Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FOX
F ox wondered how hard it would be to knock the woman out and simply carry her back to Suvi gagged and tied, because at this point, the chief commander would be lucky if they made it back before Fox killed her.
He was in a particularly grouchy mood after Sofia woke him by flinging him off their makeshift bed, cock harder than it had been in blinks. She wasn’t an ugly woman; even he had to admit that. Her hair was always a tangled mess and her eyes were too big for her face, but her body was curved and muscled and he spent too much time staring at her lips, soft and pink. She looked the most beautiful when she was angry and ranting. When her cheeks flushed red, it brought out the sprinkle of her freckles across the bridge of her nose, and her green eyes practically glowed with passion.
But none of that made her ranting and raving any more true. The Dragonborn weren’t innocent. The resistance wasn’t innocent, and their movement deserved to be torn down, each and every rebel punished for the lives they’d taken.
He wasn’t lying to her when he said she’d been the one to move closer to him in the night. He would have argued, but the warmth of her body pressed against his chest had lulled him to sleep almost immediately. Somehow, despite spending days in the rainforest and refusing to wash off in the lake, her thick curls smelled of coconut. Based on the few whiffs he’d gotten of himself—he did not.
And as a thanks for preventing her from freezing to death due to her own stubbornness the night before, he’d gotten thrown on his ass.
He wanted to be home as much as she did, and he wasn’t the reason they were stuck out here dodging shapeshifters and faeries and discussing the merits of praying to dragons. The first thing he was going to do once they got back—after he threw her in the darkest cell in the prison—was take a hot bath and eat his body weight in anything other than rabbit.
At least they appeared to have finally made it to an area of the rainforest that actually had water. By midday, they had already stumbled on half a dozen other cenotes. Although none of them had been inhabited previously, two had been easy enough to climb down. Each time, they drank their fill of the water and rested in the coolness of the caverns.
The sun was low in the sky, sending long shadows through the trees when they came across another cenote, barely more than a thin crack in the earth. The only reason they found it was thanks to the echoing rush of water traveling up through the opening.
“We should go down,” Sofia said, leaning over the crack, a wind from somewhere below, making her curls sway.
“Are you kidding?” he said, legs straddling the thin opening. “We’ll find more water later.”
“The sun won’t be up for much longer and there is no guarantee we’ll be able to find water before then.”
“So you want to what? Cave dive and hope this widens at the bottom?”
“If anything, climbing down and back up is going to be easier than a wider cenote.”
“If we don’t get stuck.”
“I’m sure your muscles will fit,” she said, looking him up and down.
He smirked. “I knew you were ogling me.”
She only rolled her eyes. “I’m more worried about your big head getting stuck. “
His lips pinched, holding back a smile. But then he looked back at the opening she was suggesting they crawl into.
“I’m not going down there,” he said more firmly this time.
“Fine, have fun dying up here. I’ll pray to the dragon gods a jaguar gets you before you die of thirst or exposure.”
Her smile was predatory. Before he could find a retort, she was lowering herself down and disappearing between the open earth.
Her wild curls disappeared last, swallowed by the darkness, and his heart spiked. As if calling on the fear thrumming through his blood, the vines behind him shifted and moved under the footsteps of something .
He couldn’t stay up here alone. He couldn’t go down there. He couldn’t breathe.
“Stop it,” he snapped at himself, taking a deep breath. Stupid. Weak. Useless. Child .
He let the voice in his head wash over him, pulling on it for motivation, even as it made his hands tremble.
“This is how I’m going to die,” he said as he slipped into the crack, ignoring how close the walls were on every side of him.
The journey down was longer than any other one they’d had, the earth pressed on either side of his body. He kept his face turned toward the widest part of the opening. But even still, he felt the earth against his back as he crawled down. It was convenient that at every minor slip, he had only to throw himself back to catch himself against the wall. The only sounds he heard were his shallow breaths and the steady rhythm of a stream growing louder and louder beneath him until it wrapped around him completely. His senses narrowed to only the feel of the wet, cool dirt and stone beneath his fingers, aware of every change in texture of the wall as he descended.
The earth never widened and then suddenly his feet were touching ground and the earth was still solid, wrapped around him.
The air caught in his lungs. The light from the sky above was gone, darkness surrounding him, choking him. The earth seemed to shift around him, tightening against his chest. His toes and his fingers were numb as he scrambled against the stone, trying to dig himself out. It was too dark. Too tight.
Ocon! Ocon!
His body was shaking and he pushed against the stone holding him down, trying his best to move it but he was too weak and the stone too heavy.
