19
Jeryn
The ropes dropped. I moved with efficiency, unwinding from my locked position and seizing my knife from the thicket’s stockpile. Urgency had been a regular fixture in Winter’s medical wing, therefore I should be used to emergencies. Yet dread coursed through my veins, a shock to the system, which had consumed me from the moment she’d sprinted out of the rainforest.
Her features twisted. Stricken. Turmoiled. Those bloated features indicated a blockage, the sight more daunting than I’d care to analyze. If I didn’t school my expression, the way I had moments ago while feigning indifference, it would set her off. Already panic gripped the beast’s countenance, which exacerbated her condition.
I examined the berry quickly, then scooted closer. “Look at me.”
Her wild eyes stalled on mine.
“Much better,” I encouraged. “Now, keep your gaze steady and listen carefully. Your airways are compromised. It is difficult, but you must quell the hysteria.”
Wheezing, she nodded. Uncensored fear and trust shimmered in her eyes. This often proved the case with patients enduring physical trauma. Nonetheless, her open gaze found a crawlspace inside my chest.
The little beast spasmed, fighting to siphon oxygen into her lungs. With an outward control I didn’t entirely feel, I flicked open one of the slots embedded into the scalpel hilt. A rectangular plate of steel flipped into view, the surface reflecting sunlight and enabling me to cast the brightness onto her eyes.
“Steady,” I reminded her. “Eyes on me.”
Angling the plate and mirroring light beneath her lower lashes, I tilted my head to inspect her dilated pupils. The orbs eclipsed her irises, the gold having vanished.
Suffused complexion. Flared nostrils. Swollen tongue.
The berry she’d swallowed had been toxic.
Because she couldn’t achieve more than nodding or shaking her head, I asked a series of rapid-fire questions about what happened. While she responded, I retracted and sheathed the knife, pressed my thumb to the underside of her wrist, and assessed her pulse. Then I proceeded to the rest of her anatomy, checking her tattooed throat and windpipe.
In Summer and Winter, certain seeds released oils. If this was one such example, and if it had such an abrupt effect, she wouldn’t last. At this accelerated rate, consumption would prove terminal.
Two things. Excrete the seed before it emitted too much oil. Neutralize the traces of poison already infesting the victim’s system.
One, I didn’t know what ingredients the rainforest contained. Two, I also didn’t know how the fuck they functioned.
This environment gave me no choices but the antiquated ones. After urging the beast onto her back, I trailed my fingers over her stomach and moved upward, manipulating and pumping. Pressure, concentration, precision. With a jolt, she vomited—and a mangled seed projected from her mouth like a pellet, along with bits of mollusks and berry pulp.
I collected the seed with the pad of my index finger, grabbed a large shell from the supply pile, and shot to my feet. Stalking toward the ocean, I collected saltwater and returned to her side, where she’d resumed her upright position. After grinding the seed with a rock and mixing it with the alkaline fluid, I snatched her jaw with one hand. On reflex, she opened her mouth, and I poured the contents down her throat.
Fair enough. Saltwater tasted like shit. She gagged but kept it down.
I tossed aside the bowl and framed her face, my thumbs pausing under her eyes. “Inhale. Exhale.”
Talking her through the motions and mimicking the act, we fell into a rhythm. Her respirations eased, her pupils shrank, and that burnished complexion resurfaced. Then she sucked in a resounding breath.
Internally, I shuddered. Externally, I kept my face neutral, stony, composed.
Unaffected. Unruffled.
In certain cases, grinding the source and combining it with saltwater absorbed its toxins, thus counteracting the damage. I had not tried this method before. With Winter’s advanced facilities, I’d never needed to. It was hardly a guaranteed treatment, much less a reliable one, yet fuck. It had worked.
While her respirations returned to normal, she brushed her fingers over her neck. With a grunt, I batted the digits away and double checked her pulse, my hands grazing the inked collar. I instructed her to keep breathing and surveyed the rest of her vitals, then resisted the impulse to triple check them. It took longer than usual to feel satisfied with her recovery and even longer to pull away.
Once the unfathomable impact of touching the beast subsided, I retrieved the canteen and a fallen broadleaf, then watched as she drank, gargled, and wiped her mouth with the leaf. At which point, I remembered myself. Healing this woman had dominated my attention to an unbridled degree. For a moment, I’d doubted my ability to fucking think straight.
The former was common when ministering to patients. The latter was not.
Still. A physician would do this for anyone in dire need.
It. Meant. Nothing.
As she opened her mouth to express thanks, irritation replaced my concern. I took her elbow, deliberately cutting off those words. Gently, I drew the female toward me, the scent of her flesh permeating my nostrils.
Patience, I reminded myself.
And because she’d learned to distrust my intentions, her smile disintegrated. Those insolent lips parted, about to spew something defiant.
