Chapter 22
We left the mineshaft immediately. Not that we thought Python would wiggle his way up to the top of the shaft and gulp us all down, but who wanted to take the chance that he might?
Veyyr drove, Lucky held Rana wrapped up like a burrito in a blanket so she couldn’t wander off, Sorrow had crammed himself inside the edge of my jacket somehow—for a big bird it was a feat.
Harrison helped me bandage up my leg. He started with a salve that smelled like summer fruit and mint and was pale pink.
It was thick, almost a clay rather than an ointment.
“Lucky it wasn’t a bite, but the paralyzing effect will take some time to fade.
I’d expect that with how you heal, it’ll be a couple days at most, and you’ll be back to full speed.
” He tightened the last of the wrap over the ointment.
“And the clay will draw the remaining venom out and will turn the clay a different color. We can maybe trade it at another town.”
“Ingredients for a witch?”
He nodded.
“Then we should save it for Rana. She needs to start her…I don’t know if witches have the equivalent of a hope chest?”
Lucky barked out a laugh. “Not a bad idea. By the time she’s ready we could have a whole slew of ingredients for her.”
Harrison looked over at Rana, his face unreadable as he gave a slow nod. “Yeah, okay. Sell it if we need to though.”
Something had shifted with him, the minute we’d been topside again, and Veyyr had said Rana had been initiated by Thorn. He looked at her the way he’d looked at Isla. Distrust and no small amount of fear.
I suppose that knowing she was a witch now was enough to do that.
I leaned against the box of the truck, the topography around us changing again.
A wild and young forest rose up on either side, hiding whatever buildings might have been there at one point in the distant past. Some of the plants I recognized, but it was the sheer amount of green, pops of vibrant flowers, and the calls of birds that had me entranced.
Like a fairy tale, you’d never know if there was a Rift cut into the earth just on the other side of the band of trees.
Here the weather seemed more like summer than the fall, warmer, whispering that winter was far, far away.
Smaller animals darted away from the sound of the truck, but otherwise it was quiet, the road without any issues…the reason becoming apparent soon enough. Veyyr slowed and turned the truck off.
Standing, still holding Sorrow tight to me, I looked out over the cab of the truck.
A long viaduct stretched out in front of us, its repeating arches marching through an older, denser version of the young forest around us. The struts looked like the ribs of some ancient, sleeping beast.
“It’s old,” Lucky stood beside me. “You think it will hold up?”
He wasn’t wrong, even to my eyes I could see the structure was beyond old, made of stone, and heavily weathered. Moss and grass had claimed the top of it completely, turning what was once a rail line or roadway into a narrow green spine. The question was, would the spine be brittle?
Veyyr walked to the edge of the drop off. I hopped out of the truck, wincing as my calf took the brunt of my weight.
Sorrow clucked. Whispering still. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“Hush, you don’t need to be sorry. We’re alive.”
He shuddered. “Bad bird.”
It had been like this since we’d climbed out of the shaft. The shame rolled off him, his fear of snakes making it impossible for him to do anything but flee. I lifted him up as I reached Veyyr.
“Sorrow, can you help me? Do a check of the trestle, look for breaks? Check for monsters?”
He blinked up at me and clacked his beak. “Sorrow helps.”
“Yes,” I tossed him up so he had an easier launch. And then I got a better look at the bridge. Or what we might use as a bridge.
Below, the arches dropped into a deep, shadowed ravine swallowed by trees, hiding gods only knew what.
The forest was thick with conifers, layered in soft shades of green, darker and heavier near the ground, lighter and mist-washed closer to us.
Fog hung in the air, blurring the distant treeline and softening the world into muted tones, giving the whole scene a quiet, almost mournful stillness.
It did not ease my mind one bit. This kind of quiet…
“Could be the lair of something,” Veyyr said. “Nothing that I know of, but there are new Riftborn monsters all the time.”
I snorted. “Like me.”
He glanced over at me, just the fraction of a softening, the barest bit of a wink. “No, you weren’t born in the Rift. It fucking spit you out.”
Lucky started laughing, the sound echoing out across the chasm, disturbing a series of birds that Sorrow chased for a moment.
But there were no people, no monsters. No signs of movement other than us and the birds. The bridge didn’t feel abandoned so much as…waiting.