“Fox!”
He felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him, and it was Sofia’s voice only a few inches from his ear.
“Take two steps to your left and duck down about a foot, the cave widens over here.”
Her voice was soft and slow, as if she were talking to a child. But he didn’t have the breath to berate her or argue. He listened, moving slowly, feet brushing against the ground as if to remind himself he was still standing. His shoulder hit stone and he flinched.
“Okay, duck.” Her voice was farther away now, but he listened, moving down until suddenly the air around him opened up and he could see again.
No longer worried about being buried by the earth, his knees gave out and he slumped against the nearby wall. Sofia was standing above him and he could just make out her features in the soft blue glow that seemed to emanate from the earth itself. There was a knowing look in her gaze that he didn’t want to examine too closely.
“Slow your breathing,” she said, crouching down and looking into his face as if he weren’t trying to avoid her eyes. She reach forward and he flinched away.
“Don’t touch me!”
Her face tightened, but she didn’t snap back. “Breathe. Tell me what you can hear.”
He tried to focus his eyes on her, confused at her command, but after a moment he complied. “The water. Your voice. There’s a wind from somewhere. My voice.”
“Good.” Her voice was gentler than he’d ever heard it. “And what can you feel? Beneath your hands?”
“The ground is wet—cold. It’s almost as hard as our beds last night.”
She cracked a smile and he felt pride at being the cause.
His breathing began to slow. The tingling in his fingers stopped and he was able to refocus his gaze, looking around the cave they were in. It took another minute to realize it wasn’t the earth itself glowing blue, but the pinpricks of thousands of creatures, crawling along the walls.
“They’re starworms,” Sofia said, noticing his gaze. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, voice harsher than he intended.
Her lips pursed at his tone, but she only nodded and held out her hand. Not making eye contact, he accepted her help and stood on shaky legs.
“Where are we?” He was as stiff as his words, brushing the dirt from his clothes as if it might matter. He was so covered in mud and filth, he was starting to forget what color his tunic had been originally.
“I’m assuming you don’t want to talk about it?” Sofia said, still not looking away from him, as if she cared. As if she weren’t asking to use it against him. The last thing he needed was for the resistance to learn all they had to do was lock him in a small space and he’d cry like a baby.
Instead of answering, he looked around, taking in the flowing river that rushed against the farthest wall and the small dry spot of land they were standing on. There was nothing else here. They weren’t even in a real cenote, simply a crack in the earth above one of the underground rivers that snaked through the peninsula.
“We can’t sleep here.”
Sofia looked around, lips pressed tight. “No, I don’t think we can.”
Fox’s gut twisted. “We need to climb back up.”
She walked the two steps to the river and looked at where it flowed through the glowing tunnel.
“There’ll be more openings down the river,” she said. “Wider ones.”
“And we have no idea how far away those might be.”
“No, but at least down here there is fresh water and shelter from the night faeries and predators. If the starworms are living down here safely, then we’ll be okay.”
He looked back at the small gap in the wall behind him that led back to the surface—through the narrow crack that had already tried to kill him once. The river, on the other hand, flowed through a high arched tunnel with starworms lighting the stone above like a night sky. There was no dry path of land, but the water looked shallow enough along the edges.
“Fine.”
Shoulders straightening, he marched forward, passing her and stepping directly in the river’s edge. The water was icy against his boots. He gave a sharp intake of breath, but kept moving, refusing to show weakness again. She was wearing sandals. He wouldn’t be the pathetic one here, if she could handle the water.
He heard her own sharp intake behind him and the splash of water as she followed. When he glanced back over his shoulder he saw her picking at her fingers, biting her lips hard, but she didn’t complain.
As they walked, Fox’s eyes traced the starworms that lined the walls and ceiling. While many of them were scattered across the stone, creating the illusion of the night sky, others were hanging on invisible threads stretched down from the ceiling, as if the night sky were crying stars. All of it reflected back by the river. He had never seen anything so beautiful. He’d seen the waterfalls of Falais across the north sea where his father’s father had been from, but the blue glow patterned across these caves outshone even those.
They kept their steady pace, even as the water deepened and the tunnel narrowed slightly. The water was now up to his calves and every time he looked back, he saw the way Sofia trembled even as her face remained impassive.
He hated how much he seemed to care, but he rationalized that any human would be pained to see another suffering. And she had been kind enough to not comment on his panic attack earlier.
“Take my cloak,” he snapped after another ten minutes of trying to ignore her clear distress.
“I’m fine,” she said, not looking at him.
