Chapter Thirty-seven #2
Wilder was the one to insist they stop to rest every few hours, which was a constant war with Thea’s single-minded focus and the power of the Furies themselves.
‘You need to be rested when you reach the starting point, Thea,’ he told her gently. ‘There’s no point in running yourself ragged to get there. You need to be strong, energised.’
She grumbled, but acquiesced eventually. However stubborn she was, his apprentice knew there was no arguing with that logic.
It was during one of those brief respites, where the silence around them seemed deafening, that Wilder felt the weight of another presence. The hair stood up on the nape of his neck, a prickle running down the length of his spine.
‘We’re not alone,’ he murmured, sliding his swords from their sheaths with expert quiet.
Thea did the same with a wary glance at him. ‘Is this it? Has it started?’
Wilder scanned the horizon, shadows dancing in the periphery of his vision, darting in and out of view like phantoms in the night. ‘No,’ he told Thea. ‘This is something else entirely.’
But to his surprise, Thea gave a wicked grin. ‘Good. I need something to take the edge off.’
‘Well, in that case…’ Wilder raised his blades as movement blurred beyond the trees again.
The air crackled around them and he glimpsed the storm in Thea’s eyes.
‘Not now,’ he cautioned. ‘You’ll need all that power for the Great Rite.’
For once, his apprentice heeded his warning. He noted her grip on her sword tightening as she unsheathed Malik’s dagger from her belt and gave him a single nod.
Side by side they stood, as three arachnes crept into their space from beyond the trees.
They were smaller than the one in Vios, but just as cursed with darkness. A strange clicking noise permeated the air as they approached, their forms grotesque: a twisted fusion of spider and human and hatred, their multiple eyes gleaming with a sinister hunger.
‘Good odds,’ Thea quipped, twirling her steel in invitation.
Wilder baulked. ‘How d’you figure that?’
Thea shrugged. ‘Last time you were fighting with broken chair legs.’
Then, his apprentice lunged.
Wilder followed, his blades glinting in the weak sunlight and reflection of the snow. He moved with the grace of the Furies, each strike to the lashes of darkness swift and precise as he fought his way to the largest monster’s layers of chitinous exoskeleton.
‘Mind your left!’ Thea shouted, and he dodged just in time to miss a thick net of webbing flying at him. The arachne snapped its pincer-like fangs, dripping venom as it surged towards him on its eight freakish legs.
Wilder somersaulted, feeling the icy kiss of snow on his back as he rolled beneath the monster and cleaved his blades through the lower half of its limbs.
The screech that followed shook icicles from the nearby trees, but Wilder was already on his feet, seeing Thea as a blur of movement in his periphery as he launched himself onto the arachne’s back and plunged his blades through its thorax from behind.
The monster staggered on its severed legs, black blood pouring from its wounds onto the snow as it collapsed.
Wilder leapt from the falling creature, not wasting a moment as he sought Thea. She was wielding her sword and dagger against the two lesser arachnes, her face lined with determination, her footwork as flawless as ever, even in the snow.
Twirling his blades, Wilder came to her side.
‘Don’t know if you realise, but I’m in a bit of a hurry,’ she muttered.
‘Thought you’d have these two little ones handled,’ Wilder retorted, knowing that Thea often responded to a challenge.
A wicked smile curved her lips. ‘Well then, stand back and watch how it’s done, Warsword.’
Thea threw herself at the remaining monsters, her sword and dagger carving through darkness and sinewy flesh, eliciting shrieks from both creatures, black gore spattering onto the pristine snow around them.
Wilder guarded her back, but allowed her free rein on the attack, knowing she needed this.
She needed her blood hot and her body warmed up for the trials ahead.
She needed the confidence in her abilities.
The cursed forms of the two remaining arachnes faltered with every swipe of her blades, unable to withstand the ferocity of Thea’s assault. She embedded a dagger in one of their human-like skulls and flung an array of silver throwing stars at the other’s many eyes.
‘I was right, all that time ago…’ Wilder mused, watching her carve up the monsters.
‘About what?’ she managed between blows.
‘You’re even more beautiful with steel in your hands, and the blood of your enemies splattered across your face.’
He saw a flash of a smile before, in a final manoeuvre, Thea jumped, avoiding a slash of darkness, her body twisting in mid-air only to come back down in perfect form, her sword slicing through the thick neck of the final monster, severing its head completely.
The head rolled across the snow with a dull thud as Thea landed deftly beside the falling carcass.
‘Not bad, Apprentice,’ Wilder murmured. ‘Not bad at all.’
But Thea’s eyes were fixated between the trees, where a naked branch bounced, disturbing settled flakes of ice. ‘Someone’s there.’
Wilder charged towards the bush, instantly finding the tracks that led away from the muddied slush. He scanned the surrounding forest, but there was nothing but white snow and barren trees. Whoever had watched the battle had fled.
And that someone had likely set the arachne upon them.
A drip sounded, and another.
Wilder searched the snow at his boots, spotting a tiny patch of red, so stark against the white. Blood. Human blood.
His , he realised.
The sleeve of his shirt was wet with it. Turning his back to Thea, who was still in the clearing with the monster corpses, he looked down at his forearm. There, beneath the tattered leather of his vambrace and the torn fabric of his shirt, was a thin, bloody slash through his skin.
