35. Down the Mountain
Down the Mountain
Tage falls into a deep sleep with his thick arm a dead weight over me.
I know I should sleep, too. Tomorrow and the coming days will require a great deal of energy from me.
I should store up all the rest I can. But sleep eludes me.
The awareness clings that this is the end, my final moments with him.
Why would I want to sleep through it when these are the memories that will fortify me through the remainder of my life?
I clasp my hand over his arm, my fingers lightly brushing his taut skin, reveling in the smooth texture of his muscled flesh beneath my palm.
Ever so slightly, I turn my face and press an open-mouthed kiss to the bulge of his bicep, reveling in the salty taste of his skin. He shifts slightly, pulling me more against him as though I’m the thing that anchors him, and my heart squeezes in futile yearning.
I will think of him up here in these mountains, the perfect beauty of him, this ageless dragon . . . as I drift through life, growing older beside those blind to me.
When I’m gone, I hope he remembers my promise. I hope he doesn’t worry that I am a threat to the pride. I hope he knows I care about him too much to ever hurt or betray him. This leaving is about me. About doing what’s best for me and right for him. For him and the pride.
I feel him stir and know that his internal clock has signaled it is time for him to leave to surveil the area surrounding the cave.
I feign sleep as he eases away from me. Instantly I’m cold as the great slab of him moves from the fur bed.
Even though he carefully tucks the fur back over me, I’m cold without him.
Without the great radiating furnace of his body.
He slips away like the whisper of a dream, and that is all he will come to mean to me, I realize. A gossamer dream. Something wispy and intangible that happened in another life.
I don’t know if I wait long enough, but timing matters and I can’t get a late start. Tage will only be gone for so long, and I have to utilize every moment of his absence.
I dress in my borrowed clothes. Even if not a perfect fit, they’re much warmer than what I wore when I originally arrived here.
Danhy is waiting for me as arranged. There is no sight of Tage or any of the others.
She has a pack full of supplies and garments for me—heavy outerwear and fur boots. I quickly don the fur-lined cloak, pulling the thick hood over me, and swap for the warmer boots.
“Come, quickly,” she whispers as she leads me out of the cave through the dark and clawing trees that camouflage it.
As soon as we emerge into the open, the freezing air hits me like a hammer. I suck in a stunned breath that immediately turns to ice in my lungs. It’s not yet dawn, so the air hangs thick and dark as ink, but Danhy knows exactly where to step.
My memory of when I first arrived here is a fog in my mind. Everything is unfamiliar: the craggy landscape with its pockets of trees and jagged rocks nosing up from the thick snow in various places.
I can’t recall ever feeling this cold. Maybe Tage’s magic shielded me from the worst of the elements. As we wind our way outside, over the uneven ground of snow and rocks and fallen tree needles, it only gets colder and colder—impossible as that seems.
“Wait here,” Danhy instructs, darting into a copse ahead. I listen as her steps crunch over the ground, and she rustles through leaves and trees.
Upon her return, she’s holding something. Once close enough, I see that it resembles an umbrella, except the canopy consists of leafy branches.
“I made this for you,” she explains, and I know I should feel comforted that she put thought and planning into my escape.
She actually doesn’t want to send me off to my death.
It makes my survival feel a little more likely, too, and I need that kind of hope right now.
“Keep it over your head and no one can see you from above.”
No one as in no dragon.
I accept the umbrella from her. “Thank you.”
She looks from me out to the horizon. Layer upon layer of snowcapped mountains spread out below us in rolling undulations of white against the dark, and I realize how high up we are. They live at the very top of the world, and I must make my way down.
Danhy points between two peaks. One of the peaks hooks sharply to the right like the letter L before dropping and continuing its steep decline. “See there? Stay in the plane between those two peaks, and you’ll reach the Great Falls. Follow the Falls down into the Borderlands.”
“That easy?”
Something passes over Danhy’s face. A look I almost interpret as guilt. “It won’t be easy. Stay alert.” She exhales. “If you follow the Falls, you’ll reach the Borderlands. The Borg is west from there.”
