to Rowan as he gave her a final shake and straightened up. Odd, she thought tiredly, Rowan was never up before her. And she was usually up before the sun, but even it had had the jump on her that morning.
She heaved herself into a sitting position and rubbed her face. She felt sore all over, the way she used to feel when they had first started their journey and she hadn’t been saddle fit. Rowan had already packed everything back into their pack and was bridling Sunny. He looked over his shoulder at her as she got to her feet.
“You hungry?” He asked. She shook her head and groaned lightly. Upright, her limbs felt weak. and her vision swam. He dropped his hands from the horse’s head and faced her squarely. “What was that?”
“A groan,” she retorted dryly. “A noise that generally accompanies an ache or when one finds oneself in distasteful company.” Rowan didn’t laugh at her joke, and before she’d even finished speaking he’d taken several steps to stand before her. He touched her forehead with the back of his hand.
“Get off,” she snapped, pushing him away. He didn’t budge.
“You’re feverish,” he told her, dropping his hand to her cheek and then to her wrist. “Show me your side.”
“No.” She wrenched free of him. She didn’t want to show him her side. She didn’t want to look at it herself. It hurt and was hot. She knew it was infected.
“Cori, show me.”
“Or what? You’ll force me?” He rocked back, his expression closing down to hide his hurt. Obviously he’d enjoyed forcing her from the palace as much as she had enjoyed being taken - not at all. She tried to push away her guilt at dragging up the memory but it was difficult. She didn’t want to fight with him and he was just trying to help as abrupt as he may be. She sighed and lifted the edge of her cardigan to bare her side.
Rowan sucked in a breath and Cori peeked at the wound. One of the claw marks - the one closest to her pants line - was puckered and red. The incision was weeping a yellow and bloody fluid. It was foul. Cori dropped the cardigan to cover it again.
“Well, we’ll have to get this over and done with quickly so we can get back to Bandar Utara and get that looked at.” Rowan said the words lightly but his brow creased, troubled. He watched Cori for a moment longer, then said, “I’ll see if I can get some ice.”
He walked away, out of the shelter of the tree and kicked the frozen ground into shards of ice. He caught a handful up and came back to the tree. With the ice in one hand, he rummaged through the pack with his other and pulled out his shirt from the day before. Before Cori could stop him he dumped the ice on the top half of the shirt and ripped a thick strip off the bottom.
“You have no other clothes,” Cori told him uselessly.
“Doesn’t matter now,” he responded. He handed her the bundle that had the ice in it and instructed her to hold it to her hip.
“What if it storms again?”
“We won’t feel it while we’re in the forest and if we get out again, well...” Rowan gave a small shrug as he used the strip of shirt to secure the ice to her side. He was close enough that she could smell him. Where once the aroma of books and parchment, flavoured tea and scented soaps had clung to him, he now had the earthy smell of rain on the hot ground and freshly crushed leaves underfoot, and it mingled with the smell of wet horse and salty sweat. It suited him this place; the wilderness at the edge of the world.
His skin brushed hers as he straightened the makeshift bandage and she shivered. His fingers faltered, and he looked up at her. Their eyes met and her heart paused.
“Cold,” she lied and his eyes dropped away again. He made a double knot and stepped away.
“Let’s go,” he lifted the pack and sword and waited for her to mount Sunny first, but she couldn‘t do it. The muscles beneath her wound screamed in protest and she swayed with vertigo.
“We’ll walk,” Rowan suggested, and he could no longer hide his worry. Cori nodded and set off ahead of him so she didn‘t have to look at him, her feet crunching on the frosted ground. They didn’t go far - only back to the road - before Rowan stopped again.
“This is as far as Sunny goes,” he said, running his hand down the chestnut’s neck.
“What?” Cori said in disbelief. She moved to the Sunny and wrapped an arm protectively under his neck. She’d grown fond of the horse; he was as much her companion on this journey as Rowan was.
“He won’t make it through the forest, his mind cannot protect itself.” Rowan unfastened the bridle and tossed it to the side of the road.
“Bye Sunny,” Cori said sadly, but even as she stroked his nose she wondered what Rowan was getting them into that the horse couldn’t come with them. Rowan gave Sunny a slap on the rump and the chestnut turned and headed at a leisurely pace back down the road.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “he knows to follow the road home.”
Cori waited for him to buckle the sword to his belt and shoulder the pack, then side by side they entered the forest.
THE TREES WITHIN HEN Goeden became progressively more twisted, both in appearance and soul, as the pair of them delved deeper into the forest.
Mountains rose before them, jagged and stony, but the trees maintained their dense consistency and the road remained clear and, for the most part, straight. Cori’s steps faltered on the uphill and staggered on the down. Her wound pained her more than she cared to admit and Rowan slowly drew ahead.
It was perhaps midday - though Cori couldn’t see the sky through the dense canopy - when she noticed that the whispering and muttering voices in her head had changed. She could understand them.
