The cliff face loomed like a relentless shadow against the night sky, and not even the starlight overhead managed to illuminate anything but the solid blackness around them. Kherron trudged up the narrow path from the cavern as if he’d always known where he was. At some point, he’d overtaken Kayu’s lead and was the first to emerge at the top of the cliff, the man in grey and Aelis’ bear following close behind. Without slowing, he led them to the completely material and unmoving clearing in which they’d left Paden.
The healer remained in nearly the exact same place and position in which they’d left him. Only now, he’d since slid to the soft carpet of grass and now leaned against the fallen tree, staring up at the sky as if he’d spent the night inebriated. Kherron noted the birds taking flight and the small creatures skittering into the undergrowth at their approach. Most of them, he knew now, were Nateru; the healer had been both protected and watched with a wary curiosity during the clanning. This seemed to settle whatever doubt Kherron might have harbored for Paden’s true intentions. If the Nateru had suspected anything untoward about the strange healer in their midst, they would have alerted Kherron to it. Each of them answered to the Blood of the Veil, and he seemed to be the only one walking this world—at least now in the open.
Neither Kherron nor his companions made a sound as they stole across the ground in the middle of the night, and Paden did not seem to notice their presence until Kherron stopped directly in front of him. The healer slowly lowered his thrown-back head and took a few seconds to settle his gaze upon the man who’d returned for him. Eyes wide and shining in the starlight, he gaped at Kherron for a few seconds before asking, “What happened?”
From behind Kherron came a low, irritated rumble. Kayu passed through the clearing without stopping, closely followed by Aelis’ bear. She shambled right by Paden, pausing only to sniff at his boot and chuff a blast of hot breath at him before following the man in grey. Paden’s eyes seemed to clear immediately—whatever spell this clearing had cast now broken by surprise and no little fear—and he scrambled backward and unsuccessfully against the fallen log behind him.
“We have to go,” Kherron said, trying to speak gently but afraid he had little patience for the healer’s enthusiastic curiosity.
After a huge, loud swallow, Paden added, “Where’s Aelis?”
Kherron stared at the man, waiting for him to connect the implications to the reality and put it together himself. The healer was clearly not a fool—though Kherron still did not fully trust him—and he expected Paden to manage both the new reality and the circumstances the best he could for being not much more than a stowaway on the final leg of Kherron’s journey.
The healer licked his lips and stared after the massive brown bear lumbering behind a grey-clad stranger, and when he seemed to understand, he leapt to his feet. “How is she?”
“Unrelenting,” Kherron grumbled, feeling a distinct distaste for petty conversation in that moment. He had a lot of traveling and no small amount of guilt ahead of him, especially now that Aelis had decided she would join him no matter what happened to her. And he had a lot of promises to keep. “Now, Paden.” He motioned for the healer to fall in line behind Kayu and the huge brown bear, and for a minute, the man gazed at him as if Kherron had gone mad. Then he nodded vigorously, apparently still clearing the cobwebs of awe and disbelief from his mind, and followed the silent forms moving through the forest. Kherron studied him for only a moment, then pressed on at the rear of their party, still feeling watched but no longer unknown.
SOME FEW HOURS LATER, once more returned to the chilly mountain terrain and the biting sting of twilight, they stopped to make camp with what little resources remained out here. A large pine branch had snapped from its trunk, presumably under the weight of the snow Kherron knew would come more quickly than any of them would have preferred. He spoke to it, and the entire limb burst into flame, the dead, mostly damp needles burning slower and longer simply because he asked it of them.
The men huddled around the flames, the deadly silence of the forest broken only by the loud snap of burning wood and Paden’s chattering teeth. Aelis, though, had disappeared from within the ring of firelight. Kherron reached out to the forest, listening and searching for her, but either she had covered a great distance in a short time, or she actively sought to hide herself from him.
“She will return.”