In one serpentine move, I hauled her against me. My free hand grasped her lips and squeezed until they puckered. Then a silken threat slid off my tongue. “The next time you attempt to tie me up, one of those berries will go back into your mouth.” With cold civility, I gave her a harsh jerk. “Do not test me on this.”
She smacked away my hand and wrenched out of my grasp, her features throwing unspoken vitriol at me. I considered punishing her for that, but the whiff of salt and florals assaulted my senses, perfuming the air like a hallucinogenic.
I launched to my feet, my stiff knees protesting the movement. Seasons, it felt as if my joints had aged a century.
Stalking to the water’s edge, I knelt by the surf and washed my hands. The foaming ocean swabbed my knuckles. I worked quickly and kept my head bent, averting my gaze from the contemptible depths.
I would not look beyond the tide. I would not check for sea dwellers. I would not appear a coward in front of her.
Instead, I distracted myself with other thoughts. A fruit recognizable to the woman had turned out to be deceptive—a mistake anyone could have made. She had overlooked the seeds, which hadn’t appeared until oxidized because even the familiar could not be counted upon here. At best, saving her had been fortuitous.
Peering at the ground, I thought of my grandaunts, who’d announced with pride at the onset of my apprenticeship, “He will be our greatest healer.”
Then I thought of my grandaunts years later, trying to smile through their grief when the declaration turned out to be false. “You’re doing everything you can,” they had assured me.
Yet skill did not mend everything.
I grimaced at the abrasions on my wrists, the cords having rubbed them raw. The female had done an expert job of detaining me.
Would I retaliate if she crossed me again? Naturally.
Would I do a permanent job of it? By no means.
Survival didn’t work that way. I may have experience in healing, but she knew Summer better than I did. We needed each other.
Too bad she had used a weapon to release me. I would have preferred her fingers instead of the dagger, so that I might see those hands work the knots, unraveling the tension in them. I went so far as to envision her digits jerking, tugging on me, her skin moving hectically against mine.
I glanced sideways. She plunged into the waves, the outline of her body spearing into the tide. I waited, scanning the surface until the object of my infatuation arched into view, her form spraying droplets into the air. As she stood mid-waist, the beast threaded her fingers through that sopping wet hair. From this distance, streams raced down her silhouette. Under the clingy chemise, her flesh would be slick to the touch, and the garment would be easy to peel off.
My fingers curled. As I veered from the sight, splashes resonated from behind, each one penetrating my spine.
I doused liquid onto my face, only to squint and curse, viciously reminded that it was saltwater. With my eyes stinging like fuck, I retreated from the waves.
By then, she had returned to the shore and set two disemboweled fish on a pair of flat stones. I took judicious note of the fare, with its green gradient of scales and long fins. The stomachs had been gutted, leaving no bones in sight.
We worked without speaking. I dug a pit while the woman arranged tinder and kindling, debris that had fallen from the trees. Leaning over, she planted a stick into a notched plank of wood, rotating the stem between her palms and pressing downward.
Speed. Friction.
I waited for her to run out of steam. Which took a considerable amount of time.
There was a puff of smoke, then nothing. Her lips pursed into a stubborn knot. Yet something about the way her brows crinkled was rather … amusing.
Done with this unproductive display, I squatted across from her. “Let me.”
“I can do it.”
“Winter builds fires.”
“Summer is fire.”
“Not the same thing.”
“Our kingdom created flames. From volcanoes to the ashes of Summer tinder, we’re the ones who know fire best.”
“Boasting is impractical, unimpressive, and won’t do the job.”
“Fuck you, prince. Sand drifters also cook fish this way. I’ve built plenty of blazes.”
“That must have been a long time ago,” I volleyed.
She flinched. Then she glowered, continuing to twist and grind the stick with a vengeance. Any rougher and the instrument would snap.
Yet within seconds, cinders spiraled into the air, a nest of amber and blue flames igniting into an inferno. My eyes snapped toward the female’s victorious expression.
Yes, Summer was fire.
She was fire.
Her reference to Summer tinder resurrected the details of Autumn’s castle blackout, when Briar had been trapped in the stronghold. Her attackers had been influenced by Rhys and supplied with the ashes of such kindling. Sprinkle any blaze with those cinders, and it could be controlled from the ashes’ original source, thus enabling a person to ignite or douse multiple flames remotely from a single location. That method had snuffed every candle, hearth, and torchlight in the fortress.
By comparison, the pit’s ashes were unlikely to help us here. We hardly required multiple flames unless we intended to burn down the forest.
The blaze crackled like parchment. We used sticks to secure the fish. The aroma of seared meat and sputtering grease alleviated my resentment toward her, and I gave a brisk nod of gratitude.
