Chapter 27
We ride steadily on the snowy path, our caution a vibration in the air. I’ve known fear. Those moments standing on the green, waiting for the Eastlanders to attack, and the time after, when violence and fire took all, were pure terror.
I also felt it while watching Hel, consumed by a shadow wraith.
When I swung that sword, the knowledge that it was her or us was one of the most painful moments of my life.
I feel that way now, my insides as twisted as some of the trees in this construct.
I’m standing on the precipice of a nightmare, so close to falling and never landing.
All I need is someone—or something—to tip me over the edge.
A tingle crawls along my spine, and I glance over my shoulder. I feel a…presence. It started a while after we left the refuge, but there’s nothing but dark woods and snow. Ahead, nothing but more dark woods, snow, and looming mountains.
And Alexus Thibault, a man I wasn’t sure could even experience genuine fear until several hours ago.
Now his fear is my fear, because if he’s scared, I’m fairly certain I should be as well.
I’m just not entirely sure what it is I’m supposed to fear most—the Prince of the East, the worry for what lies ahead, or the secrets of my companion.
Buried in the gambeson, I keep my tired eyes peeled to the tree line, swinging my gaze back and forth with an occasional glance at the sky.
For the last few hours, the color has gradually shifted from the soft pink that reminded me of my mother’s flowers to a deep, grim red—a shade that sadly reminds me of her, too.
The whole world is cast in this bloody moonlight glow, reflecting off the snow.
The white wolves are out, prowling in the shadows, and crows follow us through the trees. I’m past the point of exhaustion and have arrived at the place where I’m questioning everything. Is this real? Or is this some illusion thanks to the distressed state of my mind and body?
The unholy melody of baying howls and gurgling croaks, along with a cold snap of wind, reminds me that this is very real.
It also feels like a warning.
I wriggle my feet in my boots, the press of warm steel reassuring.
In my left boot resides the old dagger from Littledenn.
In the right, the curved Eastlander blade that Alexus found in the snow.
He gave it to me in exchange for the God Knife and dagger belt.
It was the right thing to do, but there are moments, like now, however brief and cutting, when I question my judgment.
But I trust him. Even with his words of darkness. Even though he knows things that he’s yet to share. And even though he’s the Witch Collector, I feel safer with him leading the way, the God Knife in his grasp.
More than anything, I believe him when he speaks of his darkness.
I don’t know what it is, but the truth of its existence is undeniable.
When Alexus saw the God Knife—truly saw it—the green in his eyes turned black and liquid, that primal stare boring into my soul like he could enter me if he gazed long enough.
Otherworldly, I’d called it before. It’s more than that, though. I just can’t define it.
Yet.
We come to a crest in the wood, and Alexus halts Mannus. He throws a fist in the air to stop me as well. I take a deep breath, smelling burning wood.
Soundlessly, he removes his sword and scabbard and fastens them to Mannus’s back. When he dismounts, it’s eerie how quiet he is, how every movement and step is as silent as snowfall.
He creeps up the path with long, careful strides—a cloaked, menacing figure—then he stalks along the path’s edge, his back against the rocky hillside.
I close my eyes and focus my hearing.
Voices. They’re faint, like murmurs around a campfire, but they’re there.
Is this what Nephele hoped to protect us from?
When I open my eyes, Alexus approaches, still hauntingly quiet. He folds his hands around my waist and lifts me off Tuck. Gripping my arms, he bends down and looks me in the eyes.
“Eastlanders,” he signs. “About twenty. Camped on the path. The prince is not with them.”
“To the woods,” I sign, pointing.
Because what are our options? As for the prince, I’m worried that he could be anywhere in an instant, so the fact that he isn’t warming his bones with his men isn’t exactly soothing.
Alexus shakes his head. “I know where we are now. Too near the mountains. The landscape is too rugged.”
I glance back the way we came. “We cannot turn back.”
“No.” Sighing softly, he shakes his dark head again, and his broad shoulders fall. “The only way forward is through,” he reminds me. Gently, he presses his forehead against mine and whispers, “I will take care of them. Just stay here.”
I grab his cloak before he can pull away. “They should not have to die for us to live,” I sign.
