Chapter 8
EIGHT
This walk isn’t as long as the last one.
It’s a few hours before the fae on those grey steeds turn off at a gravel road. Since leaving the burning town behind, the blackout has been thick, but I don’t need sight to tell the shift of terrain under my boots.
And again, hours later, when I’m sagging and swaying with pure exhaustion, the gravel thickens to foliage, and when I’m on the verge of passing out, it hardens to packed dirt.
A blind guess, we’re headed into the forest.
That makes sense, with the packed-dirt trail, narrow and windy, firm under my boots, and the sudden rich smell of wet grass and leaves, and with where we are in Canada.
I mean, I don’t know exactly where we are, not since we ran from the lake, but from the trees surrounding the remote town, I’d guess we’re headed into the thick of national park territory.
The packed dirt beneath my boots firms my steps, and I’m grateful for it, because I’m not slipping all over.
But I am leaning—leaning too much to the side, staggering into the warrior’s solid arm every other moment, and I can’t even summon the care to worry about it.
It’s not the throbbing sensation in my mouth, slicked with the metallic taste of blood, that’s exhausting me, or the constant thrumming ache in my back, or even the hot burn in my shoulder.
It’s all of it, woven together into a tapestry, and I fight it with every step.
My lashes are lowering that bit more with every heartbeat, until my boots are scuffing on the dirt trail, and my balance is tilting me into the cold warrior.
He notices.
He matches the steady pace of the unit through the forest, his steps unfaltering, but—as the torches are lifted throughout the unit, and light illuminates the fae and the forest all around us—I see that his chin tucks to his shoulder as he looks down at me.
His stare holds for a while, heartbeats, and I have the distant thought that he’s waiting to see if I’ll collapse right on the path.
I push through the lull as best as I can.
The ragged sensation drawing through my serrated lungs is hoarsening my breaths.
From the waist up, I loll with every staggered step, and it must be annoying somehow, because there’s a huff on my right, where the female keeps our pace.
The rope that tethers me to the cold warrior’s belt is a swing between us, just swaying and swaying in the spotted crimson torchlight.
In that shadowy light, his pale hand reaches for me.
I flinch as his hand grips my bicep, firm, and he hoists me closer to him.
My shoulder knocks into his muscled arm, hard enough that I grunt, but before I can stumble at the impact, his hold hooks—and he supports my weight with that one grip.
Like I’m nothing more than a doll, like I weigh less than a breath in the breeze, he just holds me by the bicep, and it keeps me upright.
He turns his cheek to me.
We follow the path in a row of three, three, three, all the way down to the captives and backed by some guards.
Eventually, the trail spills out into a small clearing, barely two metres wide, and surrounded by trees.
Way too tight a fit for the whole unit.
Ahead, the general tugs on the reins of her steed, turning it in a crescent around the clearing—and that triggers stillness through the unit.
She speaks, and her tongue is sharp.
Like all the other times I have heard their barbed language, it sets me on edge.
In my daze, my attention drifts from the words I don’t understand to the clearing.
It’s not exactly spacious.
It’s no open grass area with a frosty meadow. It’s just a small perimeter of a couple of metres, hugged by trees, and really brown.
But with the glare of the torchlight building up, I look through the gaps between the thick, sturdy tree trunks, and I see another small clearing of the same kind, and to the right, another, and the longer I look, the better I see that it goes on like that for a few clearings.
The general snaps a command that strikes down the unit. As if she’s taken an axe to the warriors, groups start to split off from the first clearing and move through the treelines.
The cold warrior wrenches a flaming torch out of the soil before he takes me deeper into the forest.
With each step, the pressure of exhaustion is pulling down on me, heavier and heavier.
I strain to keep my eyes open, focus to steady my steps—but my grip is slipping, and I wonder if the backhand and my hitting the ground had anything to do with this.
I doubt it.
I don’t need another reason beyond walking and walking and walking, in the freezing cold, on a stomach so empty it’s churning acid.
There’s food in my backpack.
I blink on the startled reminder—and my mouth floods.
Didn’t realise how hungry I am.
Now, it’s all I can feel.
That nauseating burn up my chest to my throat, and I wonder if I’ll puke bile before the fae can even deposit me somewhere to tie me up and forget about me.
Maybe I can eat then, when I’m fastened to a cart’s hook or a tree.
