The consistent hush of the waterfall and the murmur of its stream soothed this anger, reminding him of what he had done and who he could be. “You’re right,” he said. None of those things mattered, because he had freed himself; Kherron’s path was now completely his own to choose. That meant, from now on, he could go wherever he wanted, could sleep where he wished, travel west or north or south if he so desired. He could stop for weeks anywhere of his choosing, could meet people and get to know them—or not. The woman in this very stream had said as much when they’d met, though it had awoken a fearful disbelief in him them.
So many people—even after his bond had been paid and he’d left the Iron Pit—had told him what he was meant to do. It had started with Torrahs, and the old man had used the leverage of paying Kherron’s bond and knowing his effect on inanimate objects to the fullest extent. Then Dehlyn had revealed herself to him and sealed his oath to her with whatever ancient force he had only just managed to resist. Zerod and his amarach lover Mirahl had revealed to him his burden—what the mortal prophesied to end the celestial war must do and that they believed Kherron to be that mortal. Even Siobhas the cat-man had beseeched him to fulfill that duty, reminding him that the immortals’ battle extended its reach to other creatures of this world. Every step along the way, someone somewhere kept telling Kherron he had a role to fulfill and could not turn away. Even the amarach Wohl had sought him and appeared countless times, delivering Dehlyn’s hidden messages and commands.
With a lurch of regret and confusion, Kherron remembered what the amarach warriors had mourned the night the Roaming People attacked Uishen’s barge and Kherron had been plucked from the Honalei’s deck. Wohl was dead. He did not fully understand what death looked like for a celestial being, since he’d only witnessed the likely mortal wounds Mirahl had suffered at the hands of her brethren. But that was what the warriors had told him; Wohl had been slain, and Kherron knew they’d all felt it. He wondered briefly what that meant for Dehlyn, what it meant that her black-winged guardian no longer remained at her side to take her in the dark hours of every night and return her with the dawn. Would she now cease to disappear with an amarach, as she had every night he’d known her? Did that change the danger everyone had insisted loomed over her?
Kherron had grown so accustomed to it, he braced himself for the persistent clutch of agonizing guilt and anxiety renewed with every thought of Dehlyn’s circumstances. But this time, they did not come. He waited longer for it, thinking perhaps his time spent beyond the purple mists might have dulled such a strong reaction. Still, he felt nothing more than a small, fragile sadness at the thought of her, removed from that pain as he understood the new truth of things. Their destinies had joined for a time and might yet again, but they were no longer dependent upon each other as she and everyone else who named him the prophesied mortal had believed. The aching pull in his soul no longer existed, and removing it had been his first true act as a free man belonging only to himself.
So, then, what would his next decision be? The world and all its possibilities called to him, and it seemed the logical choice to simply take the first step beyond this clearing—the place that had illuminated his beginning and enabled one form of ending. He pulled the waterskin from his pack, knelt by the stream, and filled it after taking several long, cool draughts. Part of him hoped the woman would materialize and appear to him once more from the falls, either to express her pride in him or to give some new hint of direction. While he felt the presence of everything around him here, comforted by the calming whispers and the thrumming life, a somewhat familiar face would have been a boon in this unexpected rebirth of his. Nothing stirred within the waters, and no true voices called out to him. With a nod, Kherron stuffed his cloak lightly into his pack, which he then slung over his shoulder, and headed over the rise beside the waterfall. Wherever he went next no longer mattered. All he had to do was listen.
DESPITE HIS NEWFOUND awareness and the power of having seized his own destiny, those things did not prepare him for the inexplicably immediate change of landscape. Minutes after he’d crested the hill to follow the stream feeding the waterfall, the heightened chatter of birds died to a low, occasional call. The warmth of the sun within the clearing and the brightness of the day diminished beneath an unheralded cover of grey clouds. The previously pleasant breeze took on a chilling bite, battering Kherron without warning. He paused to unpack his cloak and clasp it about his shoulders, then continued. The trees around the clearing, their branches heavy with green leaves and full of life, thinned and then disappeared, giving way to pines and evergreens, whose fallen needles carpeted the ground now instead of soft grass.