She paused in the counting of her footsteps and gazed off the road into the forest. The trees were grey, almost white, with gnarled limbs that contorted like an old man’s hands.
Human, they said to her, their voices sexless and queer. Come. Come, come.
She turned bodily to face them, drawn by their teasing and mocking. Tendrils touched her mind, weaving through the notes of her Hum and pulling her forward.
Pretty human, lovely human.
Come, come, come.
Why not? She thought distractedly. Why not?
Her feet found the edge of the road and the voices chattered their urgency. The tendrils tightened
Yes, yes! Come, come!
She was shuffling forward when a hand closed around hers. It was warm, and it was real and it pulled her gently back onto the road. A barrier settled around her mind - though it was not her own - blocking out the luring voices of the dragon souls. She hadn’t known Rowan could do that.
“Don’t listen to them,” he told her. His eyes were flat and ringed with dark circles, but she said nothing. She probably looked just as haggard, if not more so.
They walked side by side along the road, silent for a time. Rowan shifted his hand on hers so their fingers intertwined, but Cori’s mind was too fogged with fever and pain to give the gesture the attention it deserved.
Instead, she explored the barrier he had placed around her. When she created her own, they sat against her mind, wrapped tight as a glove. This one sat just outside, surrounding both herself and Rowan like a wall.
She could hear his Hum within their bubble but it was strangely quiet, despite his need to weave the song that held the barrier up. She got the feeling he didn’t really want her there.
“I can put my own barriers up,” she offered.
“No, save your magic,” was his response.
She didn’t argue; her body was fighting its own internal battles, and she didn’t have the strength for it. She withdrew into h
erself.
Eventually their hands broke apart and Rowan drifted ahead again. Cori resumed the counting of her steps, forcing one foot in front of the other. She kept her eyes down and off the forest even though Rowan’s barriers remained around her mind.
THE FIRST SHE NOTICED that something was wrong with Rowan was a flicker of his Hum and a falter in his barriers. It was a single skip of a note but the voices came rushing through the gap, tearing at their minds with a frightening ferocity, then the barriers were back in place and everything was quiet.
Cori looked up but he continued on as if nothing had happened. She went back to her counting.
The second time his magic failed it was accompanied by a stagger in his step that almost took him to his knees. Alarmed, Cori closed the distance between them at a run.
The voices of the dragon souls sprang at them, and Cori felt them suctioning at her mind, trying to drag her off the road once more.
Human, huuuman!
Come, come, Karalis, come!
And there was something else there, something in Rowan’s mind, something that was different.
“Get the barriers up.” His voice was heavy, exhausted.
No, no, come, come. Pretty human, lovely Karalis.
“Cori, the barriers.”
She blinked rapidly, dispelling the tantalising effect of scales glistening under candlelight from her vision.
She didn’t know how to include Rowan but she sluggishly wove the song for her barriers. One by one the voices vanished until it was just her. And him.
“What are you weaving?”
“Not here.”
She didn’t argue. Off they went again.
TIME PASSED, AND YET it didn’t move at all. They trudged the endless road, heads down and feet dragging.
“A bit further,” Rowan kept saying. “A bit further.”
Cori wasn’t sure if he actually knew that, or if he said the words to keep from going mad. The only change in the surrounding landscape as far as she could tell was the gradual whitening of the tree trunks. She knew without a doubt that this wretched forest would kill them long before they found Cadmus. She entertained the idea of just laying down on the road right there and going to sleep, or dying. But she didn’t; she continued to watch her steps.
Suddenly Rowan stopped and she may have walked right past him had he not interrupted her counting by clutching her arm.
“Here,” he said. She looked around but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. He took a step off the road.
“No,” she gasped, grabbing him by the shirt. She winced at the lightning pain the sudden movement sent through her side.
“It’s all right,” he promised and moved forward among the trees. She had no option but to follow him and hope that the dragon souls granted her a painless death.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The dragon souls pressed greedily against her barriers, pulling and unravelling them like thread. Panic was tight in her chest as she followed Rowan, her hand clutching the back of his shirt. She was afraid her barriers would fail. But did it matter? Rowan had gone mad, and they were going to die, anyway.
Rowan raised his own barriers within her mind, reinforcing her defences. For a moment she was claustrophobically sandwiched between the two opposing forces. Her chest constricted and her breath came in pants. Branches grabbed as her clothes, snagging the wool of her cardigan like the souls that were ravishing her mind. Rowan’s shirt slipped from her grasp and she sobbed, sure she would die, but he reached back and took her hand, pulling her a few more steps into a clearing. The souls abruptly ceased their torment and they knew silence.
They were perhaps only four or five trees deep in the forest, but Rowan’s barriers dropped away in exhaustion, as if he’d been the one keeping them intact for the past few hours. After the cacophony of their push through the trees, the clearing was eerily quiet. But it wasn’t just the absence of the souls. There was no wildlife. No birds singing from the branches, no beasts scratching around in the underbrush. It was a forest of ghosts, completely uninhabitable.