But… maybe not.
He might not feed me.
He didn’t last time.
What will happen if I just dig out the tins and packets from my bag, and start chomping away at my supplies?
I don’t know…
I don’t know if I’m allowed.
Strange thing to wonder.
A child seeking the permission of adults to have a sweet. Only I’m a captive human surrounding by dark fae I never knew existed before the blackout.
Yeah, I’ll be leaving the backpack where it is, thudding softly against the small of my spine with each step I take all the way to a far clearing.
This one is about four metres in diameter, more space than the ones we passed through, but that’s only because of the mammoth of a tree on the other side, split and blackened, as though struck by lightning.
It looks like it’s crashed into the younger trees around it, and now it’s a pile of four stacked and scattered.
The branches weave together with still-white snow dusted all over waxy greenery.
The snow is powder-like around the clearing, so different to the slush we left behind, as though we trekked further up north to chase the harsh winter, to escape sleet and find true snow.
I turn my cheek to it and look as the warrior slips his hand away from my bicep.
He side-steps in front of me, moving with the slinking muscles of a tiger prowling through the forest, and the tether between us forces me to follow him deeper into the clearing.
The moment we’re through the trees, and my boots are flat on the snowy foliage, the clearing is overwhelmed by a rolling wave of fae.
Emerging from the treelines, they invade the small clearing, drop their satchels, brush off snow and foliage from fallen logs, drag tangled branches to the centre for firewood I guess, unearth boulders and soft plots of soil to drop down onto, and rip into their waterskins.
The tug of the silky rope drags me along, pulling on the torn flesh of my wrists.
I throw a look back at the female fae, whose glass eyes watch us go, but she doesn’t follow.
She just watches.
And around her, a burst of chaos explodes like a firework. Only, the firework is human captives.
It’s as though I just blinked and they appeared.
Chin touched to my shoulder, I watch as they rush around the fallen branches, collecting what they can for firewood.
Each one of them is tattered.
Before that thought can take root, the foliage under my boots wrenches me back around, facing the steps I take out of the clearing, and into the treeline.
The rope tugs me along.
The fatigue that has blanketed me for hours is suddenly ripped off with his direction—
Away from the rest of the unit.
My breath shudders. It starts to tremble.
The ice in my chest stirs, my heart thumping through it.
My knees lift with every staggered step behind him. The foliage is too dense, the snow powdered around is too thick.
If he was going any faster, there’s no doubt about it, I would either collapse or face-plant.
But his pace is easy between the trees, winding and weaving—until his boots halt at a particularly thick trunk.
Without a look at me, he rams the torch down into the earth. Impaled, it stands stiff and sturdy.
My lashes flutter at the show of strength.
The cold warrior turns on me as he draws the strap of his satchel over his head. The movement dishevels some strands of pale hair, and I watch them fall over his brow.
He lets the satchel hit the foliage with a faint thump before he’s luring the rope off his belt.
He lets that drop, too.
It thuds, soft, so soft, between our boots.
And I just… stare.
Blankly, I look at the rope, silken black coiling over snow-dusted earth, and it looks so much like a glossy snake.
It’s still bound to my wrists—but not to his belt.
I lift my frown to him.
A silent question, is he letting me go?
As if waiting for that inquisitive look, his cold eyes are on me already.
My mind is chugging to life.
Slow, but the realisation starts to sink in…
He is letting me go.
But…
The frown digs deeper into my furrowed brow.
Where can I go?
There’s no way I can find Bee now.
I don’t know how much distance is stretching between us, how much interference with the radios will keep us disconnected, and that’s if she even still has hers.
From the point where we were separated, in the town, it has been some stops but a lot of walking—I guess at least twenty hours total.
Maybe more.
I don’t have anything to go off, no way to count the minutes, but it’s how I feel that helps me calculate.
The blackout has the sense of day and night. It comes in weather shifts, slight drops from cold to freezing, louder whistlings of winds then quieter darkness.
Could all be total nonsense.
Not that it matters anyway.
It only means it will take me a trek to get back to the town. Then I assume Bee is the same distance in the other direction… and I’m guessing there is about two, maybe three days between us.
I don’t like my chances.
Through the exhaustion, the threat of being abandoned out here touches my mind, kicks it into a tumbleweed of thoughts—but not fast, apparently.