Chapter 33
There was someone with her in the dark. She could hear them breathing, steady and soft.
Cool hands on her brow, sliding into her hair, curving around her skull with a healer’s professional exploration.
Fingertips danced lightly down the vertebrae in her neck, swept across her collarbone.
There was pressure on her jaw and her head was gently turned.
Pain exploded in the back of her head, and she whimpered. The questing fingertips prodded harder.
“There it is.” The voice was male, pitched so low it was scarcely louder than a breath. “Sorry. Sorry.”
She forced her eyes open and raw panic jolted through her. She couldn’t see anything at all. The blackness was so complete it swallowed the world.
That blow to the head.
She was blind.
Reaching out, she caught a hand, an arm, held on for dear life.
“I’m here,” the stranger said. “Are you dizzy? Do you need to vomit again?”
Again? Had she already vomited once?
“I can’t see.”
A long exhalation. “It’s very dark here. Your eyes are probably fine. You’ve taken a blow to the head, but it would be unusual for that to take your sight.”
Not impossible. Unusual.
It was true even. She knew that from her mother’s lessons, but it didn’t help to reassure her when she couldn’t see so much as a shadow of gray in the darkness.
She turned her head in the direction of the voice, slowly opened her fingers, which had locked around a strong wrist. The chain that bound her wrists clanked against stone when she lowered them to the ground.
“She doesn’t use chains like that,” the voice said. “They feel like ours. Are you a witch? Why has she locked you in here?”
“I’m not a witch.”
Not really.
Not like he meant.
She swallowed down the nausea that rose in her throat as she turned onto her side, not wanting her wound to sit in whatever moisture coated the floor of this place. Was it blood? Was it her blood?
She tried to feel the back of her head, but it was hard to manage with the irons.
A hand caught her arms and lowered them. “Don’t mess with it. Your skull isn’t broken, but there’s a cut and some swelling. I’ve nothing to dress it with, but the bleeding has slowed.”
He didn’t say anything about blood loss. Or infection. Of course, if the witch had captured her, infection was the least of her worries. A fever that took her out of her head might actually be welcome.
The witch…
What happened?
Her head ached. Her thoughts were fuzzy. And the nausea wouldn’t let her so much as try to sit up. But she felt the need to move. The need to run trembled through every limb, singing through her veins. She tried to order her thoughts. To think it through.
“You’re Asher,” she said.
Casrian’s missing medic.
“Hmm.”
“I hit my head.” The stupid irons and the runaway horse. A familiar had come at them out of nowhere. Garin dropped the reins. She’d blacked out.
“Where are we?” Her voice trembled. She thought she knew. Now that she was coming back to herself, this place felt familiar. The darkness that was like an abyss, without bottom, just a drop that went on forever and forever. That smell…
“We’re in the dungeon of some old fortress,” he said. “Who are you?”
A trace of hardness in the question. Of course he was suspicious.
She rubbed at the ache in her forehead. “My name is Rowan. Rowan Yahl. I came here with Casrian. He was injured in the woods, and I patched him up. He hired me as a guide because I knew where the fort was. He’s been looking for you.”
There was a moment of silence while he processed that. “Why are you in irons?”
“Emrys. He put me in irons because…because he’s a suspicious ass who didn’t believe that someone like Casrian would have hired me as a guide.”
Asher breathed a laugh. “It does seem unlikely.”
“I’m a good guide. I got Casrian back to your patrol and gave them directions to the nest. I saved Sol’s life.”
“Sol was wounded?”
She swallowed at the note of alarm in his voice. She wondered if he knew about Mat. She didn’t want to tell him about Edar.
“Sol is alive,” she said. “He’s on his way to Sulen with one of Emrys’s men. Casrian has the witch cornered in a cave nearby. Emrys’s patrol went to help. Once they kill her, they’ll come here next.”
Asher was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was grim. “They don’t have the witch. Whatever they’ve cornered out there isn’t her. The witch is here in the fort. She brought you here.”
Fuck.
She drew in a shuddering breath. “Well, Casrian is here. He’ll figure it out and he’ll come for us.”
Casrian was alive. He was ruthlessly competent and braver than anyone she’d ever met and… And—dear God—she sounded like Rina singing the virtues of her latest lover.
Was she really so far gone?
No.
This was Casrian. She knew he wasn’t perfect.
He was stubborn and jaded and he liked rules far too much.
He never let himself relax, and he seemed to think he was invulnerable.
Or he wanted to be. He didn’t let many people close.
But he cared. He might fight it. He might try to hide it behind the uniform, but he cared.
He wouldn’t leave her here if he knew she was trapped by a witch.
Everything else between them might be complicated, but she knew that down to her bones.
He didn’t leave people behind. Not ever.
“Casrian will come for us,” she said, more firmly. “He’ll kill the witch and get us out of here. We just have to be ready when he gets here. Are you hurt?”
She tried to sit up but her stomach gave a nauseating flip. She gagged and hunched over to vomit.
Asher placed a hand on her shoulder to steady her as she dry heaved spit and bile onto the floor.
“I’m not nearly as bad off as you at the moment.” There was a dry note to his voice. “Here lie down, away from that mess. Come on. I’ve got you.”
He helped her to move, only a foot away, but she was panting by the time he settled her back down. She closed her eyes and waited for her stomach to stop doing somersaults.
“Do you think we can get out on our own?”
“No.” There was a finality there that she didn’t like.
“You’re in no shape to do anything, and there’s nothing to be done.
We’re in an underground cell with no windows.
The way out is barred and locked. Even if we could get through…
We’re safer in here for now than we would be wandering about her nest.”
“But—”
“You need to rest,” he said, and there was an edge of steel in his tone. “I need you strong enough to survive this. Trust me?”
“All right.”
It was unlike her. Maybe it was the head injury.
Asher sat beside her, his thigh stretched out against her arm. It was nice, that contact. Reassuring in the dark.
“I thought he was dead,” Asher said softly.
“When we were attacked in the woods, everything happened so quickly. We chased the familiar into the rot and were lost to it for hours. When the horses started to falter and we stopped, we were miles away from where we started and there was no Cas.” He paused. “Is he truly alive?”
“Why would I lie about it?”
“You’re a voice in the dark,” he said. “You might not even be real. You could be just another trick of the witch.”
That unsettled her. She remembered the shadows in the woods. The woman with dark hair and too pale skin.
Daughter of the wood, you’ve come home.
She shivered. What did the witch want with her anyway?
“Casrian is alive,” she said. “He was wounded. Three gashes across his chest and abdomen. I found him in the woods when I was hunting for deer. He’d dragged himself to the river. I thought he was dead.”
“No one hunts in the Black Woods.”
“They do if they’re hungry enough. The woods weren’t always so bad.” She thought of the way the alders had answered her when she called. “There are still good parts.”
He hummed, not accepting it but not rejecting it either. He gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “You should get some sleep. We need you to heal.”
For the first time since she was a child, since before the people of Jarn had soured, before her mother was branded, she reached out past the darkness surrounding her and cast up a prayer, hoping for the first time in so very long that there was a God there who could answer it.
She felt something…some sense of connection, a feeling that maybe everything would be all right in the end.
Her mother was safe in Sulen. Casrian was alive. He would come for her.
Asher’s hand disappeared from her shoulder.
The ache in her head faded. Exhaustion made her limbs heavy. Her body warmed and even the watchful darkness seemed to shift its attention away from her.
She slept.