Blood rushed in his ears as they trekked back up the side of the valley, scrambling over the frozen earth. He tried to keep both the dagger at the healer’s back—just enough to remind the man it was there—and his gaze on the woman. She’d slowed dramatically, and when she fell behind Kherron and the healer, he turned to see her slump to her knees, clutching her shoulder and staring with wide eyes at the ground.
“She can’t go on like this,” the healer said, his calm gaze unnerving Kherron. “If I’m going to help her, it needs to be now.”
Another chorus of shouts rose through the forest behind them, but Kherron couldn’t ignore the woman kneeling in the cold, gasping and as pale as the cloudy sky. He nodded to the healer, who immediately went to the woman’s side, muttering unheard words and helping her to lie back. Kherron glanced back toward the camp, immediately catching the flicker of swiftly moving men between the trees.
“Can you do anything for her now?” he asked the man. “Quickly?”
The healer turned briefly to look up at Kherron with a disconcerting frown, as if Kherron had insisted there was nothing wrong with the woman in the first place. But he hardly had time to register such an intimidating expression, because the quiet hush of the cold, snow-dusted forest simultaneously burst around him and washed through him.
A budding warmth spread from behind his ears, as if he had summoned the mere thought of someone touching him in that same spot. But the sensation came from somewhere else entirely—from around him and within him and beneath him. His shoulders itched with an unknown tension, and he didn’t have to think about un-focusing his gaze so he could listen.
Step aside.
The words came from the biting sting of the still air, from the half-frozen leaves and needles beneath his boots, from the silence all creatures understood and in which they knew now to settle. The whispered command could not be ignored, and Kherron did as he was told.
The minute his second foot completed that one step, a long, thick arrow streaked past him to bury itself in the cold ground. Both Kherron and the healer jerked their heads toward the deadly projectile protruding from the forest floor. When Kherron then met the other man’s gaze, he realized the healer, too, understood the arrow would have gone right through him if he had not moved.
Feeling both grateful for the unexpected warning and idiotic for stopping, not to mention turning his back on their pursuers, Kherron whirled back around to face the small army—only part of a larger whole—coming for them. Three more arrows flew toward the runaways, and when Kherron swept his gaze over them, their trajectories changed abruptly, sending them harmlessly against tree trunks and into snowbanks. But that seemingly simple feat, which he felt he was quickly coming to understand, would not be enough. At least a dozen more soldiers in blue tabards trudged up the side of the valley toward them. The archers took aim again, and Kherron caught sight of a dappled grey horse moving between the trees, its rider bent low over the saddle and glaring at him.
Even before he could clearly see the man’s face, Kherron knew the soldier riding straight for him was Evar. Time seemed to slow as the man grasped the hilt of his longsword and pulled it from its sheath. Where Kherron had thought he’d previously remained rather calm, given the circumstances, his breath hitched in his throat, and he felt the clammy sweat breaking through the palms of his hands. He could not let the soldiers cut them down; he would not die again. Though his numerous deaths within the realm of purple mists had not ended his life in any true, irreversible way, nothing had been more real, more lasting, and he would not give up so easily as to meet his final end now. But they needed more time, they needed—
No, he realized. The healer needed to work faster. Kherron jumped to kneel beside the man and the wounded woman, grasping one by the wrist and the other by her good shoulder. He heard the twang of loosed arrows and the grating slide of drawn steel. They had to escape, to slow down the approaching men, to move quickly, quickly...
The whir of arrows rushing towards them never came. Nor did the triumphant shout of men having caught their unlikely quarry ring through the air. The only sound now had become the woman’s heavy, pained breath and the hiss of restrained panic from Kherron’s lips. The muted light was unmistakable, and though it lacked the violet hue and the mists, Kherron knew exactly where he’d taken them.
He turned around to see their would-be attackers only for an instant before they blurred, moving with far more speed than was humanly possible. Streaks of blue shot past the stranded trio, around them, up the side of the valley and down again in mere seconds. He could neither discern their faces nor any distinguishable forms as the colors moved and sped through the forest around them—soundless, completely unaware of what he’d done.
But Kherron knew. When no other defense remained to him, he’d opened another doorway to that undying place, where he’d suffered relentlessly under the powers of a demonic creature he still could not fathom. He did not think before he scrambled backwards on the ground, his heart pounding in his chest and the heat of true terror bubbling from his core to his face. He could barely breathe, gasping on his panic, watching the unnatural movement of everything around him. How could he have let himself return here? How could he have chosen this place over the world of flesh and blood, of time and distance and consequence?
His chest heaved with shallow breaths, his fingers digging into the cold earth beneath him that was not truly earth, only a shadow of it. Then the muted light of the day changed, shadows scurrying across the forest floor, between branches and clouds. The glimmer of a dimmed sun pierced through the shadowy treetops, momentarily blinding him before it too moved on, completing its arc across the sky in almost as much time as it seemed to take Kherron to realize what was happening. The light dimmed almost entirely then, coming to just a thin, hazy orange glow and heralding sunset mere seconds after mid-morning.
