Chapter 22 #2
He pulled her after Hedda, trying to be mindful of the pain she was clearly in. “What did you find?”
“Only made it to the tree line,” Mag answered, jogging alongside, “and turned right back around. Something’s trashed the fields, and Faldir was nowhere to be seen.”
“It was like this when I came through earlier,” Thad said. “I never got close enough to see that it was wrong, else I’d have said something.”
They followed broken branches and skidding foot prints, almost crashing into Hedda’s rooted, listing body when they emerged from the wood.
Brand followed her look and froze right with her. “What the fuck?”
“Aye.” Mag’s voice was hushed. “That wasn’t there when my watch ended, I swear it.”
Fields that had been mostly pristine the night before were rutted and ruined, the land raised in jagged, overturned clumps taller than he was. Huge gouges ran like twisted scars from the spot where they’d all sat to keep watch, through the meadow, all the way to—
“The chasm,” he said, feet already moving.
Magnus ran ahead of him, throwing his robe off and shifting mid-air. Pet put his enormous snout to the ground, sniffing at the divots, pawing around. He loosed a whimper and turned golden eyes on Brand.
There, mixed in with the mud and roots… No. Not mud. Ooze, inky and shining, even in the low light. It dripped from sundered petals and broken stems. Seeped into the dirt. And it was moving.
He reached down—
Lunara’s hand wrapped around his wrist, her nails digging into his skin. “Don’t touch that.”
Her breaths were coming in pants, a haunted look in her eyes.
“What is it?”
She slowly unlocked her fingers, head shaking.
“All I can smell is burning death and rot. Nothing else.” Mag had shifted back, already retying his robe. “There’s blood, but the rest is too fucking foul to know whose.”
That’s what caught Brand’s eye in the first place—crimson mixed in with the black, too much of it for comfort.
They followed the streaks and splashes of red right up to the chasm’s edge, where Hedda was standing in the center of a colossal groove, swaying as she peered down into the darkness.
Lunara went up alongside her. “Hedda?”
She was met with silence.
“We have to assume it’s Faldir’s,” Brand said quietly, one eye on them, the other on the ground.
Thad sidled up. “Do you think something actually dragged him down there?”
Sister’s save them, but that’s exactly where his mind had gone. As to what had done it—
“Dreadbeast.” Hedda’s voice was a haunted slur.
Brand hadn’t wanted to think it, let alone say it out loud.
The mythical monsters that allegedly inhabited the bowels of every chasm. Some swore they could hear their animalistic snarls and screams echoing in the dead of night, when no other sounds pierced the air.
In all of recorded time, no one had ever seen one. They were supposed to be nothing more than a chilling bedtime story that parents used to frighten wayward children.
Not real. Not capable of this.
“Ach, lass, those are a legend. Fiction.” Even Magnus didn’t sound sure, false lightness in every word.
Hedda’s head snapped up, violence in every line of her body and a crazed gleam in her eyes. “Are they? You saw what happened to those people. The same filth on their bodies, the same smell. What else could have done that?”
What, indeed.
She turned back to the chasm. “Real or not, we have to find him.”
Brand was inclined to agree, except…
He shared a look with Mag, no words needed. His brother saw it too—the desperation, the drunken, uncontrolled movements of her limbs.
Warriors had to be sharp, quick. Hedda was all over the place, more likely to make mistakes or act without thinking, and it would only end in tragedy.
No way she was going into the chasm like this.
Fuck, he wasn’t sure if any of them should go down there, or how, or… Fuck.
Brand straightened his spine and dug deep, calling on all of the authority he possessed—armor, for what he was about to do. “Second, to me.”
Hedda paused for the barest moment before she obeyed, planting her feet in a wide stance in front of him—or, at least, trying to.
He reached out to steady her, surreptitiously removing the axe from her hold and tossing it away. “I know you want to go after your brother,” he said, squeezing her shoulder, “but someone needs to get help, and reassure Caius that Thad is safe.”
Hedda didn’t notice that he’d just disarmed her. Oblivious, her lip trembled as she raised her chin, lids blinking too slowly. “Thaddeus himself should do it then, Your Highness, since he’s not supposed to be here.”
What in the realms? He could barely understand her garbled words.
He kept his face bland and lied through his damned teeth. “You’re too weak in this form.”
Hedda reared as if he’d slapped her. “What did you just say to me?”
“You heard me well enough.”
Her lips peeled back. “You would forsake your own Second and let a child go down there? A timid Sorcerit that’s afraid of her own shadow?”
An hour ago, he would have laughed and said never. Not in a million years. But looking at her, at the disjointed movements and the disconnect in her eyes…
“In this case, yes. If it keeps you safe.”
Easy to let her think that, if it meant saving her life or someone else’s.
She gripped the front of his tunic and tried to shove him, her respect gone. “Fuck safe, Brand. That’s my twin!” Her fist was flying and connecting before he could blink.
Brand’s head snapped back, every concern legitimized with that single action. In the more than eighty years they’d known each other, her destiny as his Second secured from the start, she had never struck him in anger.
If Brand were any of the Imperial Demons that had come before him, she would’ve just earned herself a swift death for treason.
“Look at yourself!” he hissed, running a hand across his split lip. “Would you let you go down there?”
She looked mildly horrified, but didn’t let up. “I would do whatever it took to get him back.”
“So would I,” he growled. “You’re a danger to yourself and those you’d be protecting. You’re a liability. Now go home, Second, before you do something I can’t overlook.”