Kherron stopped when he found himself within the coniferous forest, quiet, cold, and concerning in its abrupt contrast. Just ahead, he glimpsed mounds of greyish-white packed against the steeply rising hills before him. It had to be snow, though he’d never seen it himself. The Iron Pit was too far south for such extreme weather, but he remembered Torrahs having described it when he’d briefly explained the northern territories of Marohd and the Bladeshale Mountains. This must have been what Kherron had seen in Nina and Matteus’ supply cart, before he’d stayed with them, Cor, and Sid in Gileath Junction and listened to their tales. But that made no sense; Gileath Junction was far enough south of the Bladeshales to see no snow, and he’d traveled farther south still to find passage across the Sylthurst from Vereling Town. Even after all the mysteries of his last few weeks, it seemed impossible that the river had saved him from the Honalei’s wreckage to deliver him several days northeast of where he might have met his end—where Uishen undoubtedly had. Still, though he could not explain what he now saw, he did not doubt it. He did not think he could know any less of where he was in the world.
He pushed on for a few hours more until the sun had almost reached its highest autumn point. The hushed quiet of this new landscape—even the mist of his own breath and the growing sting of cold upon his cheeks—filled him with awe. He needed neither direction nor purpose here, consumed by the song of a place so unlike anywhere he’d been before. He still followed the stream, assuming it would eventually lead him to something, and he noted with fascination that the farther upstream he moved, the smaller its movements became. Ice formed on either bank, freezing the water to a trickle. Snow lingered on the branches of pines and conifers, occasionally slumping from the soft needles to the ground with a muffled thump. Beads of water dripped from short, melting icicles, glinting in the muted sunlight when they fell. A red cardinal, its plumage as bright as a first drop of blood, fluttered from one tree to the next before him, and Kherron followed its path with wide, unblinking eyes. He smiled. He thought he’d never seen anywhere so beautiful, so luminous in its contrast to the clearing he’d left. But even here, he listened.
Where the clearing had burst with joy and excitement, urging him with the hum of energy to move, to act, to rejoice in the new life he’d unwittingly forged, this forest sang something different. The fallen needles whispered for patience. The frozen branches and barely moving stream murmured for him to wait, to bide his time, that all things turned in cycles when the moment was right. It was an oddly comforting tune, quiet and crisp, speaking directly to Kherron’s question—with his former duty removed, what now was he to do with himself and the knowledge he’d gained?
As if in answer—and how could it not have been?—a sharp, echoing growl rose from down the gently sloping hill beside him. He was briefly aware of the fact that, if he’d heard this beastly cry only days before, he would have crossed the stream and headed elsewhere to avoid it. But he knew the sound instantly for what it was; he felt the rage and pain within the decidedly inhuman voice. With both curiosity and something not unlike a desire to help this unknown creature, he turned away from the stream and headed down the slope.
His boots crunched upon the frozen carpet of snow and needles and dead leaves. It took him a moment to orient himself to the feeling of slipping across the ground, but his steps
quickly acclimated, and he moved with a surprising ease. The trembling roar filled the forest again, and then he glimpsed two men through the trees. Their blue, wool tabards stood out against the brown, white, and muted green of the woods. Both trained notched arrows toward where the slope met level ground, though Kherron couldn’t see their target beyond the thick trunks in his way.
He did, however, see the twitching muscles beneath one man’s eye as he took aim, heard the slow, calculating exhale of his companion, felt the strings of their bows quivering with tense accuracy. All these things he took in as if he stood beside them himself, not meters above them. When he realized what they meant to do, a hot, vicious anger raged within him, fueled by a protectiveness he did not understand. They meant to harm whatever creature they had cornered against the bank, and it did not matter what kind of creature.
