3. Taking an awfully bumpy road #2
I clambered over the rock Streja and I had been sitting on and started towards my tent. It was a damned good thing she trailed after me, because I found my legs as trustworthy as any of the barstool back at the garrison tavern.
“Here, princess. Let me put you to bed.” On my second stumble on the uneven ground, she wrapped her arm across my shoulders and tucked me against her side. “You can crash in my tent. It’s much closer.”
My vision was a little fuzzy at best, between my fatigue, the dark, and grit from the persistent wind, so it took me a moment to realize Streja’s eyes were gleaming with tears.
“Oh, Stre…” I rested my head on her padded shoulder and found it almost impossible to lift it back up. “You’re still stuck with me for a—” I had to clear my throat, “—while longer. No tears yet.”
“Yeah,” she rasped.
“I mean it,” I chuckled. “S-save that f-for—fuck.”
My feet were as useful as two planks strapped to my legs for how my toes couldn’t seem to stop catching on the ground. Embarrassing, really. If it weren’t for Streja’s arm banded across my shoulders, I would’ve been laid out flat on my face in wasteland dirt.
She tightened her hold a little and let out a bone-deep sigh. “Yeah, Nor. We’ll save it. Let’s get you into bed.”
The next steps Streja tried to nudge me into just didn’t happen.
A wave of sickening dizziness swept over me, tilting everything around me, and my legs gave way so suddenly, I half slipped from Streja’s grip. A tremor of pain shot up my bones as my knees met the unforgiving ground, and I couldn’t even force a groan out of my slackened mouth.
Streja cursed, shuffling us both to get her hands under my arms.
When she leaned me back and started moving, the hazy night sky swimming above, realization came creeping in with agonizing slowness.
This wasn’t some alarming mixture of feast, liquor, and fatigue wreaking havoc on my body. It couldn’t be. My mind was still spinning away, my heart fucking pounding, but my limbs were growing numb, my tongue like lead in my mouth.
My body didn’t even feel like my own.
And Streja fucking knew.
Was there something in the stew? Or maybe that awful, acrid spirit?
But what about everyone else who’d indulged in both? They all seemed fine, laughing and dealing cards around the fire.
Fuck, it could’ve been something in my waterskin.
Whatever vessel transported it didn’t matter anymore, because my body was dead weight, and pin-prick numbness trickled through my nerves.
My heels kept catching as Streja dragged me through the dirt right past my tent, mumbling under her breath the entire time. I wasn’t sure where she had taken me, because I lost the battle to keep my eyes open.
They slid back open a sliver when I landed hard on something plush—a bedroll, maybe—but I lost that hazy visual as I was rolled to my side, my arm pulled over my face, and a weighty darkness settled over top of me.
“I’m so sorry, Nor. He knew how much you trusted me, and t-they threatened my fucking mom,” came Streja’s teary rasp, but it sounded so far away. “But I…I’m going to fix it. I’m going to take your tent, and it’ll be over soon, okay? I promise you.”
I couldn’t have responded if I had wanted to.
The most profound confusion I’d ever experienced warred with a hazy twilight in my mind as the sounds of objects moving all around me mixed with muted thuds and choked sobs.
Darkness won that brief, ruthless battle.
A violent cough rattled out of my lungs, and they burned when I tried to fill them again.
Gods, so did my eyes. My leg ached something fierce too.
But no matter how much I hacked or shifted or tried to blink away the foggy mess of my vision, none of it would ease. Neither did the searing heat that pressed in on me from all sides.
Coughing. Burning. Aching.
Coughing. Burning. Aching.
Over, and over, and over.
Realization came at me like a crack of lightning across the ridgeline.
It wasn’t fog obscuring my vision—it was smoke.
And the heat searing my skin? Fucking fire.
Profanities sputtered out of me with those violent coughs, and I clambered to get my limbs under me, fighting with tangled linens to get up and move. A nearly impossible task with arms and legs as heavy as sandbags and lungs that couldn’t get a proper breath of air.
Up onto all fours was as far as I could manage while I struggled to tug my shirt up over my mouth and nose.
Little good it did, with how thick, acrid smoke had consumed every bit of breathable air in the space, courtesy of a wall of flames eating away at the opening of the tent and engulfing everything in its path.
Including the bedroll beneath me.
And my fucking leg.
I scrambled to the corner furthest from the flame as the taste of metal coated my tongue, and my eyes refused to even crack open against the bite of smoke.
My fingers scraped across rough, gritty ground, fumbling until I felt the edge of the tent pulled taut against the earth.
I gave it a few desperate but exhausted yanks and dragged myself through the gap.
I crawled for as long as my body would allow, which couldn’t have been more than a few paces before the agony in my leg had me collapsing into the dirt. It took everything to shift onto my back and glance down.
Bile surged in the back of my throat as I took in the singed and blistered mess of my calf—blackened not only from burns, but from the reinforced fabric of my boots and pants fusing into my skin. Skin that was still smoking and producing the most putrid smell.
I barely turned my head in time as I voided the contents of my stomach in a couple of violent heaves—onto tree roots.
Trees.
We hadn’t set up camp near any trees, had we?
Wiping my mouth the best I could with my heavy arms, I blinked at the ground beneath me—dark and devoid of life, cracked earth sprawled out in all directions around me except for one.
Just beside my head, gnarled tree roots seemed to spring out of nowhere, feeding up into the dark bark of trees I was too dizzy to take in the full height of.
No, we hadn’t set up camp near trees at all.
We’d been right on the border of Odessa and the Wastes, just where the land was barren but not yet dead. No trees nearby at all. Just rocks, weeds, and dry grass as far as the eye could see. Streja had bitched about the openness and the wind incessantly, and—
Oh, fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I was half-upright before I processed it, staggering in a brutal limp back toward the tent I had just crawled from, only for it to fully yield to flames, sending a surge of heat toward me as the support ropes snapped, and it collapsed.
I staggered back on a string of curses, shielding my face from the scorching blast.
“Streja?” I shouted, but my throat was raw, and I devolved into a fit of raspy coughing.
When I finally caught my breath, my hand came back spattered with blood, and my vision swam, darkening at the edges, an annoying threat that it and my consciousness could give way at any moment. But in that precise moment, the true gravity of my surroundings seemed to hit me all at once.
The dozens of structures we’d fought to erect the evening before were actively burning before me or reduced to a smoldering pile.
But this wasn’t where we’d made camp; I was sure of it.
It was as if the hand of a giant had picked us up and deposited us somewhere else.
I couldn’t even spot our horses, nor the ridge face where we’d anchored their leads.
And even more alarming?
The stillness that surrounded it all.
No commotion; no movement.
No noise—Odessan made or not—save for the crackle of eating flame and the dull moan of the wind.
A wave of internal heat washed over me, leaving my skin feeling suddenly clammy as my head swam.
Pain rattled up through my knees next as they collided with the unyielding earth and set a searing burst of agony so intense through my calf, I cried out.
I pitched forward, and my body met the ground, kicking up dust. One pained grunt pulled all the air from my lungs as I curled on my side and fought to keep my eyes open.
Another terrifying revelation came moments after that.
The trunks behind and canopy half-above me weren’t just any trees.
They were the gnarled black branches of the ashclaw tree, and I only knew of one place they grew—the Lastlight Woods.
Not only was my camp decimated, but I was grievously injured and at the mercy of the denizens of those terrifying woodlands.
That was the last thought to grace my ravaged mind before my vision narrowed to a pinprick.