My stomach churns, sick with knowing what he means to do, if he even can. He alone cannot take down twenty men, Eastlanders at that. Can he? The God Knife hasn’t proven itself as the divine weapon I once believed, though Alexus seems to think it’s a critical piece in this game we’re playing.
He tilts my chin, and even under this red haze, I can see that the pretty green of his eyes has turned black.
“Believe me, this is the last thing I want to do,” he says. “But you’ve seen what these people are capable of. They will not spare us, Raina. They will kill us or take us to their prince. Or worse. Make no mistake.”
He tosses up his hood, shadowing his face, and kisses me.
I don’t know why his hands on my cheeks, or the press of his lips is so shocking.
Perhaps because it’s so natural—so impossibly right—when it should feel anything but.
It’s a tender kiss, but it makes me weak all the same, scattering my mind like I’m sure he knew it would.
“Do as I say,” he whispers against my mouth. “Do not follow me. Your life depends on it. I will come back for you, but no matter what you see, no matter what you hear, do not follow. Swear it.”
I hate every bit of this, but I press the word Promise against his chest, not missing the way his heart pounds like a war drum beneath my touch.
It turns out I’m more of a liar than I ever knew, because minutes later, the earth quakes and rumbles like a star fell from the sky and crashed in the middle of this godsforsaken forest. Then I’m tying our horrified horses to a tree, stripping off the cumbersome gambeson, freeing both my blades, and creeping up the path in the cold, just as Alexus did.
A momentary white light splits the wood, stopping me in my tracks. The horrible groan of trees falling and snapping—a thousand at the same time—shatters the night, followed by men screaming in misery.
Their screams die at once, and the wood falls to absolute silence and stillness that makes my blood turn to ice. The wolves have stopped crying, and the crows have abandoned the trees.
The rocky hillside digs against my back, the jagged stones loosening as I move.
One snags my bodice—under my arm—slicing through the fabric covering my ribs.
I wince at the sharp pain. I’m cut, I think, but I’m more worried about every noisy pebble that falls, setting my pulse racing.
I’m a liar breaking a promise, but I must know if Alexus is okay.
Finally, I’m at the cliff’s edge, panting around my anxiety. It takes all I have to gather my defiant bravery and peer around the rocks.
My heart lurches in my chest, slamming to a stop before speeding up all over again. The Eastlander campsite—no, the path and even part of the wood—looks exactly like my imagination conjured.
Like a star crashed in Frostwater Wood.
There’s a crater in the middle of the forest, obliterating the path and surrounding landscape. As for the Eastlanders, there’s no sign of them, though dark stains splatter the open earth, and bits of wet flesh hang from the limbs of broken trees.
In the middle of it all is Alexus, kneeling like a fallen god.
Even from here, I can see that he’s in pain. He rests his weight on one fist while the other hand pounds his chest like he’s driving a stake through his heart. He gasps so hard his back bows with the effort.
I hurry down the hill, stumbling and sliding to the shallow crater. The moment I reach the basin, I’m running. When I reach him, I drop my weapons and fall to my knees, slipping my arm across his back, hoping to help him when I’m not even sure what in gods’ death happened.
At my touch, he jerks his head up. Black veins web the blanched skin around his eyes, which are still that same liquid darkness, only now it’s not only his irises. Even the whites of his eyes have been overtaken.
“Go!” he roars, and the deep, reverberating sound of his voice is bone-rattling enough that the echo hits my core in ominous waves. It’s so arresting that I’m shaking, and I almost obey.
Almost.
I feel magick. Not Nephele’s magick. Not Witch Walker magick. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, kissing my skin like that charge in the air the first few times I ever met Alexus Thibault’s stare. Only stronger.
Every hair on my body stands on end, and chills run up and down my arms, but not out of fear.
The magick in the air is silky to the touch, so cold, and thick enough to taste.
It tastes like him—like honey and cloves—and something else.
The wood, perhaps, where magick now permeates the soil, the roots, the trees, the leaves.
In reverent form, Alexus presses his forehead to the ground, palms flattened to raw earth, and rocks back and forth, chanting. His voice is too low for me to make out the words, but they’re Old Elikesh, ancient and beautiful, and I know their cadence.
A plea, not a prayer.