Only when Kayu spoke did Kherron realize he’d been sitting for so long beside the fire with his eyes closed and his awareness stretched beyond his body. He opened his eyes to meet Kayu’s gaze; the man in grey sat with his knees pulled toward his chest, carelessly resting his forearms atop them, as if they had all the time in the world and nothing at stake.
“She just needs a little more time.” The bird-man attempted to reassure him with a weak smile, his eyes tinged with regret and something Kherron could have taken for envy, though it wasn’t—not entirely.
“I would give her all the time in the world if I could,” Kherron replied. “This very minute.”
“I know.” Kayu tilted his head and blinked at Kherron, the firelight flashing within his calculating eyes. “When you finish this, you can give her everything.”
The man in grey’s ability to see right through Kherron’s silence and into his heart intrigued Kherron more than it unnerved him. It also made him wonder if the same communion he held with the earth and the trees and the life around them extended in any way to the Nateru as well—the combination of every living creature and the world of men. If this were so, perhaps it was a good idea to finally work on masking his thoughts and emotions. But for the first time, he felt neither judged nor doubted when Kayu spoke to him as if they’d discussed these things for years. He felt known.
A snore rose from Paden on the other side of the fire, and Kherron found himself grateful that the healer, at least, had managed some peace.
“Try to rest,” Kayu added as he shifted to the ground and rolled onto his side.
They would wake again quite soon and be off once more toward the Amneas Sea and Deeprock Spire. But as Kherron lay there in the twilight slowly and achingly giving way to dawn, he could not wipe away the image of Dehlyn’s face—as he’d just seen her in the doorway to the void—from his mind’s eye. He did not want to go to her, to see her, or to offer himself for any more than what was required of him to end the desolation consuming this world. But he had a feeling she would take from him more than he ever intended to give, and he did not sleep.
Chapter 20
Lorraii trudged across the snow-covered ground, fighting the pain lancing through her back with nearly every step. For nine days, she’d traveled like this, and for nine days, the agony did not abate. She did not expect it would any time soon.
The first day—when the world shook and everything she thought she knew about her runes tipped upside-down and shattered across her awareness—she’d tried to soothe the awful burning with packed snow from the Bladeshales’ newest storm. She’d grown so tired of the cold, though she recognized how much it numbed one’s sensations and often helped with pain. For her, it did nothing. So after that first day, she stopped trying, choosing instead to press on toward her goal and let the runes sort themselves out in their own time.
Under any other circumstances, it might have seemed even more foolish to fight through her discomfort for the sole purpose of retrieving her first bearskin cloak from the cave in which she’d left it so many years ago. The fact that it could have been a waste of her time only made her that much more determined to ensure it was not.
Thankfully, no amarach had reappeared in her path to threaten or antagonize her; even still, she knew they were behind what had happened on that first day, when she’d moved unheard and unseen through the mountain forests. Torrahs, of course, would also have been responsible in some way for such a tumultuous episode. In their time together, he’d explained to her enough of what he meant to do that Lorraii could recognize his stamp of vehement aspirations in everything
he did—even in the glowing, unceasing burn of the rune series running up her spine.
These she’d received from her warlord father; very few Ouroke had ever been offered such an apparent honor and none in her lifetime. But within days of the earth’s sacred clay pinned beneath her flesh, Lorraii recognized these marks for what they truly were—a collar, binding her to her father in ways she could never have imagined, making her his puppet when she least expected it. The last time these runes had illuminated through her flesh was the day Ruxii and the Ouroke as a race fell at immortal hands—at Lorraii’s own behest. To suffer their awakening now seemed an impossible reality, and she could not allow herself to break beneath the call of a man so long dead to this world.
Still, it gave her some little pleasure to retain the Sky Metal dagger through her journey, having slipped it delicately through a loop on her vest. The thing was sharper than any blade she’d wielded thus far, and while admittedly she missed the twin daggers kept in her boots until Torrahs had relieved her of them, the amarach blade was no less a boon. Sometimes, for a few short, sweet moments, she thought the dagger might have been fighting on her behalf to quell the pain of her spinal runes and the storm of rage it induced. But it never fully went away.