“You hear that, Sorcerit? I’m the liability now.” Hedda’s laugh was unhinged as she locked eyes on Lunara. “Think he’d let me go if I was the one sucking his cock?”
Lunara’s gasp was like flint to kindling, igniting his fury.
Hedda turned on him again, fist flying as she shrieked. “Is that all I have to do, Brand?” Slam, into his chest. “Be related or get on my knees, and you’ll let me do whatever I want?” Slam, into his stomach. “No matter how fucking idiotic it is?”
Brand was glued to the spot, enduring every hammering blow and fighting to control the rage overtaking him. He’d been rendered speechless, blood roiling, seething to his statued marrow.
“Hedda, lass.”
She spun to Magnus, gripping her hair with white knuckles, tearing at the strands. “Is this what I’m reduced to? A messenger?”
“There’s no shame in it,” Mag answered.
“No shame in leaving my brother to the mercy of a chasm?” She staggered. “H-he would never… Faldir would’ve been halfway down by now, if it were me. But… you want me to leave and get help?”
All Brand could manage was, “Your Imperial Son commands it.”
Hedda loosed a savage scream to the open sky, tears flowing down her cheeks when she faced him again. “I swore an oath to the Sisters, with Faldir, never to leave your side exposed.”
Sisters above. Crying? If Faldir wasn’t in danger right now, he’d be doing everything in his power to figure out what in the fuck was happening to her.
“This is an exception. You are not yourself, and I can’t risk it.”
“No!” she wailed. “No, no, no. I won’t do it. I won’t.” Her eyes darted, unfocused, and she started to back away. “He would have been halfway down…”
“Hedda—”
She turned and bolted, clumsily dodging Mag’s grasp and heading straight for Lunara.
No, not Lunara—the chasm drop.
Mingled shouts filled the air as Brand barreled after her, Lunara the only thing standing between his Second and a deadly drop into nothing.
She threw herself in front of Hedda at the last possible instant, faster than any of them would have guessed her capable of. The two collided with dual grunts, Hedda wrapped in the vice of Lunara’s unyielding arms as they toppled to the ground amidst a blinding flash of light.
His Second was out cold by the time Brand made it to the spot.
“Forgive me,” Lunara was murmuring, clearing wine-red strands of hair from Hedda’s face.
It happened so quickly, mere feet from the edge.
Lunara looked up, a slight tremble in her lip. “It seemed a mercy to put her to sleep. I swear, it will only last as long as you wish it. Give the word and I wake her.”
“That was…” Mag raked a hand through his hair, staring at Hedda’s crumpled form. “Shite. You just saved her damned life, witchling.”
Brand sucked air into his lungs—willing his body to obey and the red to seep from his vision, to resist the clawing desire to change—and unleashed it with a bellowed, “Fuck!”
Lunara was still stroking Hedda’s forehead. “Something in her tonic wasn’t right. I tried to say so.” Her eyes scrunched closed. “I can feel whatever it is evading me while her body burns it away. Until then, there’s no telling what her state will be.”
“You think we should leave her like that?” Thad seemed so young voicing the question, so trusting.
“I believe it would be the safest thing for her, yes, but it’s not my decision to make. Excuse me.” Lunara stood and strode away, running a shaking hand over her face.
“How did all this happen without us knowing? Without us hearing it?” Magnus began to pace, his gait predatory, fixed on the depths stretching out beyond the cliff.
“I don’t know.”
“First Faldir, and now she’s trying to say Hedda was drugged?
Poisoned?” Mag threw his hands up. “A few hours ago I was waking him up and trading insults, and Hedda was grumbling at us to shut our fucking traps. None of this was here, she was fine. Shite, forget the rest of it. How can the land be overturned for nearly a mile and it didn’t make a sound? ”
Weariness hit Brand like a wave. “I don’t fucking know.”
“I assume we aren’t really sending for help or waiting to go after him?”
Brand shook his head, relieved that he wouldn’t have to fight his brother as well.
“And Hedda?”
“Leaving her like that feels so wrong, on so many levels.” Brand let his head fall back. “But you heard Lunara. She knows more about this than the rest of us. Unless I can be assured of Hedda’s state, this solves the problem—poorly—and we’re wasting precious time debating it.”
“How will we go down? Come back?” Thad asked. “N-no one returns once they go in.”
Brand’s found Lunara a few yards away, bent and examining the divots. “No one else was an Imperial Son, Blessed of Straelon,” he said. “I’ll make steps for us to descend and come back again.”
“What of the shadows?” Mag asked. “They’re not fucking right.”
Lunara went preternaturally still at that. He wasn’t even sure she was breathing… but she was listening.
He strode to the drop and knelt in the dirt, hyper-aware of her following his movements.
It was a gamble to test her, to see what she was thinking or if she would stop him again with a gaze that said she knew something.
One hand planted and gripping a tuft of long grass, he reached out, stretching for the writhing obsidian darkness.
“Wait.”
He stopped shy of touching it—them—his satisfaction at the urgency in her tone curiously dim. Maybe because it only proved there was more to fear from the chasm than they’d realized.
“I…” There was that curl, tangled in her fingers again. “I can protect you from the shadows. I can shield you.”
There was something monumental about that small admission. Her dazed expression would have been comical any other time, as if she couldn’t quite believe she’d done it.
Oh, yes. He was starting to understand. What she was, what she might be capable of. There was no longer any doubt she’d been holding herself back. The real question was why.