Kherron didn’t think to shout out to them, to call for them to halt; he merely ran down the hillside, sliding on loose ground beneath his feet with little thought for how much noise that made alone. The men’s deadly gazes lifted in tandem to search for him through the trees. They found him quickly, eyes wide with curious surprise, and for a moment, he thought they would lower their weapons. But then whatever they had meant to kill must have moved again, reclaiming their attention, and the men fired upon their target, one after the other.
It seemed he heard the thrum of each bowstring’s release as if in a dream, slow and certain. He felt the rush of fletching feathers brush past the string and into freedom. Kherron’s urgent anger left him unable to think, only to react, and he swiped his hand through the air as if whisking aside a curtain, urging the whistling arrows to find a better target.
That was all the time he had to consider the strangers and their weapons before he reached the bottom of the hill, sliding to a crouch beside what he did not recognize at all. He saw skin first, nearly as white as the snow, then dark fur, then a blaze of fiery red. Only when he noticed the bloom of darker crimson upon both skin and fur did he realize the brighter red was hair. And then he saw the arrow. Protruding from fur, the long shaft lurched when the creature stirred and gave a low, constricted moan. Then a pale hand reached up to grasp the arrow, followed by another, and Kherron reached out to stop them.
“Don’t,” he pleaded softly, unsure then exactly how to handle what he’d found. The hands froze, and he looked up from them to find a woman beneath the tangled mass of bright red hair, staring at him with surprisingly calm brown eyes.
She scoffed, gripped the arrow in her shoulders with both hands, and snapped it in two. A hiss escaped her when she yanked the shaft from her flesh; it had pierced her fur cloak first, Kherron realized, which fell away at her movement to reveal the torn, quickly staining tunic beneath. Dropping the arrow, she ripped her tunic away from her shoulder. Then she leaned sideways to grab a fistful of snow and pressed the frozen mass to the wound with a grunt.
Kherron watched this in stunned surprise, realizing he knew next to nothing of treating arrow wounds and highly aware of the fact that the woman seemed to have done this before.
“I need you,” she said, her voice jolting his focus from her shoulder. She briefly removed her hand from the reddening snow to lift the fur cloak over her head, then resumed pressing the packed snow against her flesh. She jerked her head to pull her hair from the cloak’s weight, then turned to gaze at him.
“What?” he murmured. Her implication was impossible to read, and he found himself glancing between her bloody hand and her anticipating gaze.
“It went through,” the woman replied, then grunted again and leaned forward. “I need you to pull out the other end.”
Staring with wide eyes at the two inches of iron arrowhead protruding from her back, Kherron stuttered for something to say until he forced himself to stop. He placed a gentle hand against the back of the woman’s shoulder, wedged his cold fingers beneath the barbed edges of the arrow, and paused. The woman grunted, not turning to look at him, but gave a curt nod. It took a lot more force and patience than he expected to draw the broken shaft from her flesh, and while he tried to do it quickly, it still took longer than he would have liked. Her hiss of pain mixed with the wet slide of the arrow from her shoulder made his stomach churn. But when it was finished, Kherron dropped the offending projectile and instantly grabbed a fistful of snow, pressing it against the back of her shoulder as he’d seen her do.
The woman exhaled and slumped farther forward, still holding the entry wound, her eyes squeezed shut. “You wouldn’t happen to have bandages in that pack of yours...” she said, breathing slowly.
“Oh.” Kherron dropped his pack from his shoulders and hastily withdrew his spare tunic. She instructed him in how to cut it, for which he used his dagger, then directed him in wrapping first her arm below the injury and her bleeding shoulder. Kherron paused when she told him to bring the makeshift bandage down and across her chest, but she merely shot him a condescending glare, and he did as he was told. When he managed somehow to tie the end of it against the back of her shoulder, he sat back and forced out a sigh; he had no idea how she remained so calm while the complicated act left him feeling anxious and highly inadequate.