Unfortunately, for the last few hours, the pain had only grown worse. Lorraii was no stranger to physical discomfort, to torturous battle wounds from both her enemies and her own brethren. But the Ouroke took precautions against the weaknesses pain inevitably injected into one’s being—pre-emptive patterns to pacify the body’s natural reaction to such grievances, either by blocking it out entirely or teaching it to heal itself faster, better. None of these performed their purpose when she called to them, and she no longer had the strength to try again after countless attempts. To put it mildly, it seemed the power within the last Ouroke’s fabled tattoos was fading, perhaps indelibly. She would not let it stop her.
Nor did she slow her pace by any marked degree. In this, Lorraii knew full well the folly of pushing herself for such a small, sentimental thing as a decades-old pelt from a first kill, which ultimately meant nothing against the thousands of lives she’d taken since. But she refused to accept that this was nothing more than the last Ouroke fleeing from the Wanderer’s grasp, from what she’d done, from how she’d erred. Lorraii did not flee; she pursued.
The sun now hung just above the tips of the mountain range before her, dangling there in the sky as if it would drop to the earth at any moment. Her eyes swam with tears now as she bit back the urge to attempt dampening her pain once more, but if they had not already, they would have watered anyways against the vivid glare of sunlight streaming through the trees. She crested a rise of boulders slick with ice and snow, the light too intense and penetrating in the open. Staring down the other side of the embankment, she thought the comparative darkness of the trees beyond and the hush that would surely settle there after nightfall a welcome sight. She felt as if she’d been set aflame, her cheeks burning with both the cold air against her flesh and the rising heat beneath it.
As soon as she lowered her foot to the next rocky shelf amidst the boulders—such physical obstacles had never been much of a deterrent for her—the world reeled around her. Only when she clutched at the cold, slick rock with both hands, nearly kissing the rough surface, did she realize there was nothing wrong with the world in that moment. This was her own dizziness, her own weakness, and she squeezed her eyes shut to feel the surprising heat of tears falling down her cheeks.
Opening her eyes again, she tried to blink the tears away and focus on the details of the stone she meant to descend, but pain gripped her now under its control, and her body was no longer entirely her own. Her muscles shook as she lowered herself, her spine stabbed with unyielding aches no matter how she moved. The climb seemed to take forever, and when she finally felt the even, slightly softer pad of partially frozen earth beneath her boots, she had to take a moment in stillness.
Whatever Torrahs had done with his tricks and his magic spells, it seemed now to be undoing her. Lorraii could not fathom a reality in which her runes and her birthright failed her of their own accord. She’d seen the world around her changing slowly over the previous days—the birds flocking in the snow-drenched trees when they did not belong here this close to winter; the darkening shadows at the corners of her vision, even in open clearings under the intensely glaring sun; the heavy pull of the trees and the air and the rising peaks around her, as though the earth’s heart had attached a string to everything upon it and now yanked it all in towards itself. But under no circumstances could Lorraii herself be failing in her aptitude for strength, speed, and agility. After all the agonizing work she’d put into ensuring her own survival—a survival that would last far longer than it would have had the Ouroke still existed at her side—she could not now give in to whatever new pressure her own existence endured.
Breathing heavily, she turned from the rise of boulders and forged ahead with slow, uneven steps. The dark cover of the thick pines enticed her to no end, offering a cooling comfort she could not sustain even amid the biting frost in the air and the hard, frozen surface of the boulders against which she’d pressed her body. Her breath puffed out in steams of frustration, and she pulled all her focus toward the tree line, toward the next few steps forward.
It took a lifetime, but finally, Lorraii stopped just within the darkened shade of the pines and leaned against the rough bark for only a moment. It did not cool her burning forehead; she felt nothing at all.