“That’s enough,” the woman croaked from beside him, and only then did he remember his companions. “Stop.” She reached out to grip his wrist with a cold hand, and Kherron took a long, shaky breath. He focused on the round orb of the sun through this muted, veiled doorway—nearly vanished now behind the rising edge of the valley—and when he imagined it pausing low in the sky where it was meant to be, it did.
But the eerie silence of the threshold into which he’d jerked them remained, swallowing even the sound of Kherron’s heavy exhales through flaring nostrils as he tried to calm himself. It felt almost as if, should he look away from the top of the valley ridge where a weak sunset still produced some light, he would disappear—just like the star that lit their world each day. But he would disappear forever, never to rise again, sucked back into the realm where night and day were mere ghosts. Where he did not think he would ever find another thing within him to break and thus release him one more time.
“You did it,” the woman said, her voice weak but filled with as much relief as Kherron wished to feel himself. He turned his head to look at her, reeling in the expanse of his own terror, begging for some surety with which to tether himself to reality. His gaze fell on her wide brown eyes, calm and powerful even against her pale face glistening with sweat. Though she lay back against the rising slope of the valley, mirrored as a pallid shadow of the world’s true realm, her gaze offered the tranquility he needed, as if he were the injured one and she the protector. “Can you see enough by this light?” she asked the healer, her brow creasing in an apparent effort not to cry out against the pain and exhaustion.
The man glanced back and forth from Kherron to the woman lying prone and helpless before him. He gave a small, brisk nod, as if worried he might be punished further for not consenting.
The woman swallowed, her tongue audibly sticking to her dry mouth. “Then we’ll stay here a little while longer.” She did not break Kherron’s gaze, nodding as if prompting him to mirror her until he believed whatever it was she tried to impart to him.
Kherron found himself nodding with her, hoping the healer could do what
needed to be done to save her. He did not want to look away from her, fearing that if he did, the thing he’d just discovered would be lost to him before he could explore it; finally, after all his time spent flailing in the use of his own will and wishing for someone to aid him, this woman had been set directly in his path, even now that he’d come to accept he was on his own. She might not have understood everything about him—his past, the prophecy he no longer felt compelled to fulfill, Dehlyn, the amarach, whatever spirits wandered in his blood—but she knew something about both where they were now and that Kherron was the one who had brought them. That in and of itself was more than anyone else had given him, and he wanted so badly to believe it was enough.
He did not notice the healer had started to suture the woman’s shoulder wound until the man was nearly through, silent and intently focused on his task. The woman herself seemed not to have registered the pain of the healer’s iron needle repeatedly piercing her flesh; if she did, it never registered within the lines of her mouth or behind her calming eyes. She merely stared at Kherron, drawing from their shared gaze her own tranquility, her own hope, whether it came from Kherron himself or not.
Then Kherron seemed to enter himself again—a little calmer, a little surer of himself and what he knew, though that had not and would most likely never be complete. He dropped his pack and pulled out the waterskin, raising it gently to the woman’s lips for her to drink before the healer finished his work.
“Knife,” the man said. Kherron drew his dagger to hand it over, but the healer merely eyed first Kherron then the woman’s shoulder; he’d lifted the thin twine with both hands, drawing it taut to be cut above the puckered, jagged edges of the hole he’d quickly closed. Kherron slowly drew the tip of his blade against the twine, needing barely any pressure to sever it. When the healer gestured for the waterskin, Kherron gave this over willingly as well. The man poured a bit of it over his iron needle, which he secreted somewhere within the sleeves of his tunic beneath his thick cloak, then splashed the woman’s shoulder as well, dabbing it with a strip of linen he produced from a pocket. “Let’s hope it stays clean,” he added, looking to Kherron with a warning half-nod, as if Kherron would be the one responsible for her further injury.
“I’ll be fine,” the woman croaked, taking in a hitching breath before letting it out, slow and controlled. “We’ve been here long enough. Bring us out,” she said to Kherron with another slow nod, “and I’ll take us somewhere safe.”
Kherron brought a gentle arm under her back and helped her to sit. The healer joined him in lifting the woman to her feet, then Kherron clamped a hand on the man’s shoulder—both in thanks and to deliver them from the gateway. They stepped forward together at Kherron’s gentle nudge, and the glow of the world at sunset blossomed into fullness, as if they had been looking through bandages this entire time and someone had just removed them.
The healer gazed about with wide eyes new to the color and life after their time spent in the doorway between realms; Kherron understood this only too well. But when the man finally caught his gaze, he nodded in solidarity, and while Kherron remained suspicious of the man’s aim in doing so—especially as a stolen hostage—he welcomed the assistance. Kherron placed the woman’s good arm over his shoulders, the healer wrapped his arm around her waist, and she lifted her hand to point them in the proper direction across the rise of the valley.
Chapter 5
The sight of the sun sinking behind the valley ridge, compressing the grey lightness of the cold, snow-covered forest into the grey darkness of night and even more cold, had filled Kherron with a dread akin to shame, yet still unrooted. It felt as if, after what he’d done, letting the sun set on its own to continue its path away from him would mean he had failed. He felt responsible for the world’s darkness, not because it came from him but because he had the power to maintain the light, if he so chose.