The cut wasn’t deep. Wilder couldn’t even feel it, but what caused him to falter was the translucent film of something else around its edges.
Venom.
‘What’s the hold-up?’ Thea called. ‘Did you see anything?’
Wilder wrenched his sleeve back down and wiped away the smear of blood. ‘There was someone watching,’ he told her, returning to the clearing. ‘But they’re long gone.’
‘Spies?’ Thea asked, frowning into the forest.
‘Perhaps,’ he replied. ‘They’re not our concern now, though.’
Thea sheathed her blades. ‘Onwards, then?’
Wilder whistled for Biscuit, who came trotting through the trees, Thea’s mare close behind. ‘Onwards.’
The towering mountains of Aveum loomed close now, bearing down on them in the fading light just as the weight of the impending Great Rite did.
Wilder could feel the faint edge of the venom in his system, but he shoved the thought aside. His priority was Thea and getting her to where she needed to be. He could deal with the consequences of the arachne scratch later.
He and his apprentice wove through the barren trees, the incline perilously steep through snow and ice. The air was getting colder by the second, clouding before their faces, and Wilder was beginning to lose feeling in his fingertips.
‘Wilder?’ Thea’s voice cut through the quiet.
‘What is it?’
‘We’re nearly there.’
He had felt it too. He noted the familiarity as they approached the foot of the mountains, his heart lurching, threatening to come up into his throat. Torj’s words echoed in his mind.
Be strong for her .
So he simply nodded. ‘Good.’
All too soon, the trees around them thinned, revealing the foot of a formidable mountain. The towering behemoth reached skyward, crowned by a jagged peak, wreathed in a swirling tempest of fog and snow.
The very air they breathed sang with an otherworldly chill, biting at their lungs as they inhaled.
To the left of the rocky base was one of the roads to Tver…
The road Wilder and Talemir had taken after he’d emerged from his Great Rite ordeal, to claim his Tverrian stallion.
To the right, the road was swallowed by more forest, a sea of ancient pines burdened with the weight of endless winter.
Thea drew them to a stop and dismounted, staring up at the mountain before her, taking in its sharp rocks and the eerie trees, their gnarled branches like bony fingers grasping for something they’d never have.
‘It’s calling me,’ she murmured in wonder, her hands falling from her mare’s bridle.
Wilder followed her gaze, his chest aching, his more primal instincts warring inside him. Part of him wanted to snatch Thea up and whisk her away from this place, but he beat those feelings back.
‘I go no further,’ he told her instead.
The mountain had its own presence, etched by history and time, harbouring secrets that would never come to light.
Even now, it whispered to him as though it knew him, recognised him from long ago and had known he would return.
So many fates had been determined in the depths of its valleys, in its dark crevices, atop its razor-edged peak.
But it was the fate of only one that mattered most to him now.
Those celadon eyes locked with his.
Only decades of training kept him breathing as he took in her fire, her beauty and her determination. He struggled to find his voice, but when he did, it came out hoarse and full of unchecked emotion.
‘When I stand against the gods at the end of my days,’ he told her fiercely, ‘I will regret nothing. Not the lies I’ve told, nor the lives I’ve claimed or the rivers of blood I’ve spilt. I do not regret a single moment, because every one of them led me to you.’
Thea’s chest heaved. ‘Wilder…’ she breathed, closing the gap between them.
His mouth was on hers in an instant, as though with a kiss he could stop the force of the Furies themselves.
The dark frenzy that had always connected them took hold and they became a tangle of limbs and a tempest of longing.
He threaded his fingers through her hair, deepening the kiss, trying to put everything he felt for her into every brush of his lips, every stroke of his tongue, desire burning white-hot from the inside out.
He wanted to tell her he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, live without her. That, should the Furies wish to take her from him, he’d tear their fucking mountain down to get her back.
But it was Thea who broke away, panting. ‘I want you to know… If I come out of this unrecognisable, if I leave this Rite a different person… I want you to know that I have felt for you what I have felt for no one else. That I —’
‘Don’t.’ Wilder’s mouth crashed to hers again, an outlet for the rising tide of panic within. ‘We don’t say those words again until we’re on the other side. Until we can say them Warsword to Warsword.’
Understanding filled those stormy eyes, and slowly, Thea nodded, her fisted grip on his cloak loosening.
They broke apart and the cold swept in, more brutal than before. Mist swirled at the base of the mountain, beckoning her with smoke-like tendrils.
‘Warsword to Warsword, then,’ she said, her shoulders rising and falling as she steeled herself.
Wilder stood with the horses as she checked her weapons and left the rest of her belongings in her saddlebags. He had told her she could take nothing more with her into the Great Rite.
His heart hammered mercilessly as his apprentice, his love, gave him one final look. He lifted three fingers in salute, in deference to her, before she turned to face the mountain, squaring her shoulders.
A hundred moments flashed before Wilder’s eyes, but he didn’t dare blink as Thea took a breath and walked into the swirling mist.
In seconds, her form was obscured. A moment later, it was gone.
Wilder stared after her, at the fog that danced in her wake.
He thought he had known terror before, known it intimately. But this was a different kind entirely. The kind that saw a man glimpse what he’d always wanted, only to watch her walk into the clutches of fate itself, knowing that for the first time, he could not follow.