Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
SAMICK
Water splashes around his boots.
It is the song of the forest.
And it layers over the quiet of death.
There is peace in it.
But not this time.
Samick does not listen to the quiet and find a calmness in it.
He treads through the water that floods the forest floor, and he listens for life.
He listens beyond the disruption of water, the steps that other warriors take through the flood.
He listens beyond those heartbeats.
And he searches for the one that flutters on every third beat. The weak heart.
Bodies are face-down in the water. They float. Moving into his path.
Each time an obstruction blocks his way, his eyes whiten that bit more.
Too long has passed since the last still-breathing body was lifted from the water. A human, a male, a kuri.
Not her.
Even longer has passed since the wave struck the camp and blasted fae and human alike deeper into the forest.
And since, Samick has been wading through the remnants of the attack.
He stopped calling out for her.
He considers the floating corpses, their plain jackets, not yellow; their plain hair, not amber; their plain flesh, not freckled.
And still, the occasional one stops him. He turns over a corpse here and there, checks the face, and finds hope in that none are her.
More warriors prowl the waters.
Arwyn is a mute shadow behind him.
He isn’t only searching for Tesni.
Arwyn checks off names from a scrap of parchment, documenting the loss of life—both fae and human.
But Arwyn has been trailing him since the waves settled and General Raske ordered the search for life.
It was a loss.
A great one.
But there is only one loss that lures Samick deeper into the forest, rolling over human bodies, drawing them out from tangled shrubs, pulling them down from the trees.
Some are not all the way dead.
He leaves them behind.
Continues searching.
And searching.
And searching.
?
The shore is parched, the bay barren.
Samick looks out into the shadows settled over where water was mere hours ago—and he sees the same death he found in the forest.
The fish of this world, colourless and plain, lie across the bay.
There is silence around him.
A quiet that is sheathed in the noise of warriors trudging over damp sand, charcoal dragging over parchment, humans whimpering and hacking and crying—thrown into the thinning group of survivors.
The silence comes from her absence.
A clanging, abrasive wave of emotion should be striking him, assaulting his ears.
But it is gone.
Her body, too.
In the hours of searching, he found not a trace of her.
Now, the unit is preparing to march on again.
As though she isn’t gone.
Samick does not help Arwyn count the surviving humans. He does not help pack the debris of the camp. He does not report to the general whose stare cuts into him every other moment.
He considers the death of the fish.
Strewn about the floor of the bay, starved of water, their lifeless bodies lie limp in the darkness.
It is a darkness that she cannot traverse.
If she is out there.
If she survived.
If she is lost.
“Samick.”
Ormus advances on him.
It is not the accent that betrays his identity, that twang from the eastern parts of the Blood Court. It is the uncertainty that ripples beneath a natural authority.
Samick does not turn to look at the second-in-command to General Raske.
Ormus stops. Does not get close.
They rarely do.
“Raske has demands of you.”
The general’s summons should spur something in him. If not a feeling, then a shred of tradition. Respect. Obedience, at the very least.
But he has found something to hold his focus.
Among the colourless, plain fish, Samick considers the one with the faintest hue of pink in its grey scales.
“I will report—” Samick turns an ice-cold look on the second. “—shortly.”
Shortly.
But not now.
A darkness comes over Ormus.
But he has no retort.
Or he has no courage.
He leaves.
And Samick returns to watching the faintly pink fish—
Until another calls his name.
The warrior comes out from the trees that shroud the left side of the bay.
Jyrki.
And he has his human with him. His evate.
Tesni spoke of her at the camp before the wave came.
Samick never noticed the human before. Never looked at the warm tones of her skin, or the eyes that seem too large for her face.
Eyes that are larger now that she is being hauled across the shore, past the captives with only three guards to surround them.
Jyrki is rough with his evate.
Fist buried in the scruff of her jacket, he drags her down the shore. The tips of her toes graze along the sand, all the way to Samick.
The evate is thrown to the sand at his boots.
Samick lowers his frosty gaze to the shivering human.
The fear brims her eyes with tears. Her hands fist in the sand, as though she can steady herself against her own violent trembles, against those violent rolls of terror colliding through the air.
Samick leans his weight back onto a boot. A slight retreat from the irritating surges of her turmoil.
Humans are unrefined with their feelings. Too disordered.
Jyrki’s eyes darken into blackness. He turns that lethal stare down on the woman. “She was fleeing. Again. But this time, not alone.”
There is an eternal ice that lives in Samick. It is frost on his bones, winter sheathing his muscles, a chill that cools his insides.
It never thaws.
It is a part of who and what he is.
Yet, for the first time in his existence, he feels it… splinter. As though cracks are fracturing the ice.
“Your human escaped.”
Those cracks spread through his entire body. Every bone, splintered.
It is a new sensation.
A confusing one.
And an utterly wretched one.
It is more than hope. More than relief. More than pain.
Samick tenses against it.
He looks down at the woman whimpering at his boots. “Where did she go?”
She doesn’t look up.
She stares at her fingers curling in the sand.
Her voice trembles in sync with her body, “To the bridge—she said it’s the way out.”
That sensation of wretchedness sinks down his throat and hits his chest. It spreads, like spilling tar, to his gut.
A curt breath escapes him.
Jyrki lifts a frown to him, but Samick’s attention is wholly on the woman. “How does she know the way?”
Surges of anguish pummel her.
Her shoulders quake with each strike.
The bubbling is festering too close to him.
Samick itches to step back from her.
But her confession keeps him rooted to the spot—
“She has a map. And a compass.”
Tesni has his supplies.
He did not find the bag in the ruins. And she had it before the wave struck.
He did not find her.
Not a trace of her.
Because she took the supplies, and fled.
The frost spreads over him. It touches his fingertips first, then sprouts along his cheek.
But inside, he is quiet.
A cold, calm rage.
All along, Tesni knew about bridges.
Knowledge she kept to herself each time he read the map in front of her. Those times she stayed close to him, leaning on him, resting her head on his arm—reading the map.
Hands fisting, his lashes close on the threads of cold rage lashing inside of him.
As he opens his eyes again to the darkness, Jyrki is dragging the whimpering woman back to the captives.
Samick turns to look up the shore—at the general and her second.
Both watch him.
Then he glances at the trees.
General Raske seems to grow in the darkness. Her shoulders set against his stare—the challenge in it as he starts up the shore…
Towards the treeline.
Not to her.
As though she expected this, was prepared for it, her narrow face sharpens, and her voice commands the unit—
“You know the punishment for desertion.”
To be forsaken.
But Samick does not say that.
He looks at the general—the one he chose to serve, the one he had loyalty to even in the barracks when he was young.
And he says, “Only if I return to Dorcha.”
No one stops him.
Mika watches him leave with a sadness he does not share.
Arwyn stands by her side. His eyes are ice.
He takes nothing with him.
Tesni has all the supplies he will need.
He only has to catch her first.