Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
Help wasn’t coming. If anything, they were at risk on this side of the border.
Who knew how many other attackers lay waiting for them.
Orla stood, ignoring the now throbbing pain in her calf.
She tried to raise Owain to his feet, but he was so much larger than her, she struggled to lift him. Her only option was to drag him.
Quickly, Orla tore off her dress, leaving her only in her cotton breast wrap and her trousers. She laid the dress on the ground before rolling Owain onto the bloody fabric. Then she pulled. He was still heavy, but the slick icy ground allowed her to drag him.
He had said they were close to the border. She could get them to safety. She had to. She couldn’t fail him too.
With all her strength, Orla pulled him. It felt like it took hours to reach the border, the sun was now rising above the Emmentalian side of the mountain.
But once they arrived, Orla felt the strange hum of magic coming from Iridaceae.
If it wasn’t for that hum, she wouldn’t have known that they had arrived.
She expected the border to be distinct, but this part of the mountain looked no different than any other.
Panting and shaking from exertion, Orla made one last pull through the magical barrier.
It was as Owain said, she felt both pushed and pulled, her entire mass compressed into a single point.
Owain stirred at the discomfort of the crossing, but otherwise he hadn’t made a sound since she started moving him.
She would have thought he was dead if it wasn’t for the faint rise and fall of his chest.
She crashed to the forest floor once she had pulled them through, shocked to find that somehow, they were no longer stuck in the frozen barrens of winter.
The morning sun was turning the sky from indigo to light pinks and purples.
The ground was covered in bright leaves.
The air was cool, but nothing like the frigid air on the Emmentalian side of the mountain.
If she had to guess, she would assume that it was autumn in Iridaceae.
Orla didn’t have time to take in the beauty around her though. She had to move.
Looking around, she saw the grove of redwoods Owain had mentioned to her earlier. She pulled him towards the grove, moving slower than before now that she didn’t have the icy ground to help her. There was a small fairy ring around one of the trees that Orla hid Owain behind.
He looked so weak. His wounds were bleeding, though less than before, and his color was going from pale to almost ashen. Kneeling, she kissed him on his clammy forehead. “You are not allowed to die.” She stroked his bloody cheek before setting off east.
Orla ran as if her life depended on it.
No.
Not her life, his.
She ran past the grove until she reached a clearing, but she kept running. One mile became two, but she didn’t see the way station Owain mentioned. She didn’t know if she had passed it or if he was mistaken. Her only option, she thought, was to keep going.
Surely, she would find someone who could help.
By mile three, she found it. It was a tiny wooden building on the edge of an old forest. Past the station, there was a paddock of several hippogryphs.
A gentle-looking silkie stood near the door of the station, eyeing her with an immense amount of skepticism.
She could only imagine what she must look like.
Bursting through the forest panting, dirty, covered in blood, and only wearing pants and a breast binding.
But she didn’t have time to care. Owain needed her.
It was not lost on Orla that he had been injured because he tried to help her. It had taken running through this strange forest to save him for Orla to realize just how much Owain had been helping her. Caring for her. Loving her.
He loved her. The thought slammed into her chest, nearly making her stumble.
He sacrificed himself for her. He was willing to die so she could get away.
She had been so preoccupied wondering if his affections had all been a ploy to manipulate her, but looking at everything he had done since he had gotten to know her, she could no longer deny her feelings.
Owain had been showing her exactly how he felt about her for moons now.
And it didn’t scare her the way she thought love would; it didn’t make her want to turn and run like her mother had done to her father.
It made her want to fight to keep him just as hard as he had been fighting to keep her.
Breathless, Orla hurried towards the silkie. She reached into her trouser pocket and pulled out two gold coins.
“I need a hippogryph. Please. Your fastest one,” she said between breaths.
The silkie looked at her, perplexed, one tawny-colored eyebrow raising in confusion.
Again, Orla spoke, only this time she was interrupted by the male in front of her. He was stringing together a series of phrases that she couldn’t quite decipher. Her heart sank.
She couldn’t communicate with him, and she needed him to understand her, to feel her sense of urgency, and yet he couldn’t understand what she was saying.
It had been so long since there was any relationship between their two countries that the languages no longer matched up well.
But Orla didn’t have time to pantomime what she needed.
She didn’t know what state she would find Owain in when she returned.
“A hippogryph, please!” Orla said while jangling coins in the silkies direction.
He continued to assess her, taking an inordinate time to stare at her chest before he looked back up at her face, motioning to her ears.
“Ef-en?” from the way he said the word, with the inflection at the end, it sounded like a question.
“Please, I just need help.” She was beginning to feel desperate. She couldn’t drag Owain all the way back here for the man to see what she was talking about. She needed his assistance now!
“Ef-en?” he said again, this time pointing to her ears.
“Elven!” she exclaimed, realizing what the man must be saying to her.
She pushed her hair aside to show him her rounded ears.
“Not Elven. I’m a nymph. Well, part nymph, anyway.
You know what, that is irrelevant. No, not Elven.
” She was rambling, but she was quickly spiraling into a panic.
She felt her heart racing and her chest growing tight. This was taking too long.
Making a snap decision, she moved around the silkie towards the full paddock, pointing wildly at the hippogryphs there.
“I need a hippogryph,” she said slowly while continuing to show the coins she held.
Logically, she knew that saying the words more slowly wasn’t going to make him understand her, but she didn’t know what else to do.
Owain had said that he would take care of the communication, and she had never had a reason to learn any language but her own.
As if finally understanding her, the silkie nodded before walking over to the paddock and unlocking it. He gestured for Orla to follow him and pointed to a hippogryph with fur and feathers the same tawny color as the man’s hair.