She did not know how long she paused there, but when she finally lifted her forehead from the trunk of the pine and turned to find the path she meant to take, nothing looked the same. The trees had grown taller, the snowbanks of a far brighter white and piled higher than they had first appeared. Lorraii could not imagine what force now drew her on, and beneath her waning faculties rose an even greater rage. How could Torrahs have done this to her, despite whatever aim he claimed to pursue? How could all the time and energy she’d spent—the lives she’d taken—on empowering herself with more Ouroke magic than any one living creature had ever possessed now be rendered obsolete? How could her very self turn against her like this?
Each step grew more agonizing than the last, her eyes swimming with hot tears, though they quickly cooled and seemed to crystalize against her cheeks. She did not know when she had drawn it, but the solid weight of the amarach’s Sky Metal dagger now rested within her tightening grasp, as though the weapon were the last source from which she could draw the strength she needed to endure. And when she finally saw the blurred figures just beyond the next few trees, her heart thrummed in her chest.
She staggered toward them, unable to fully admit that somewhere, deep within the hardened mass of her person, she yearned to call out for aid. Then she found herself moving faster than she thought possible, with more purpose, with more hope than she’d dared just moments before. The figures seemed a bit odd—something off about one of their shapes—but Lorraii couldn’t stop now that the wave of urgent desperation had been unleashed. She could not do this on her own; she needed help.
The trees spun around her, and she staggered. When she managed to somehow blink away the tears of agony blurring her vision, she did not believe what she saw with perfect clarity. Two men stood amongst the trees, and a third knelt beside a hulking brown figure that almost blended perfectly with the pine trunks and the damp earth beneath them. The kneeling man slowly turned his head in her direction, and only then did Lorraii realize he’d been face to face with a giant brown bear; the beast’s composure in man’s company and its lowered head made it no less ferocious-looking.
One of the two men standing vanished from the forest floor, and a small grey jay fluttered through the branches. Then the kneeling man met her gaze, his eyes flashing even from this distance with alarm and rage and some daring Lorraii had never expected to see out here. He looked as if he were about to pounce on her, but instead, he slowly rose to his feet and raised a hand.
> Lorraii did not see the tree branch whipping out to crack across her face, or the next three that followed. She pushed forward, trying helplessly now to find her voice and tell them she meant no harm. A spray of frozen pinecones, dead needles, twigs, and icy loam rose in a wave before her, as if some creature had stirred beneath the earth and lifted its massive self just within her path. She hardly felt what was either ice or sharpened twigs slicing into the flesh of her neck and cheeks, but she wiped the debris aside; what little presence of mind she had to question such an odd occurrence soon disappeared under the still-rising anguish of her relentlessly screaming runes. She raised her hand in an effort to show she meant no harm, in that moment recognizing she still gripped the Sky Metal dagger. That she would not relinquish, even now. That she had earned.
Despite her faltering steps and the torment and the world spinning in all directions, she managed somehow to regain the man’s stare—the only source of strength from which she could now draw, though she did not fully acknowledge the hatred blazing behind his eyes. The man extended both hands now, as though he meant to embrace her, but he flicked his wrists instead and clenched his hands into fists.
The earth rumbled beneath Lorraii’s numb and undependable feet. Two large pines on either side of her swayed, tilting unnaturally even amidst the dizzying spin of everything the tattooed woman saw. Rimed soil burst before her, the air erupted with groaning wood and cracking ice, and a gnarled root the width of her leg broke through the surface. Lorraii had neither the time nor the faculties to stop herself from tripping over the inexplicable obstacle, though she did manage to set her other foot upon the ground again before pressing forward. Yet another underground limb rose before her, and another, and where she expected her face and hands to finally meet the hard, cold ground, she felt only bent and twisted roots like giant fingers. They lifted higher and bent around her, showering dirt and frozen needles everywhere, forming a loose and unnavigable barrier between herself and the strangers she meant to implore for relief.
Sacrament of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 3) Page 20