Chapter 16 Araphi #2
“Don’t distract me, Bard,” Sage says, her tone playful, but her gaze still focused on the horizon.
“I would never, Ranger. I’ll leave you to the night and your watch, if you can assure me that I’m fully out of your system.” Her lips graze Sage’s skin as she whispers the words.
Sage shivers again. “I’m not entirely confident that’s the case.”
This admission emboldens Araphi. “Perhaps we can play a little game to help us stay awake, then?”
“What did you have in mind?”
Araphi feathers a kiss on the spot where Sage’s jaw meets her neck. “You watch for deadly Northlands creatures and I kiss you dizzy and keep you warm.”
She circles the ranger to plant another kiss on Sage’s neck, on her collarbone, on her shoulder.
“The others will hear us.” Sage keeps still, but her voice is tight with desire.
Araphi loves it when she sounds like that. “They won’t. Because you’re not going to wake them up, are you?”
Sage grins at Araphi. “Fine. Challenge accepted, Bard.”
Araphi slides her fingers into Sage’s hair, pulling her head back gently. “Eyes on the snow, Ranger.” Araphi starts to unbutton her pants when Sage’s body goes rigid under her touch.
“What is it?” Araphi’s hands freeze at Sage’s waist.
Sage nods sharply to the field in front of the barn. Fear quickly replaces desire, sliding like cold water down Araphi’s spine as she takes in what walks across the snow.
Two willowy women with ice-blade hands and long ropes of pale-blue hair glide through the snow.
Moonlight illuminates them, painting their ragged dresses silver and showing the edges of their sharp teeth.
They sway together across the field, as if they’re hunting something.
They move closer to the house, their steps slicing through the ice and snow like Araphi imagines blades cut through wheat.
Araphi’s fingers dig into Sage’s hip. She lets out a ragged inhale.
“Ice nymphs,” Sage breathes.
Araphi nods, remembering Tea’s description of the ancient tree spirits who wander the Northlands at night, hungry for lifeblood. Always seeking their next victims to warm themselves.
“Can they be killed by arrows?” Araphi whispers.
Sage shakes her head a fraction, setting her bow aside.
“Their flesh is like ice; my arrows wouldn’t pierce it.
Not before they were already upon us. But we might be all right.
Outside the range of their own groves, they can’t see or hear well.
Perhaps they’re desperate for food. Hopefully the snow will help cover our smell—”
As if to challenge that hope, one of the horses snorts from the barn below and the embers of the fire crackle. If Tea were here, she could’ve warded the barn against creatures like these.
Araphi wishes she knew the right kind of magic to do anything about it. As she thinks it, one of the nymphs breaks away from the other and glides toward the barn.
Out of habit and fear, Araphi grips her lemon charm and hums the barest of tunes. Something her mother taught her years ago for protection on dark city streets.
Sage pulls Araphi away from the window, holding her close and against the side of the loft.
The second ice nymph joins the first, swaying toward the barn, hypnotic and dangerous. Araphi whispers the song under her breath. The notes flow from her, and with every part of herself, she sends it out as a shield around the barn and their party.
Please lead them away from us. Please keep us safe. Please let them leave us alone, she implores the magic through her notes.
The ice nymphs step closer, and one of them runs her long claws along the planks on the side of the barn.
Please lead them away from us. Please keep us safe. Please let them leave us alone.
She continues her song, begging the magic now. Please lead them away from us. Please keep us safe. Please let them leave us alone.
One of the ice nymphs pauses outside the barn door below, her face starting to turn toward the open loft window.
Then a loud howling rips through the night. Both the ice nymphs turn away, their focus now on the animal that made the noise. As one, they lope off, disappearing like silver shadows into the dark woods.
Araphi collapses against Sage, relief making her bones weak. It’s not clear if her magic accomplished anything, but she likes to think it had an impact, or improved their chances at least. She likes to think she could’ve protected the party.
She’ll worry about the scroll tomorrow. For now, she’s happy to let Sage’s arms wrap around her and hold her until she stops shaking.
The next day of riding through the Northlands is much the same, and that night they huddle into a cave for warmth, once again watching in pairs.
This time, after Sage and Araphi’s watch is over—they spent the time talking, but not kissing—and Remy and Nura have taken their place, the ranger curls her body around Araphi’s and holds her close at the edge of the fire.