I nod, stopping myself short of thanking her again.
The words stick in my throat. I already thanked her, and should I really be thanking one of my captors?
Especially one who treated me so unkindly—who quite possibly wanted to get rid of me only so she could have her chance with Tage.
I stare at the peaks encircled with fog spread out below me from our high vantage.
The wind howls like a hungry beast, biting at my exposed face, and I push back my fear at the lonely sound.
“Go on,” she prompts with a nervous glance over her shoulder as though she fears discovery.
I turn my back on the dense foliage that hides our cave and take my first step down the slope, moving through twisting curls of mist. Not our cave. Theirs. Always theirs.
“Arden.” It’s the only time she’s ever used my name. I glance at her with her fur boots ankle-deep in snow and her topaz eyes intent, as though she can will me to believe her next words. “You can do this.”
Nodding, I wonder who she is trying to convince. Me or herself.
Turning, I start down the mountain. The snow here is so deep and vast and blinding white that it offers its own source of light. Even in the coldest months back home, I never saw snow such as this. It covers everything. An endless white sea.
Dawn encroaches, pushing out the dark until the light of day creeps over the horizon like a slow-moving hand.
I never expected it to be easy, but this is something else entirely.
Something more than difficult. More than cold. More than exhausting. More than grueling.
It might very well be suicide.
Danhy must have known that. It would explain her almost regretful attitude when we parted. It’s comical now when I think back on it . . . how very easy I made it for her. I handed her my death—that very thing she had wanted since the start.
After a few hours I conclude that Tage must know I’ve left by now.
I envision Tage returning to find me gone.
I assume he will look for me. He will take to the skies and search.
I can well envision that, hear the desperate pounding of his wings on air.
But that’s the part of me that believes what happened between us was more than a hedonistic coupling, something beyond impulse-driven lust, something deeper, something a lot like a true connection.
Maybe I’m the one to make the hard decision to end it, but now that I have, I’m convinced he will be relieved and see it’s for the best. I did him a favor.
He might look for me, but after a perfunctory attempt to find me, he will give up and let me go. I choose to believe this because it’s the most likely scenario. The thing that ought to happen.
I walk throughout the day, following Danhy’s instructions with the leafy umbrella over my head. I trudge forward through the ache and strain in my arms, ignoring the icy burn in my lungs. I walk long past the point of exhaustion. It’s only day one. I have to be stronger than this.
If any dragons fly overhead, I don’t notice. Still, when night drops, I’m relieved to lower and relax my weary arms.
And that’s when the cold sinks its teeth into me, when the paltry sunlight that breaks through the chronic fog fades completely, giving way for the rule of night.
I push on through the steadily falling snow.
I don’t stop walking for fear that if I do, I might perish.
I might lie down and never get up again.
I trudge through banks of snow, through the blinding screech of white, until I can walk no more, until I have to stop and rest.
I take shelter in a crevasse. It’s not a proper cave, just wide enough and long enough to shelter my body from the worst of the night.
I doze fitfully until morning and then I set out again, carrying that umbrella with my sore arms overhead through the long hours of the day.
The snow falls steadily, so there’s no fear of my tracks being discovered.
When I finally hear the roar of the Great Falls and register what it is, jubilation fills me, injects me with a fresh bolt of energy.
My steps quicken through the drifts of snow.
Panting, my legs work, churning to reach the Falls, to see my first sight of—
The earth gives way, ripped out from under me.
My cry is lost, swallowed up with me . . . the sound bouncing, tinny in my ears, as I’m sucked down, down, down.
Into the great jaws of the mountain.
Deep into the darkness I go, the ground gone beneath me, my mouth wide with a scream, arms and legs pinwheeling in the subterranean freeze.
The circle of light above me grows smaller and smaller and smaller, shrinking into a dot, then a speck as I descend.
It reminds me of flying. Only I’m falling.
Only Tage isn’t here.
I’m plummeting through air and there’s no one to catch me. No wings like sails to lift me up. No one to stop me from landing hard. No one to save me.