by Teresa Rook
“Come on,” I press. “You’re helping two complete strangers sneak out from under the nose of the Wolf. You’re not nobody. You’ve got a story, and I want to hear it.” She refuses to meet my gaze, so I place the tip of a finger onto her cheek and gently turn her face towards me. “Where’s that confident woman from yesterday? From half an hour ago?”
“She’s only part of me,” she whispers, her eyes wide like saucers and locked onto mine. My finger on her cheek soften into a palm. Her red freckles look like sparks under my touch. Her eyes slide past me, and she pulls her head away. I look over my shoulder, irritated.
Ennis stands behind me, his eyes hard and fixed on the hand that was on Yarlin’s cheek.
“What?” I say, but I already know. My heart beats staccato, sensing a fight. This is it. This is where something changes.
This brand of anger is a new look on Ennis. He stands stiff as a board, hunched just slightly forward, with his mouth set in a grim line. His eyebrows sit low over his dark eyes, and for a good thirty seconds, he just stares. Thinking, I imagine, about how much time he’s wasted on me. How many weeks of niceties went into the fantasy of me in his bed.
“Yup,” I say with equal animosity. “This is how it is. Sorry to disappoint.”
He doesn’t engage. “There’s no other way around,” he says, all business. “It’s going through the Chirals or staying here until they find us. And they’re getting close.”
“This really isn’t my fault,” I say. “I never offered you anything.”
“I’m going back the way we came. They’ll think you’re with me, and it’ll draw them away from the pass.”
My breath catches in my throat. “No.”
“Don’t waste this. Once I’ve got their attention, you go.”
“No.” He turns his back and I lurch to grab him, but I fall short. “You don’t get to do this. To be all fucking heroic. You’re not a martyr. You’re coming with us to Cirrin. We’ll find a way.”
He speaks without looking at me. “I don’t think so.”
“Why are you doing this?” I yell.
Yarlin wiggles beside me, uncomfortable with the attention I’m bound to draw to us. “If he wants to go, let him,” she whispers.
My initial, terrifying urge is to smack her, to shut her up so I can deal with this. The shock of the desire clams me right up, and I wrap my arms hard around myself, digging my nails into my upper arms. Ennis drops to a lower ledge, out of sight, and I can’t breathe. A few minutes later, the Chirals begin to yell.
“They’re abandoning the pass,” Yarlin says. “Your friend did this for us. We have to move before they catch him and realize you’re not there.”
She tugs on my arm, which jostles my entire upper body. My lip twitches, and I bite down on it.
Not fair, Ennis. You don’t get to end it like that. You don’t get to just leave.
I knew he would abandon me.
thirty-one
“I can’t go any further. I just can’t.”
As frustrated as Yarlin must be, it’s nowhere near my own fury at my uncooperative body. After days of pushing through impossible odds to make it work, my leg has simply stopped. It’s done. It goes no more.
We’ve traveled higher and longer than I thought possible. What looks from the ground like one proud mountain behind Ventrin is an entire range that never seems to end. It stretches north past the horizon and west towards the setting sun, cutting a jagged, impassible line between Carnigai and Cirrin.
Emphasis on the impassible. Ledges have turned into winding paths that snake between peaks with no point of reference, no way to tell which way you’ve been turned around. The black stone of Ventrin gradually changes to a dull gray rock, rough to the touch but at least not as sharp. There are no dead ends. Perhaps no ends at all.
Winter comes faster up here. Two nights in the cold have sapped what little energy I had, and Yarlin seems to be at the end of her rope as well. I’ve collapsed a few feet from a cavern, a place to shelter for the night. My body just doesn’t work anymore.
Yarlin rolls her shoulders to loosen them, but I see the shivers tensing her right back up again. She leans down to wrap an arm around my waist, but I squirm away. “No,” I say. “Just leave me here. Go home.”
“We just have to make it to the eastern Cirinese post. It can’t be more than another day. Damn it, where is Rorzic?”
“I can’t.”
She doesn’t have to tell me the consequences of not moving. Already I can see it on her, the blue of her lips and the way she rubs her hands over her arms for the friction. We’ve used up what little supplies she brought with her. She didn’t expect to be up here this long.
She tries again to lift me, and I have no energy to argue. She practically carries me through the slit in the rock, out of the wind. I close my eyes and lean heavily on her, letting her lead.
I keep my eyes closed even when she attempts to gently set me down. I hear her sit beside me, her breath coming in quick, short gasps that she tries to smooth out. I lie on my back and cross my hands over my chest.
“You should go,” I say through lips cracked with cold.
“I’m not going. I’m getting you to Cirrin.”
I wonder if Ennis is alive.
“I have a girlfriend,” I confess. Shame has crept up on me since our moment on the mountainside. “That’s why I’m doing this. Why I’m here at all. She has a son, a ten-year-old who’s like me. They’re both going to starve now. Once the winter spreads this cold to Barnab, everyone I know is going to die.”
“Fine. But we are not.” She coughs. “Just a few more peaks. I promise. The Cirinese will give you hot meals and a warm bed. We just have to get there.”
“Will they?” I make a laugh that could also be a gurgle. “Who wants a lame slave? They’ll just throw me out on the streets to fend for myself. I have no value.”
“You don’t know that. What you do know is that if you stay here, you’ll die of exposure. And if you go back, you’ll die at the hands of the Wolf.” She pauses as if considering, then pushes on. “And Ennis’s sacrifice will be for nothing.”