In contrast to the isolation, the clearing was a pretty place, with lush grass spotted on the far side with wildflowers that managed to grow despite the harsh conditions. Some late afternoon sunlight filtered through the thin canopy above, throwing dappled light across the space. In the middle of the clearing was a white tree stump, sawn clean off a few feet from the ground.
Rowan dropped to the ground with a groan and rolled onto his back, spreading his arms wide. Cori let go of her barriers and sank down beside him, relishing the feel of the soft grass in her hands, and the earth under her fingernails as she bunched her fists into it. She sighed and closed her eyes, allowing the silence of the clearing to surround her.
“What are you weaving?” She asked at length.
“You won’t like it.”
Cori turned her head to look at him. His eyes were closed, but at her movement he opened them and turned to look at her. His pupils retracted in in the light and his eyes seemed to glow even more brightly, rimmed with dark circles as they were.
“How could I possibly like anything less than this ridiculous expedition?”
He didn’t rise to the bait but his eyes held hers, wide in their seriousness.
“Just tell me,” she sighed.
He didn’t tell her, instead he showed her. Reluctantly his barriers dropped away; ones she hadn’t known were there, ones she didn’t know were possible to create. He laid himself bare and for the first time she saw the entirety of his mind and heard what he‘d tried to conceal from her. In equal parts of wonder and fear, Cori listened to her first Deathsong.
It wasn’t intricate like a healing song but rather made up of many shifting parts. It was haunting and alluring, sad and beautiful. She could feel parts of Rowan in there - parts of the facade he had presented to her for so long - and she could feel fragments of herself in there too, skewed by Rowan’s perceptions of her.
Rowan was actively weaving the song, or more so it was weaving itself, plucking a whisper from the breeze that rustled the leaves, feeding it the rhythm of his breathing and his heartbeat. It pulled at her mind too, a dangerous caress that threatened to lure her in like the dragon souls. The longer she listened, the more she felt she might fall into it.
“How could I not know?” The song was immense in its structure and she felt a fool for not comprehending it sooner.
“You’re only learning,” he offered her the excuse with a weak smile. “You don’t know what signs to look for.”
“Hum intoxication is one, I suppose?”
“Yes.” They stared at each other for a long time. Rowan didn’t put any of his barriers back up and Cori could sense the incompetence she felt being drawn into the song. She wasn’t sure what to think about that. She drew her gaze away and instead trained them on blue sky, visible through the canopy.
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“It’s quite likely.”
Her heartbeat quickened, reminding her that it would soon stop. She dragged in a deep breath and willed herself not to cry. She also experienced a hollowing sensation she now associated with the loss of her mother. Perhaps we’ll be reunited after this, she thought with an aching sadness. One hand rose from the grass to press to her chest. Rowan shifted beside her, rolling into a half sitting position to reach across her and grasp her opposite arm.
“Come here,” he said and pulled her onto her uninjured side. He lay down again and shifted her closer. She automatically pushed at him, declining the comfort he tried to offer. His arms tightened around her.
“Stop resisting me,” he whispered against her hair. At his words the fight went out of her and she let her head drop to his chest. His hand stroked her hair back and wiped a tear from her cheek.
“We might not die.” Cori didn’t believe him and knew he only offered the words to comfort her, but she indulged him.
“What will we do after?” She asked finally. “Afte
r Cadmus and after the Advisor? Will you have to go back to being the Karalis?”
“I don’t have to if you don’t want me to. We don’t even have to go back there at all. We can leave them to their war and do whatever you want to do.”
Whatever she wanted. The thought gave her pause. Never had she been able to do whatever she wanted and now Rowan offered her the world. A pity they would be dead within a few days. The hollowing returned to her chest, and her throat tightened. She bunched her hands in the fabric of his shirt, pulling herself close against him to close any gaps between them. The need to feel life in this graveyard of a forest was intense. His arms tightened in response and his face pressed into her hair. She felt him draw a deep breath. She couldn’t pretend anymore, even if it was nice to believe they would make it out alive.
“I want Saasha,” she whispered. She wished with all her heart that she knew where her sister was, if she was alive and all right. And she wouldn’t get to find out. She’d be dead before she could, and Saasha would never find her up here. Would she live the rest of her life wondering what had happened to her little sister who’d been swept away by the Karalis?
The ice that bound her wound had long ago melted but the wrappings were still wet and cool against her feverish skin. Rowan’s Deathsong wove about them, drawing in the currents of their emotions like a leech. The longer she listened, the more elements in the song she could pick out; notes that reminded her of daily life at the palace, a tremble that was the death of Daze and his companions and many more experiences she didn’t understand. A lilting note signalled Rowan’s feeling for her. She almost put her barriers up, not wanting to hear, but curiosity won out. The notes sang confusion and anxiety and Cori almost pulled away, hurt that they weren’t what she expected. Rowan tightened his arms.
“Don’t read into the song,” he told her in a cracked voice. “It’s not a true picture of reality. It skews perception, tempts death.”