“For warmth,” Sage whispers against Araphi’s hair.
Araphi doesn’t protest, nor does she fall asleep for a long time. Her eyes watch the flames dancing in front of her, making shadows loom huge against the wall.
By the third day of traveling through the Northlands, the entire party is suffering.
Bramble no longer whistles as they ride.
Nura is so far hunched in her cloak, only her eyes glint out.
Remy just scowls in everyone’s direction.
Araphi is no better off than the rest of them.
Whatever called her to adventure in the first place has been carved out by the cold, the edge of hunger always in her belly, and the persistent worry over whether she’ll be able to make use of the spellscroll.
“We’ll rest here for a few moments!” Sage calls over her shoulder, interrupting Araphi’s miserable reverie.
She’s stopped beside a pair of towering, moss-covered boulders.
A small path snakes between the stones, and weatherworn carvings—runes, perhaps?
—mark their surface. Araphi runs her finger over one of them as she follows Sage into a ring of pines that waits beyond the boulders.
There’s a small clearing between the trees, and the pines are bigger than anything Araphi’s ever seen.
It’d take at least three people to wrap their arms around the trunk of any one of them.
Mist hangs in the grove, thin wisps hovering close to the snow.
“Thank the gods,” Araphi mutters, sliding off her horse, tying its reins to the pine branch beside Sage’s horse.
She leans against the rough trunk of the pine and takes a long drink from her waterskin.
Above her head, the pine’s branches make a spiky, circular ladder.
If she climbed it, she’d probably see only trees and more fucking trees all the way to the horizon.
What are they doing out here? How are they supposed to find a skinny little river that only three accounts have ever noted in the whole of the Northlands? She trusts Sage’s ranger skills, yes. But she also would very much like a fire and a warm bed—preferably with Sage in it.
Araphi stretches, popping her back, then shakes snow off her boots. Best to stay in the here and now, and shove all thoughts of hypothetical fires, beds, and further encounters with Sage in said beds far from her mind.
“How are you doing, Bard?” Sage asks, striding over to her. There’s a softness to her voice. A note of care that is new.
Ask for what you want.
Araphi manages a smile as heat flares low in her belly at the memory of Sage’s words in Briarwall and for the very skilled way in which she delivered exactly what Araphi asked for.
“Oh, I’ve never been better,” Araphi says blithely. “Truly, I don’t even know why we needed to stop. Did you get tired, Ranger?”
Sage frowns. “I needed a moment to check our maps, rough as they are. We’re close, I suspect. I just have this feeling.”
“Will we be there by nightfall?”
The thought of spending another night among these pines and still not being anywhere near their destination makes Araphi want to weep.
Before Sage can reply, a gust of wind howls through the trees, cold and demanding.
Powdery snow tumbles from the pine boughs.
A lump of ice slithers down the gap between Araphi’s jacket and her neck to melt slowly against her skin, and she swears.
Meanwhile, snow has settled in Sage’s hair and eyelashes.
She looks sugared. Delectable. Delicious.
The ranger is breathtaking as she brushes snow off her shoulders with a grin and glances up at the sky.
Araphi follows her gaze. Above them, between the crowns of the pines, dense bulwarks of cloud pile up.
Sage inhales, letting out another happy laugh on the exhale.
“You really love being out here, don’t you?”
It’s so apparent the ranger is in her element in the wilds. How did Araphi ever dream that Sage might be happy in a tavern, or at a fashion show at a manor house in a small village, or in the capital among Araphi’s friends? The thought now seems so ridiculous as to hurt.
Still, Araphi wants this—whatever it is—to work out. Whatever that means.
Sage’s breath puffs out in a cloud. “I do love it out here. Something in me lights up with the prospect of an unexplored country and miles ahead of us. Though I would like to find the Swallow before nightfall. There’s no—”
A high-pitched screech rends the air, at once the sound of a knife’s blade on a whetstone and the scream of a dying creature; pain and the promise of violence all combined in an otherworldly cacophony.
Araphi has never heard anything like it, and her blood runs colder than the plummeting temperature. How is it so much chillier under the trees, and so sudden? The mist at their feet roils, bubbling upward, growing denser as the horses begin to snort and whinny in distress.
“Sage, what…”
The ranger already has her bow in hand, string drawn back and searching for a target. But her hands shake noticeably as she glances frantically about, and her skin has gone ice white.