“I’d say you need more practice,” the woman said, finally turning to look at him, “but I’m not particularly keen on doing this again.”
Her patronizing jest at his expense elicited a wry chuckle. “You’re welcome.” The stark silence then seemed quite odd until he remembered the men responsible for this ordeal. He whirled on the ground to face them, wondering why they’d given him room to aid their victim, but they no longer stood where they’d taken aim. Instead, he found them both lying on the frozen ground, each struck through the chest by his own loosed arrow.
Kherron leapt to his feet and took a few hesitant steps, noting the blood trickling from one man’s mouth, the shocked awareness in the other’s terrified gape, and the lifeless vacancy in both their eyes. He swallowed, eyeing the wooden shafts buried in their hearts, and knew what he’d done. He’d wanted the arrows to find a better target in his haste to protect this woman—before he’d even seen her—and, in fact, they had. He found himself oscillating between a terrifying shame for having murdered two strangers and the righteous justification of killing two men who had cornered this unarmed woman with the undoubted intention of ending her life. At least, he thought she was unarmed. When he turned toward the woman again, his gaze fell upon her bandaged shoulder, the strips of his tunic already stained with her blood.
She finished the awkward task of re-donning her fur cloak with one hand, then seemed to feel him watching her and looked up. “That’s a useful trick.”
Kherron could barely shake his head. “I didn’t mean to...”
“Well they did.” The woman braced herself with a hand against the slope behind her and rose slowly to her feet. Then she fixed him with alert brown eyes beneath her wild red hair. “Obviously, neither of your intentions meant a thing. But I’m not going to tell you you made the wrong choice.”
Her words did not make him feel any better about the outcome. Using whatever defenses he had to fight off the amarach bent on ending his own life had been one thing; he would have been proud if he’d managed to crush the immortal beneath the felled trees he’d commanded. But turning men’s weapons against them without a deciding awareness left an altogether different taste in his mouth. And he’d never taken another’s life.
The woman’s grunt as she stepped forward pulled him out of his doubt, and he remembered to look for other weapons. It would be remarkably foolish to let his guard down after saving her life if she turned out to be one of those he knew still searched for him. Despite having relieved himself of his duty to Dehlyn and those who had insisted upon his carrying that burden, no one else yet knew of it, and he was not out of danger.
He found no weapons on the ground where she’d fallen beneath the arrow, and both hands were empty before she pressed her good hand against her shoulder again. Of course, she could have hidde
n a knife somewhere, but that seemed far from her mind. For a moment, they stared at each other, then her gaze flickered briefly toward his throat before resettling upon his eyes. Kherron tried not to frown, but he thought it a rather odd way to either meet someone or thank them.
Of everything he could have said, his mind landed only on, “I don’t think that’s enough.” He nodded toward the woman’s shoulder, which seemed to bleed more freely now than it had when he’d found her.
Pulling her hand briefly away from the apparently useless bandage, she studied her bloody palm, replaced it, and nodded behind Kherron. “There’s a camp not far into the valley. I can make it there.”
Kherron hadn’t considered the possibility of finding anyone else in these woods, and he didn’t particularly favor the possibility. “Whose camp?”
The woman blinked and glanced down at the dead men. “Theirs, most likely. I didn’t think to ask.”
He shook his head. “That’s a bad idea.”
After two more stumbling steps, the woman paused, straightened, and sighed. She gazed at Kherron as if he’d just contradicted himself, as if finding the camp had been his idea instead. “I didn’t ask for your help. If your obvious desire to save my life ends with killing them”—she nodded again to the dead men—“and a poor attempt at bandaging my shoulder, by all means, take your leave. Unfortunately, I need to find someone who knows what he’s doing.” She pressed her lips together, grunted again, and trudged past Kherron across the frozen ground.
Sacrament of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 3) Page 2