We drank from the canteen and savored our repast in small portions. Bland at best, yet the hot slide of food down my throat reminded me of home. Chalices topped with mulled wine, pots of steaming broth, platters heaped with game.
Nourishment revived my pragmatic side. This interlude had to end, starting with the essentials.
“Where are we?” I asked.
My dining companion wiped an arm across her mouth. “The Phantom Wild,” she said with a straight face.
My eyes tapered. “Do not lie to me,” I cautioned. “Ever.”
“I don’t lie about legends.”
“Tell me where we really are.”
“That is where we really are.”
“You expect me to believe we’ve landed on some realm out of an infernal Summer lullaby.”
“No,” she sang. “I expect you to gag on your dinner.”
So she would force me to squander my breath. “Did you overhear intelligence in the tower? Does Summer keep this rainforest confidential from the Seasons? Did you and your sand drifters locate it but not tell anyone? Are they here? Are you waiting for them to find us?”
“No. No. No. No. No.”
Well. Although I could hear her, that word wouldn’t have been difficult to read from her lips, even if the opposite were true.
I scoffed. “There’s no such thing as the enigma you speak of.”
“There is,” she advocated, pissed off. “The song is about a hidden forest floating in the ocean, the birthplace of rain and water.” She quoted, “Tempests swirl, pools drown.”
“A coincidence.”
“Bullshit. Tempests that swirl? Pools that drown? It sounds rather like the whirlpool that almost swallowed you whole, don’t you think?”
I had no reply. Not yet.
The beast knelt, opting for an area that was damp from the rainfall. In the firelight, she began to draw, engraving the sand and producing strings of words. An ardent emotion radiated from her, the sight akin to rhapsody.
Finished, she sat back and gestured to a reproduction of Summer’s renowned song. I recognized it from Autumn’s dungeon, when she’d written sentences into that pile of dirt on her cage floor. Though at the time, I’d been more intent on ridding the unsanitary soil from her cubicle, not caring to see her languish among filth.
I processed the lyrics. Unsure why the devil it hadn’t struck me until now, I deduced, “You can read and write.”
She glared. “Yes. We peasants can also count on our fingertips.”
“Spare me the righteous display. You’re hardly the delicate type who cannot handle a simple fact. Unlike in Autumn and Winter, greater percentages of commoners in Spring and Summer are illiterate. This isn’t ignorance, it’s statistics. Likewise, your tongue is more elevated than most of your class.”
“Disappointed you can’t talk down to me?”
My combative lips crooked. “I don’t need a title to do that.”
The beast shook her head, dark waves sweeping her shoulders. “You’re one pompous piece of shit.” When I showed zero intention of defending myself, she huffed. “I see beyond the song lyrics. I see their shapes.”
I squinted. “What’s your point?”
“Have a look, Winter. But don’t look closely. Look far.”
For fuck’s sake. I thought I’d left tedious riddles behind after I last saw Poet. “Do I look like a Spring artist to you?”
“You look like a shipwrecked asshole to me.”
Whatever. Scientists inspected, prodded, researched. They formulated questions and employed tools to determine answers.
Look far? I could not comprehend that.
The beast got to her feet and seized my hand. Her fingers curled around mine, the contact producing a chain reaction that injected bolts of heat into every ligament I possessed. This included my cock, which had been misbehaving for far too long, the phallus twitching like a traitor.
Stumped, I let her guide me backward, away from the song. “Look,” she prompted.
It took me an instant to recover from her digits strapped around my own. An enduring hand. A dangerous hand. With some difficulty, I regarded the sketch, paying particular attention to the angle from which she’d directed me.
Thinking better of it, I pried my hand from hers. “Nothing but verse and rubbish.”
She scowled. “That verse and rubbish is a map.”
Dubious, I took a second look. And squinted. And saw a land mass.
The mad woman hastened to the rendering and used her toes to indicate each location. “This is Summer, and there’s the castle, and there’s the wharf, and there’s the sun. And you see here? The sun’s rays? They’re ciphered in the song, and they make a path—” she revolved her foot over the closing lyrics, “—to this realm.”
Correct. It did resemble a map. A convincing one, sequestered in plain sight.
I moved nearer, stepping around the drawing to view it from all vantage points. Then I lowered myself beside a configuration of the castle. The letters and words, plus the spaces between them, transformed into shapes when one studied them with perception. The sketch arranged everything in such a way that it became a route from the kingdom to this deserted place.
The lines representing the sky denoted wind direction. The sun’s rays indicated a direction seafarers or explorers might be able to master.
Based on the sun’s position, I drew a compass in the sand. This cove faced southeast.
But what of the ambiguous distance? Despite Summer ships enabling faster travel than in any other Season, an uncharted location should have required weeks for us to reach, not the span of one fucking morning. We had to be close to the mainland.
