Chapter Thirty-Six. A Man to Die For.
Thirty-Six
A Man to Die For.
My gasp seems as loud as the bird of prey’s call, and I grab on to the front of Merc’s surcoat, prepared for an assault that, though it will not kill my body, I know without a doubt will kill my soul.
Bracing myself, moaning, kicking my feet into the pebbles, I prepare my weak body for what he’ll feel as he dies—
His one uninjured eye is dark. So dark that, with the sunlight streaming in behind him, I can’t tell where his pupil ends and his iris takes over. The other side is the opposite, so white that there is only the faintest hint of a ring around the faded center.
The slashing scar is nasty and jagged, and surely what would have killed a lesser man.
“Sorrel.” He says my name roughly. “I need to get you out of the sun—”
As I reach for his face, he falls silent and I know now is the time. It’s coming, the flash and the agony, the knowledge I don’t want, shouldn’t have, can’t change. My curse, showing up here to spoil—
The world recedes as I become lost in his gaze, that midnight darkness enveloping me as the white expanse pushes me away … but instead of driving cold, or creeping terror, or crushing suffocation, I feel cocooned. Safe. At home with this stranger who knows only violence and solitude.
After he was a humble farmer who loved the land.
It’s as all this occurs to me that I realize: Time is passing.
And still I hold his eyes with my own. I see nothing, other than the two universes that stare back at me.
I feel nothing, outside of warmth and reassurance.
I know nothing, apart from him leaning over me while I lie on the hard pebbled ground, the blue sky stretching over us, a cloudless blanket of daylight that will usher in danger when it fades into the very color of half his gaze.
A sense of utter disbelief causes me to recede from him, and that means the death vision is finally coming. Any moment. Yes, right … now …
The death vision, the moment of his demise—and all the physical and emotional sensations that go along with it—is going to take me over, and make me writhe, and cause me to know that which I can never, ever share—
Hide.
“Sorrel.” Now he’s sharp with me. “Can you hear aught?”
As I reach up, he captures my hand and gives it a squeeze. “You’re bleeding—”
“Shh.”
When he falls silent, I go for his face again.
My fingers make contact with his temple and then the scar that intersects his pale eye.
His skin is warm, and where he might have a beard it remains smooth, though I don’t think he shaved this morning.
More than this, I notice his eyelashes. They’re thick and long on the top, thick and short on the bottom, and the frame they make serves to emphasize his deep-set, intense stare.
And that is all.
For the first time in my life, I have the details that every other person registers in the normal course of things: Eye color, placement, lashes. And where the individual’s stare is directed.
Merc’s is not leaving mine.
“I’m getting you to shade,” he says brusquely.
When he goes to pick me up, I stop his hand with a light touch. “Your blade. Let me see it.”
“What—”
“Please, I need to … see myself.”
He’s impatient with the request, but he unsheathes the heavy weapon, and though we shouldn’t garner more attention from things that come out of the sky, I have to know.
Directing the blade, I angle it to my face.
And meet my own eyes.
All I see—all I’ve ever seen—is their strange pale irises and the pupils in the center. I’ve never gotten a hint of my own death, and it’s been something I’ve always been grateful for.
Like the host must not know of its own demise.
“Let me check the back of your head.” Keeping the sword steady, Merc lifts my torso up gently and cranes around behind me. “No blood.”
The relief in his voice warms me, but I can’t dwell on it. My brain is scrambling as it tries to frame within my previous experience the lack of—
The broadsword is sheathed, and I feel his hands go behind my shoulders and under my knees. I’m lifted with care from the rocks, and Merc’s long strides take us over toward the dead bird. He goes around the now-tumbled boulder pile, and finds a wedge of shadow to put me in.
“Look at me, Sorrel.”
I take a deep breath. Maybe I got nothing because I hit my head? Or the chase has exhausted me? And I could always resume my normal course and avoid his gaze, except then I’d never know whether the anomaly is this situation or him.
My focus swings back to him and I tighten my grip on his surcoat again …
Though I’m in the cooler shade, the brilliant sun slants into his face. I see now that there is a faint delineation between the dark iris and pupil, and I recognize this because of the way his uninjured eye adjusts to the ray’s intensity.
“I’m going to check your stare,” he informs me.
I almost laugh as he carefully pulls my lids apart on the right side, then the left. As he exhales, his mouth lifts into a brief smile of approval.
“What do you see?” I ask hoarsely.
“If you hit your head, you’re all right.” He sits back and brings up my wounded arm for inspection. “I’ve had many a man knocked in the skull, and if their eyes aren’t the same, they die shortly thereafter. Now let’s see about this bleeding.”
The rocks against my back are no more comfortable than the ground was, and yet I recline into their bumpy profile as Merc curses and then goes to work on the fastenings down the outer coat. Meanwhile, I just stare into his face.
Maybe the curse is over.
The instant this idea strikes, I doubt it. Over the course of my years, I’ve had slip-and-falls, head bumps, stressful things. I think of the Fulcrum, those boys, and what I was still able to see of the dragon’s plight. So fear and anger don’t affect … whatever it is I have.
“Let’s sit you up a little bit more.” He cups my shoulder and does all the work of the repositioning. “And now we get this off.”