I’m not sure how long we sit there, him chanting, me helplessly watching and listening, but eventually, his rocking slows, his words fade, and he collapses in on himself. His cloak falls to the side, revealing the God Knife, still safely sheathed at his thigh inside Finn’s dagger belt.
I roll him to his back and touch his face, wiping away the snowflakes that settle on his eyes and in his beard. The black veins around his eyes have faded, leaving behind purplish bruising in their stead, and his tunic is untied, revealing his reddened chest.
After a moment, he blinks up at me and cups my hand, pressing my palm to his cheek. I expect him to be furious—to scream at me again. But he isn’t, and he doesn’t. He looks relieved, like a man who just survived something I can’t begin to understand.
“Are you all right?” he asks, and I nod. “Good. Help me stand?”
I do, though I’m not sure how much help I am. Alexus is two of me, and whatever he did to those men weakened him a great deal.
With his arm wrapped around my shoulders and my blades secured, we trudge back up the hill toward the crest, but I pause, leaning him against the rocky hillside once we get that far.
“You killed twenty men,” I sign.
He nods and rubs his eyes, squinting at me like they burn. “Yes. I did.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“In an unnatural way.”
A half-nod. “That depends. Magick is not unnatural.”
“It is if your magick died a long time ago.”
Magick that he didn’t employ during the Eastlander attack, nor with the wraith, and I have to wonder why.
“Yes. I offered the Eastlanders a reprieve. They did not accept. And so I did what I had to do. Us or them.” He sighs. “Do you hate me again?”
Again. Because I so clearly lost that particular battle.
“No,” I answer, and I mean it, even though there are remains of dead warriors glittering in the crimson light hovering over the wood.
While more unnecessary death is the last thing I need weighing down my already overburdened conscience, he’s right.
It was us or them, and I’m beginning to understand the misery of that situation.
They had a choice. They chose wrong. I’m only glad I didn’t see it happen.
“Good.” He winces. “I don’t hate you either, for breaking your promise and seeing things you weren’t meant to see. You could’ve been hurt. Killed, even. That could be you in those trees, all because you don’t listen.”
He gives me an irritation-laced glare, the same look he wore when he tricked me before we entered the construct. Only now, it’s half as severe.
I arch a brow. “But I was not injured or killed. And now, I require a thorough explanation. Not this moment, but soon.”
Still breathing hard, he glances beyond the destroyed path.
“How about within the hour? There’s a stretch of caves ahead, in the ravine I’d hoped to avoid.
But perhaps it’s the best route. We’re farther north than I realized.
We can get out of sight, get warm, rest, and I’ll tell you all that I can. ”
This seems far too easy, though I hear his boundaries plain enough: All that I can.
Still, I’ll take it. This man has secrets he’s finally willing to talk about, and I’m tired of being in the dark. Besides, I can be more than persuasive.
He’s a little steadier now, so we make our way through the snow toward Mannus and Tuck. I catch him staring at me, paying no attention to the path before him, a glint of amusement sparkling in his glassy eyes that are slowly returning to their normal shade.
“Are you always this disobedient?” he asks.
I just smile, and for a few minutes, as we walk, I let myself live in the strange sense of normalcy that settles over us, just Alexus and me, shoulder to shoulder.
No thoughts of magick or the prince or the king or dead Eastlanders at our back.
No whispers across my mind reminding me who he is and that there’s a very good chance that he’s more than I ever dreamed.
It’s just us and the snow, and the need for the ordinary, that mundane existence that Mena said I struggle with.
Yet right now, I ache for the mundane, for the dream I’d had on Collecting Day. I imagine being somewhere else, far away from all of this horror. Me and my family and friends, and maybe even Alexus.
I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to be at odds with a magickal, mythical prince who might end me. I just want simple and easy. Long walks and stargazing in a world that doesn’t feel like it might crumble any moment.
I look at Alexus again. His face is serious and, when he stops and pulls me to him, kissing me, his body hard and thrumming with magick and the rush of a one-sided battle, I taste what remains of his power. The potent flavor is as sweet as fresh honey on my tongue.
Dark. Promising. Consuming.
And I know, beyond any doubt, that I’ve tumbled headfirst into the worst kind of trouble.
And that everything—everything—is about to change.