Chapter 61
Chapter sixty-one
Aldric
The black sands were endless.
Inky swells of it stretched to a horizon that bled into a midnight sky. Above, crimson lightning tore the heavens apart, the thunder rattling in his very marrow.
Chains bit into his wrists and ankles. They dragged him down, bowing his spine, forcing his face toward the grit. Every link burned with a cold that seared like fire.
Agony radiated from his shoulder, his hand, his soul.
“Why do you still resist?” The voice did not come from the wind. It slithered inside his skull, oily and sharp.
Aldric gritted his teeth, straining against the iron, muscles trembling with the effort to simply lift his head. He could not. The weight was too great.
“Why not just give in?” the voice whispered.
“Give in to what?” he rasped, the words tearing at his throat.
“Your destiny.”
The world shifted. The sand beneath his gaze dissolved into a pool of red. And there she was.
Sera.
She lay broken before him, her eyes wide and glassy, staring up at nothing.
“No,” Aldric choked out.
Weight pressed into his palms. He looked down.
The witchblade rested in his grip again. Even here he could not escape his guilt. But he had not done it. He had not killed his kirei.
“No!” He roared the word, a sound torn from the deepest part of his chest. He flung the dagger away and scrambled backward. But he could not escape. The chains snapped taut, jerking him to a halt, biting into his flesh until blood ran.
“Get out of my head!” he bellowed at the sky, at the dark, at the voice. “Leave me alone!”
The laughter that followed was low, a rumble of thunder and malice.
“How can I leave you alone, Crow?” the voice purred, vibrating in his teeth. “You are mine.”
The word echoed across the wasteland, growing louder with every repetition.
Mine. Mine. MINE—
Aldric jolted awake, gasping like a drowning man breaking the surface of a lake.
Air. He needed air.
His body convulsed, violent shivers racking his frame from boots to hairline. He was freezing. He was burning alive.
Through the haze of his vision, a light bloomed.
It was soft at first, then blinding, piercing the gloom of his delirium. A silhouette leaned over him, wreathed in that golden glow. A woman.
Aldric’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, painful rhythm.
“Sera?” He whispered the name, his voice a cracked, ruined thing.
Hope, sharp and devastating, pierced his chest. She had come. Against all logic, against all his prayers that she stay away, she had come for him.
No! He had prayed so desperately, begging the Lord to keep her from this. But of course, He had not listened. He never did.
Gritting his teeth, Aldric forced his arm to move, needing to touch her, to verify she was real, to apologize for everything—his lies, his failure. To tell her to run.
His hand lifted an inch. Trembled. Collapsed back onto the furs blanketing him. He was too weak to do more.
Trap. His kirei shouldn’t be here. The witch was waiting. The witch would kill her. He had to warn her. He had to—
His vision cleared for a fraction of a second.
The woman shrank back, her eyes wide with terror, silhouetted by the lantern light at her back. She held a damp rag in trembling hands.
She was young. She was blonde. She was not his wife.
He let out a breath that was more groan than exhale, his head lolling to the side. A hard cot kept him off the cold ground. A mountain of fur blankets covered him, yet his teeth still chattered. Canvas walls hemmed him in on all sides.
Beyond the thick flaps of the tent, the clatter of steel and the murmur of heavy voices drifted in alongside the tang of the sea. A war camp.
“What is wrong with him?” The question came from the tent entrance. Sharp. Imperious.
Aldric didn’t have the strength to lift his head, but he knew that voice. The witch.
The frightened woman hovering over him flinched. “He…he is feverish, Mistress. His wounds…the infection is spreading fast. I’ve done what I can, but—”
“Fix. Him.”
“Mistress, I don’t know if—”
“I said, fix him,” the witch snarled, footsteps approaching the cot. “Do whatever you can. Burn the rot out if you must.” A pause. Then, a cold whisper floated over Aldric’s fever-bright mind. “He cannot die yet. If he dies, she will never come.”
The darkness at the edges of Aldric’s vision began to creep inward again. The ringing in his ears swelled, drowning out the camp, the physician, the witch.
He felt himself slipping. Sliding back down into the pit.
No.
Panic flared in his gut. He couldn’t go back there. Not to the black sand. Not to the chains. Not to the voice that told him he belonged to it.
He squeezed his eyes shut, fighting the pull of unconsciousness, fighting the fever. He didn’t want to go.
Desperately, he scoured his mind, pushing away the image of his dead wife sprawled in the sand. He forced a new picture to the forefront of his thoughts.
Sera. Alive.
Sera, standing in the throne room at Goldreach, wreathed by sunlight, her smile reaching her eyes, that stubborn, beautiful chin lifted high. He branded the image into his mind’s eye. That was his Sera. Not the corpse that haunted his dreams.
My Sera is alive. He clung to the hope like a drowning man to a rope as the darkness dragged him back down, swallowing him whole.
But this time, he took his kirei with him. Perhaps with her firmly fixed in his mind, the nightmare would not come.
Perhaps, just this once, he could simply dream of her.