“Thanks. I’ll remember that.” I grinned and then looked out at the bridge again. “Think it can hold weight?”
“Not the truck. From here we go on foot,” Veyyr said.
I couldn’t help the grimace. Not that I opposed a walk, I opposed walking across a bridge that looked like it wasn’t sure if it was real or made of fog and trickery.
The longer I stared, the more the mist turned the distance into uncertainty—as if it could go on forever.
“And we’re sure it’s not cursed, not got some magic booby trap woven into it?”
“Not sure at all.” Veyyr turned and went back to the truck.
I stood there and just breathed in the space. The forest seemed to press close on all sides, making the bridge feel like a linchpin that was somehow holding something in, or maybe holding something back.
Sorrow cawed in the distance; I couldn’t see him and yet it sounded like he was right in front of me. “Sound travels strange here.”
Lucky’s footsteps echoed too loud, Veyyr’s cloak swooshed with a rush that shouldn’t have been.
Harrison handed me a pack to carry. “You worried?”
I couldn’t put my finger on it. Maybe it was a place I’d been before, but it felt like there were eyes unseen watching from beneath the arches and from between the trees.
“Yes. It’s beautiful, but this place is not going to welcome us.” I touched the ring that I couldn’t remove, a ring that contained so much of my past life. Why did this place make me remember I was wearing it?
“You got a whiff of something nasty?” Lucky still held Rana wrapped up in a blanket in her burrito, easily holding her in his arms.
“I…the air feels charged. Waiting. Something is watching us from down there.” I bent and put my palm to the stones that made up the start of the bridge we were about to trust our lives to.
The wolf in me rose quietly, her hackles and mine lifting as the magic within the stones whispered of an old power, one that didn’t give a fuck about us…
I lifted my hand and peered over the edge, raising both hands high, palms out in what I hoped was universal enough that they—whoever they were—would see and understand we were no threat. “We just want to cross.”
And the wolf in me understood that we had to do this right. “Veyyr, you and I will take front and rear point. Lucky, you’re second, Harrison third. Go quiet. Do nothing, say nothing, show respect.”
Because the longer we stood there, the more certain I was that we were in the presence of power that would rival Veyyr’s. I didn’t want to say it out loud, didn’t want to draw their attention.
If you’d asked me to bet, I’d have bet everything I had in me that below the bridge were elementals watching us. And the thing about the four elemental families that I did remember?
They didn’t like each other. At all. I tried to pass that on to Veyyr along the bond, and by the look on his face, he at least got the drift of it.
Veyyr went very still, as if his own magic had frozen him. “You take the lead, Tracker.”
I’d thought he would but seeing as he was the one most likely to cause the upset…me in front was probably best.
I put a foot onto the bridge and my chest tightened. The stone was damp with moss, slick enough that every placement mattered and felt ready to violently throw me off given the opportunity. “Slow, steady, watch every step.”
Of course there was no rail worth trusting, just low, crumbling edges and the awareness that the arches fell away into a green-black drop where the forest and what I suspected were elementals waited with patient teeth.
“Keep your eyes forward,” Veyyr said.
Good advice which I immediately failed, glancing down despite knowing better. Fucking hell, my heart stuttered and the thrum in my calf made me wobble as the depth below me rushed up to meet my stupid face.
“Eyes forward, Mallory,” Veyyr’s voice was softer this time and I managed to heed it, looking across the bridge instead of down.
Sorrow swooped in front of me. “No monsters.”
“Good, that’s good. You want to land on the other side and wait?”
He took another dive bomb and tugged at a lock of my hair as if that helped. The urge to swat at him was strong and I tucked my thumbs into the straps of my backpack so I didn’t go windmilling off the edge all because of the damn sorrowbird.
I blew out a breath and got moving again. Each footstep echoed. Not loudly, but enough that the weird way sound worked made it grate inside my head.
“I don’t like that.” Lucky grumbled. “The noise doesn’t really disappear here, does it?”
He was right, but I just nodded. The noises from our feet, from the creak of leather, even the hitches in Rana’s breathing, it all lingered. Crawling along the stone, slipping down into the ravine and then coming back thinner, altered.
I knew in my gut who was listening down there, waiting for us to say something that offended them. The sound was being drawn to the elementals below and as long as we didn’t do or say something to piss them off, we’d be okay.