My eyes snap open. “Don’t say that name.”
Yarlin scratches her eyelid. “Don’t you start blaming me.”
I don’t blame her. I blame Ennis for growing attached to an idea I never encouraged.
But also never discouraged. That shame creeps up on me again. Maybe some of this is on me.
Eventually, I open my eyes. My breathing hitches and my eyes snap wide.
The roof is covered in runes.
I try to sit up, but that’s too much for my body. Instead, I roll onto my stomach and squint around me, wondering if I’m delusional. Or if I’m dreaming again.
“Darga?” Yarlin says, her voice wary. “What is it?”
They stretch all the way across the roof of the cavern and down the walls, bright and pulsing, a witch cave in the Cirinese highlands. I pull myself along on my elbows to get a closer look. When I’m close enough to the wall, I press my cheek against it.
Nothing. It’s just a wall.
I stare hard at the runes, trying to decipher them. To understand what they mean. To pull out a hint I can use for the trains.
No. All that lava? It’s too late for the trains, too late for everything and everyone in Ventrin. I hope Dyren let the Rens out.
“Darga.” Yarlin hovers above me, concern plain in her voice. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’ve seen this before,” I murmur.
“I can’t hear you.”
“I’ve seen this before! In Akisir. There was a kid. He brought me to a room like this one.” I rest my forehead against the ground. “He wanted me to fix it.”
“What is it?”
“Runes,” I say into the rock. My breath disturbs the dirt on the floor, and a faint glow begins to show through it. I blow. Dust goes up and more runes are revealed. “Every inch of this cavern is covered in runes.”
Bu
t I can’t think about it right now. I can’t do anything right now. I will make sense of this in the morning.
I shiver so violently my teeth clatter, and Yarlin lays down beside me, huddled in close for warmth. We drift into sleep.
#####
This is how the Cirinese slaver finds us.
“A little lost?” a rough voice says, startling me awake. My head is groggy, and I blink into the gentle glow of runes. That’s right. Another star dome.
Yarlin tries to dart to her feet, but the cold in her bones makes her stiff, and she stumbles. I can’t move. My leg feels worse than it did before.
The man leans on the handle of a giant axe, the fur trim of his coat red in the glow of his torch.
“We’re headed for the east mountain post,” Yarlin says. “I have a slave to trade.”
The man raises an eyebrow. “Really? Who’s your contact at the post?”
Yarlin hesitates, and I offer no comment. I don’t have any idea how this works. I don’t want to make things harder for her. And I don’t want to find out why this man carries an axe high in the treeless mountains.
“Rorzic,” she finally says.
“Ah, young Rorzic. Did a bit of bad business recently, I’m afraid.” He sniffs and rubs his nose. “Anyone else who knows you?”
“Yes,” Yarlin says. She’s coiling visibly with tension. This is not going well. “My face is known at the post. And in Bluffs Town.”
“Known by whom?”
Yarlin says nothing.
“So, here’s the thing,” the man says, taking a deep breath and circling once around his axe. Surveying the cave, seeing that it’s just us. “It looks to me like the two of you are stuck up here a few hours short of freezing to death. And you can’t get to the post, is that right? I’m betting Rorzic used to meet you halfway, that you’ve never had to make this trip yourself before. In other words,” he says with a glance at my leg, “not only are you too injured to move, you’re also lost. Which means you’re in pretty desperate need of options.”
“Go back to Ventrin, Yarlin,” I say, my voice low and calm. “Take your payment here and this man will see me to the post.”
She closes her eyes and bites her lip, cringes against some internal thought. Presses the heel of her hand into her forehead, takes a few quick shallow breaths, and turns to me. “He’s right,” she says. “I’m lost. I wouldn’t be able to find my way back.”
“Bullshit,” I say, wanting to believe she’s only staying to protect me somehow. “Go home now.”
“I can’t.”
“Not to insert myself into your little spat,” the man says, “but I think I have the solution.” He spreads his hands out before him as though offering us a buffet of salvation. “I get you both to the post. Save your lives.” He leans in close. “But only if you agree that those lives? Starting now, they’re mine.”
Yarlin knows it too. Even if she could fight him off, we’d be in the same position we’re in now. We’ll freeze to death wandering the maze of the Cirinese peaks.
“Give us a second,” I say. The man smiles condescendingly and takes a few token steps back. “Further,” I say. “It’s not like we can run away.”
When he’s far enough back for our whispers not to carry, I apologize. “This wasn’t your plan. Shit. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Yarlin says, her voice artificially high, feigning bravery and optimism. “Coming up here was my choice. This is on Rorzic for not meeting us. We find him, we make him buy us our freedom. Simple as that.”
The prospect of finding this Rorzic does not seem promising. But neither is the certain death we face if we reject the slaver’s offer. We don’t say anything else. There are no other options.
We’ll go to Cirrin, both of us, as slaves. We’ll find Yarlin’s contact and have him buy us out. He’ll take us back over the mountains to Carnigai once Dyren’s campaign has died down, and I will find a way to save Mhyra, save Abadiah, save the farms. Save Ennis.
Cirrin is our temporary safe house. We rest, we regroup, we get stronger. I figure out the runes.
Then we go home, and we save it all.
“Okay,” I call to the slaver. He grins and pulls a length of rope from his satchel. Yarlin recoils, and I grab her hand and squeeze it.
“Cute,” the man says as he advances on us. I look him in the eye as he binds my hands.
#####
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