Relief flooded Orla as she ran to the hippogryph. It was a beautiful creature with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a horse. She looked back at the silkie to hand him the money before he shook his head in decline.
“Uh, how do I get her to go?” Orla realized that she was again asking this male for information he could not convey to her, but she had never seen a hippogryph before, let alone ridden one.
Thankfully, he seemed to understand her this time and showed her how to mount the creature before pantomiming talking and pointing to the hippogryph.
Taking a wild guess, Orla spoke to the hippogryph under her, asking it to take her to the redwood grove near the barrier between Iridaceae and Emmental, praying to Jove that she would be understood.
In an instant, the hippogryph was running before leaping into flight in the direction of Owain.
Mercifully, Owain was still breathing when she returned to him.
His bleeding had all but stopped, but he remained unconscious, not rousing when Orla tried to get him to stir.
It took all her strength to move him again.
She struggled to pull him out of the fairy ring and towards the hippogryph.
The creature was smart. She lowered the front of her body almost flush to the ground so that Orla could pull Owain over what would have been the hippogryph’s shoulders before she climbed on its back.
She felt bad that he was hanging like a sack of potatoes over the beast, but she didn’t have the strength to get him sitting up right.
“Drea’s cabin,” she said to the hippogryph, hoping those instructions were good enough to get them where they needed to go. With a beat of its massive wings, the hippogryph shot into the air.
Draping her body over Owain’s, Orla held tight throughout the hours long flight. If she had been less preoccupied with making sure Owain was breathing, she would have noticed how awe-inspiring Iridaceae was.
The mountains were covered in massive redwoods.
Fields of the most vibrant greens could be seen in the distance while a large, clear-blue river flowed through the middle of the forest. The water shimmered in the morning light like stars in the night sky.
They passed a few towns and cities, much larger than Imsil.
Beautiful villas and cottages lined the vibrant streets.
Few of the people looked up as if seeing a hippogryph flying by was a usual occurrence.
Iridaceae was as beautiful as Orla could have imagined, but she didn’t notice it at all.
Her only thoughts were of Owain and how desperately she wanted him to be okay.
After several hours in the air, the hippogryph started to make her decent.
Not far from the large river, a small wooden cabin with a stone chimney sat next to an overgrown garden.
It was set a ways away from a circle of similar cabins.
Touching down right in front of the cabin’s front door, the hippogryph lowered its body so Orla and Owain could slide off her. Orla dragged Owain’s unconscious body towards the oak door. The door creaked loudly with disuse when Orla wrenched it open.
Taking a quick look around, she saw that the tiny cabin looked well cared for.
The kitchen looked fully stocked with herbs and dried foods.
There was a plush-looking brown couch in the center of the sitting room across from an ornate, well-maintained hearth.
The simple wooden door on the opposite side of the sitting room had been left open.
Orla saw a large, quilted bed and a washroom inside.
Tugging Owain over the threshold, Orla made her way to the bedchamber.
Thankfully, the bed was relatively low to the ground, and Orla slung Owain’s top half on it before dragging his legs onto it as well.
For the first time since they left the mountain, she could really look at him.
His reddish-brown hair was plastered to his face, caked with blood and dirt.
The light spray of freckles on his nose looked so dark against his ashen skin.
Seeing his pallor sent a wave of panic crashing over Orla.
She had only ever seen that color on someone’s skin moments before death.
Cold sweat beaded her forehead, but she pushed the thoughts away. She had to stay present.
Owain was slashed along his front and back, but over the course of their journey, his bleeding had stopped.
Orla’s knowledge of healing was limited, but she knew enough from her time in the king’s army to know she needed to clean his wound, lest an infection set it.
She had no idea how Owain’s magic worked, but she prayed to every God that would listen that he had enough strength to heal himself fully.
She sent a special prayer to Amara not to take him from her.
Orla didn’t know if she could survive losing him.
Carefully, Orla began to peel his blood-soaked armor from his body, noticing that her hands were shaking as she worked, her nerves threatening to overtake her at any moment.
Once she had fully disrobed him, she went to the washroom, filling up a bowl of water and grabbing a washing rag.
Methodically, Orla cleaned away the blood on Owain’s face and body.
She hummed as she worked. Though she was humming for him, an attempt to sooth this male she cared so much for, she was also doing it for herself.
The rhythmic vibrations calmed her racing heart and gave her something to focus on other than the sheer panic she was experiencing.
After he was clean, Orla pushed his wavy locks out of his face and admired his beauty. She ran her fingers along the bump in the bridge of his nose and along his full eyebrows. She admired his long, elegant antlers and set about counting each freckle on his face.
She hadn’t appreciated how magnificent he was before.
Not really. Her heart hurt to think that she could still lose him.
That she never told him how she felt about him.
For the first time since she left Imsil, she greatly regretted the harsh words she said to him when she left.
Gods, she even regretted stabbing him, though she did think he deserved it at the time.
Worthless bastard, she had called him.
Those words couldn’t be further from the truth. Owain was creative, brave, thoughtful, and kind. And all the while she gazed at him, trying to commit every part of his face to memory, she hummed.
She didn’t know how much time had passed, but from the window on the far side of the bedchamber, she thought it must be midday.
She got up from the bed and made her way to the sitting room where she lit the hearth before returning to the bedchamber and pulling the covers up over Owain.
She made sure to check that he was breathing.
Orla stripped herself of her own filthy clothes before refilling the bowl with fresh water. She didn’t have the energy to take a full bath. Grabbing her pack she had left by the front door, Orla pulled out a nightgown before slipping it on and padding her way back to the bedchamber.
Crawling into the bed, Orla checked again to make sure Owain was breathing. She kissed his forehead and then each cheek. As she curled up next to Owain, she whispered, “I love you so much. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner” before she drifted to sleep.