It was a foolish, wildly disproportionate response; he knew this. So he had been only too glad to leave the sight of the darkening sky and step into the hidden place to which the red-haired woman had led them.
Now, they sat within a structure part cave, part ancestral ruin, overgrown with lichen and seemingly forgotten. Yet he felt a powerful, bubbling presence within the shapeless stone walls, calling to him as if with living voices and not echoed memories. The healer had helped him lay the woman back against one wall, cushioned by a floor of lichen, and after a few minutes of silence, the man turned to him and whispered, “She needs a fire.”
Kherron glanced up from where he sat against the wall opposite the woman, trying to block the memory of the violet realm’s lifeless, vacuous pressure. The woman had managed to deter his despairing panic, but the feeling stayed with him like rotten food in his gut, threatening to spill over the moment his body had had enough. He could barely meet the other man’s gaze. “Be my guest,” he grunted.
The healer blinked in cold, calculating incredulity, then took a deep breath. “I had not thought to gather supplies for a night spent in an airless cavern away from my men.” He nodded toward the woman. “She’s lucky I didn’t drop my needle when you abducted me, because I managed to stop the bleeding. But that’s not enough, and at best, the cold will only keep her from healing. At worst, it will kill her. She needs a fire.”
Clenching his jaw, Kherron stared at the man, wondering why he showed no sign whatsoever of planning an escape. The two strangers who had intruded into the healer’s tent had given the man no reason to foster any loyalty toward them—no incentive to aid them further and no threat of punishment should he refuse. Of course, Kherron knew abducting someone against their will often came with a promise to end their life if they did not obey, but he doubted the man before him would take such tactics to heart after having witnessed Kherron’s unraveling into near madness. He could not imagine what compelled the man to stay.
“Firewood is hardly scarce in a forest,” he quipped, only managing to unclench his fists for a second or two before they tightened again on their own.
“It is if you want it dry enough to burn.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Kherron whispered, feeling the self-conscious heat rise at the back of his neck because he had not thought long enough to consider where they were and that the other man was quite right.
“I’m not leaving her,” the healer replied, dipping his head to give Kherron the same commanding stare he’d aimed at Evar before they’d slipped from the tent. There was no fear behind the man’s eyes, only determination and an imposing surety, as if his words had never been met with defiance in another man. “You wanted my help in saving her life. She was foolish enough to remove that arrow in the first place, and you were foolish enough to let her. I’m not leaving the two of you alone until the danger for her has passed.” He spoke as if Kherron were his captive instead, as if he’d forced both of his abductors here to keep an eye on them, to protect them as his own wards—or his property.
Kherron swallowed the hard, burning lump in his throat, aware of his head twitching to the side and unable to subdue it. For a moment, he felt as if he’d stepped through that doorway once more; if he’d slipped beyond this world once already without full awareness, it could happen again at any time. Though the light was dim already in this hidden place with the grey dusk peeking through the door-less entrance, it felt suddenly muted again, distorted, drawing the breath from his lungs and bringing his heart to a quick, terrified gallop. Then the woman cleared her throat.
“Go get the wood,” she croaked, lifting her head a few inches toward Kherron from against the wall. Her words brought him back to himself, and he blinked, realizing he had not in fact left this world again. “Even if it’s damp, you’ll make it work.”
“What?” He didn’t know now if the blood she’d lost had taken her sanity with it, or if she did not know how wood burned, or if she merely wished to be rid of him for a moment, which made the least sense of all.
“Do it.” The woman huffed through her nose, like a wary
animal staking its claim on its own territory before the need for aggression became inevitable.
Kherron glanced from her to the healer again, who had now finally lowered his gaze, as if he did not wish to come between these strangers and their unspoken bond. What the other man did not seem to recognize was that Kherron and the woman were strangers unto each other, and whatever bond might have held them together was nothing more than Kherron grasping for some sort of guidance. But he had to remind himself that the woman had, in fact, known just enough about the doorway he’d summoned for their protection—to move the world around them by hours while they watched it in mere seconds—and it was enough to convince him she knew more.
When he finally stood, brushing his hand against the lichen-covered wall on his way to the cavern’s entrance, the healer brought Kherron’s waterskin to the woman’s lips and coaxed her into drinking just a little more. The woman laid her head back against the wall and took a few small sips, then Kherron stepped outside into the new darkness to do as he’d been told.
The familiar sensation of grumbling under the direction of someone he thought he could trust left him feeling anxious and wary. He’d done very much the same under Torrahs’ perceived tutelage at the man’s cottage in the woods, and Kherron never would forget what it had cost him to believe the old man a friend. Still, he could not lump the red-haired woman and Torrahs together in the same realm of treachery and deception. Torrahs had been cloyingly friendly toward Kherron in the beginning, like ale sweetened with too much honey, and it had drawn Kherron to him from the relentless toil, disappointment, and loneliness that had been his life within the Iron Pit. But that sweetness had been exposed as poison, their friendship a sham, and Kherron found himself fighting the knot of nausea in his stomach at the thought of who the old man had finally revealed himself to be.
Sacrament of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 3) Page 4