I assume he’s talking about my jacket. Instead, he takes off my pack, which I have wholly forgotten about, and then he resettles me.
“There, you should be more comfortable.”
Well, in fact I am. What I assumed were rocks was in fact the contours of the compass and the box. But who really cares about all that. I want to understand why I can look into his—
As he strips my arm out of the baggy sleeve with its fine silver embroidery, a familiar clip-clop suggests an approach, and sure enough, our sweated steed rounds the boulders, his head down low, his ears lax as a dog’s, his feet trudging through the loose gray stones as he still catches his breath from our sprinting.
Turning my head, I hold out my hand. The chestnut glances at Merc, but it comes to me. Meanwhile, Merc is talking to me, and pushing at my arm. I ignore both whatever he’s saying and the brief flares of pain that mark his exploration. Instead, I focus on the horse as I palm the loose reins.
Taking a deep breath, I slowly lift my stare from those frothy, still-flared nostrils, up the graceful bridge of his head … to his doe-ish brown eyes—
Like a crack of lightning, my body is racked with electricity, and my arms and legs stiffen. The barren lakebed disappears, and so does Merc, as I am consumed by the connection with the horse—
For once, there is no pain. There’s just peacefulness.
I see no violence, no fire, no blood or gore …
only a redolent green meadow, a peaceful pasture, a broad realm tree overhead.
The horse is lying down on its side, its hooves and spindly legs curled in, its head slowly sinking to the fragrant green grass.
I can feel its heart as my own, and the beats become slower, slower …
ever slower. There’s a brief flare of breathlessness, but that passes soon enough.
And then all is still.
Death is kind to this animal, and I can’t help but tear up in gratitude for its destiny—
“Sorry,” Merc says as he pours water on the ragged wound in my skin, “I know this hurts, but we must clean it.”
His words return me to my own timeline, and I release my hold on the reins. “Stop. Water for him. More important.”
Merc looks at me. “You come first—”
“No, he does.”
As our eyes meet again, I’m filled with wonder, but also a confusion that derails me.
“Give him all the water,” I say. “He needs it more than I, and he deserves it for his efforts.”
Merc’s brows drop down in a glower. But then he shakes his head. “You have a thing for salvation, don’t you.”
Shifting away, he makes a basin out of the side of his surcoat and pours the water into the leather bowl. The horse goes in immediately and starts drawing, the two turning into a painting, the man at a kneel, the animal bending down.
Salvation.
I look at the hilt of the broadsword protruding out of the top of its holster, but what I see is the flat of the blade … and my own eyes staring back at me.
I’ve always thought I don’t see my own death because I’m so close to it—and because my survival instinct is so strong that my free will is too disruptive to any final fate, at least at the age I am now.
And I think the latter is the key right now.
Given the journey ahead of Merc and me, and for however long our destinies are linked, I know I’m prepared to fight for him as I’d fight for myself: Of the many deaths I’ve seen, not once, ever, was I willing to give my own life up for any of the people—or animals—I set my eyes to.
Why is Merc different? He’s my protector.
And also maybe it has something to do with what I saw in him as he stared over that field this morning.
By virtue of our circumstance, I’m too close to him, too.
Perhaps, at the moment we separate, if I were to look into his eyes, I’d see what awaits him for his last breath. Until then? His mortal destiny is so inextricably intertwined with my own that the time and circumstance of his grave is not something I’m going to know.
It’s such a relief.
“All right, then,” Merc says. “That’s your fill whether you like it or not.”
He flaps his surcoat, water drops flicking around, while the horse lets out a satisfied groan and shakes its head with a rattle of tack.
“I’ve got a cloth to wrap up your arm.”
I’m so deeply in my own thoughts, I can’t figure out what he’s saying. But then he takes a clean stretch of red fabric from out of an inside pocket and begins to wind it around my forearm. When he’s finished, he tucks the end into the top and sits on his heels.
“We have to get moving. Do you think you can get back in the saddle?”
I meet his eyes yet again, and cease my flinching.
Instead of answering him, I hold out both my arms. With a nod, he brings his chest down to my own to pick me up—
That’s not what I’m after.
Winding a hold around his massive shoulders, I close my lids and burrow into his neck, smelling the leather and clean sweat and the cedar spice that is him and him alone.
“Let’s get you—oh, we’re not … all right. This is what we’re doing.”
He’s so awkward in retuning the embrace, it’s actually charming. Or would have been, if I hadn’t started to well up with emotion.
“It’s okay,” he says softly as he wraps his arms around me. “That was a big one. Let yourself go for a moment.”
With a shudder, I give in to a good weeping, and I feel myself getting repositioned in his lap. As he holds me to his steady, beating heart, his sword hand makes a slow circle on my back, soothing me.
“We made it,” he says in a deep rumble. “You’re foolhardy and far too brave for your own good. But we’re both okay, and it’s all down to you—and don’t ever do something as stupid as that again. Are we clear.”
He thinks my emotions are about what we both survived. They’re not, but I can’t tell him my truth.
Never before in my life have I met someone I’m willing to die for, and who knew there would be such a liberation in that potential sacrifice—or such a relief from the loneliness that has defined my pitiful existence.
Also …
Well, he happens to have the most beautiful eyes.