Yet far enough that this place had gone undiscovered since the dawn of time? Preposterous.
Be that as it may, I would accept the map’s existence. Faint proof, with gaps to fill.
I gave the beast a judicious glance. It would have required an acute mind to unravel this cipher. Nonetheless, the map alluded to a person having been here before. Someone had to have brought this location back to Summer’s mainland.
Humoring her, I asked, “Who wrote the song?”
She blinked. “Legends don’t reveal their authors unless they want to. Nature decides what it wants to share with us, as nature knows best, and we shouldn’t question that. But even if it wants to unveil the scribe, legends only allow certain people to be privy to that information.”
“All you had to do was say, ‘I don’t know.’”
Her features creased in annoyance. “For someone who grew up in an educated nation, you should have learned that nothing is simple when it comes to the almighty Seasons. Haven’t you heard of The Wildflower Forest or The Lost Treehouses? Or has Winter been denied its own realms of dark magic, and the deprivation has turned your scientific court into nonbelievers?”
My eyebrows stitched together. That was a valid point. “In that case, who showed this diagram to you?”
“You prick. I figured it out by myself.”
“While incarcerated.”
“While caged,” she corrected.
Incarcerated. Caged. Semantics.
The beast recounted how she’d found the song randomly written across a coastline when she was a child. How she had memorized the lines. How she’d discovered the map hidden within the lyrics.
I moved to the pit and added more logs, agitating the fire and setting off a combustion. “You could have used this to bargain for your freedom. Yet you told no one.”
“I would never betray the rainforest’s confidence,” she defended. “The map is a secret, and this rainforest is sacred. It chose and summoned me to find it.”
I couldn’t have heard her right. “It summoned you.”
“I saw its call inside the song. The rainforest revealed itself to me in those lyrics, whereas you only recognized the map because I helped you. I showed you how to look for it, and I only did so because you’re here, because you wouldn’t let me go like you should have.”
Where to start. First, I blamed sleep deprivation for my illogical statement. If she’d wanted to bargain for her freedom in Summer, no one would have accepted her claims, much less honored a deal with her. Or in theory, power-hungry Rhys might have negotiated without intending to uphold his end of the deal. Then again, the man spent more time sucking his cock and validating his self-worth than he’d have given to any prisoner seeking an audience.
True, I could not revoke the reality of this place when elusive realms like The Wildflower Forest in Spring, The Lost Treehouses in Autumn, and The Iron Wood in Winter existed. On that account, she was right.
Yes, the Seasons had power. Most would call it magic.
But this world also believed the Seasons had a consciousness. There, I deviated from the majority. No matter what “mystical” kinship people achieved with nature, there was always a rational justification.
Even so, Flare’s conviction wasn’t unconventional. And even if the Seasons had a will, what made her statement ridiculous was the assumption that such a place would summon a fool. That was a fallacy. Wishful thinking at best. All because of a chance encounter with handwritten lyrics in the sand, plus a random stroke of genius.
If nature could choose anyone, it wouldn’t be someone like her.
The beast lowered herself to the ground and tucked her legs beneath her. She gazed in starry-eyed wonder at the drawing, luxuriating in the sight, immersing herself in it.
Enamored. Entranced.
There was more to her story. This daydreamer was industrious and hardly unintelligent. Moreover, her anarchistic nature meant she wasn’t the type to hide away on a deserted parcel of land.
She had another reason for coming here. Whatever absurd purpose that might be, she would rather slit her wrists than reveal it to the enemy.
All in good time. I was a patient man.
Also, Summer was wrong. Turbulence might accompany her madness, however feral tendencies were not the primary source. Though, the answer still evaded me. As far as my experience went, I could not assign any known condition to her.
Nevertheless, she was not free. By law of the Fools Decree, this woman belonged to me. Courtesy of the agreement I’d made with Queen Avalea—in which the Autumn ruler had begged me to save her daughter’s life after being poisoned—this fiery little beast was mine.
As it should be. As the kingdoms ordained.
As I’d been bred to enforce, provided that I returned to my court. By now, Summer had sent a dispatch of my disappearance to my grandaunts. The Queens of Winter would despair of this news. Silvia and Doria would have to deliver it to the rest of our family, including …
I evicted those thoughts from my mind like tumors, then clung to reason. Summer had been on alert, the watch had seen this prisoner flee on a tidefarer, and they had witnessed me pursue her. From there, the sentinels and troops must have noted the boat’s direction. Despite the likelihood of drowning, Winter and Summer would not rest until searching every billow of this ocean. Soon enough, a fleet would emancipate us from limbo.
This rainforest existed. But it was not inaccessible, much less invisible. On the contrary, it had been remarkably easy to get here.
I would return. So would she.
As long as we didn’t kill each other first.