“My boots are better protected and my pants are thicker than yours. Take the damn cloak and stop shivering so loudly.”
She didn’t even look at him as she gave in, throwing her arm out to take the cloak. Too afraid her shaking fingers would drop it into the river, he ignored her outstretched arm, pressing close to her and carefully draping it over her shoulders. He hooked it around her throat, ignoring her gaze, even as he let his fingers hesitate there, pressing against the soft skin of her neck. It was ice cold and she shivered against him even as he forced himself to pull away. He crouched briefly and tied the bottom so it wouldn’t drag in the water. He made the mistake of looking up at her between his lashes. Her face was flushed despite the cold, lips parted. He pushed back up to his feet before he did something stupid.
“Thanks,” she said, mumbling the word, shoulders slumped in the same shame he felt every time she had helped him. Something like empathy shuddered through him.
“You called me Fox earlier.”
“You weren’t answering to Ocon,” she said.
“I liked it.”
She didn’t respond to this and his face flushed. He was happy it was too dark for her to see. They were walking side by side now and the silence grew heavy between them.
“I don’t do well in small spaces,” he said, the words slipping from him.
“I noticed.”
“I was trapped once…” he meant to say more, but his voice cracked and his mouth snapped closed. “Thank you for helping earlier.”
She shrugged off the gratitude, but he could have sworn her lip ticked up in a smile for the briefest moment.
“I think this river might feed directly into my home cenote,” she said. The words were sudden, but it was clear in her tone she’d been thinking about it for a while as they walked.
They were walking directly back to her base, if she was correct.
“How do you know?”
“The starworms,” she said. “They aren’t incredibly rare, but colonies this large are. I haven’t been upriver from our base, but others have and they’ve talked about the colonies that line the river.”
He was silent for a few minutes, mind caught between freezing and spinning. “I guess congratulations are in order. You’ve managed to get me back to your allies.”
“They aren’t going to kill you.”
“They weren’t perhaps, but I doubt after this little adventure they’ll be so forgiving. And as you said, the prisoners I was a bargaining chip for are likely all dead now. What use am I?”
“All we want is our freedom.”
“And you’re willing to kill hundreds to get it.”
“If that’s the only language your people speak,” she said, voice raw in the darkness. “Do you know we tried negotiating? A hundred cycles ago, the resistance started as a political group wanting to negotiate our rights. In response, your king’s grandfather murdered them at his dinner table.”
“That’s donkey shit. I’ve read our history books cover to cover. The resistance pretended peace and then tried to assassinate the king.”
“And who wrote those history books?”
He opened his mouth, ready to retaliate when a shudder ran through the ground around them, sending Fox stumbling to the side. He heard the splash of water and looked over to see Sofia, on her knees and drenched in water. The cloak was lying heavy on her shoulders and dripping.
“Shit!” she said as he pulled her up. He could already feel her shaking beneath the sodden clothes.
“Are you good to keep walking?”
“Yes.” She took a shaky step and he saw the wince as she placed her weight down, but she kept moving. He didn’t say anything and let her continue forward, holding her pride together with the barest of threads.
“We should stop at the first part of dry land we find,” he said. “Even if we can’t get out of the tunnel tonight, we need to rest.”
She nodded silently as she gave another violent shiver. There would be no fire tonight, and she wouldn’t be able to sleep in her wet clothes. The thought heated his cheeks, and he bit his tongue to stop his mind from wandering further in that direction.
The second time the earth shook beneath their feet it lasted no longer—only a second at most—and Sofia caught herself before falling again. A shiver traveled up Fox’s spine. Earthquakes weren’t incredibly rare on the peninsula, but it had been some time since he’d felt two so close together. And he definitely didn’t like being underground when they happened.
“Let’s move faster,” Sofia said, as if reading his mind.
He didn’t verbalize his agreement, but he picked up his pace, using a hand to steady her elbow as her own shorter legs struggled through the water.
“Take off the cloak,” he said.
“No!”
“It’s only making you colder and slower. I can carry it.”
She didn’t argue and slipped the material off her shoulders even as they continued walking. It was heavy as he scooped it into his arms.
The water seemed to deepen here, even along the edge of the river, pressed up as they were against the wall. It only made it more difficult to walk. He was happy the starworms continued to light their way.
It was because of their light that he realized that the river wasn’t just getting deeper but that the water was actively rising around their legs, the current getting faster with every step they took. In the same moment his mind was able to understand this, the water roared behind them, growling like an ancient beast awoken.
“Fox?”
“Run!”