Chapter 14 #2
Inside it, the air smells like hay and manure.
It’s not as unpleasant as she expected. She hears snorting and shuffling.
It’s too dark to see the animals they pass, but she gets impressions of them, the toss of a mane, the stomp of a hoof.
He stops at the third stall from the end and steps into it, murmuring to the animal, too low for her to hear.
He leads it out of the stall and she lurches away, still not used to how big horses are up close.
It’s black, but not jet black—-there’s a patch of white on its nose, like a beacon in the dark.
Theren points to something a few feet away.
Her eyes aren’t trained for dark stables with no electricity, but she fumbles for whatever it is. A stool.
She drags it to the animal’s side. Theren leans into the horse’s neck for just a moment. Then he steps up and, with a grimace, throws his leg over the saddle. He holds out a hand to help her up.
Her turn. She moves closer, startling when the horse tosses its head and snorts.
“Foot in the stirrup,” he says. “Then—-swing your leg. Don’t think too much.”
She puts her hand in his. It’s tacky with blood. She guides her foot into the stirrup—-and then throws her leg over the animal’s back. Pain burns through her. She bites back a groan, and slumps against Theren. He’s sturdy as a wall.
“Hang on,” he says, and she can’t wrap an arm around his middle, given that it’s gushing blood, so she hooks an arm under his and rests her palm on his chest. She holds on tight as he urges the horse forward, out of the stable and into the night.
They ride as fast as the mountain trail allows. The journey takes them down into the seam between the two mountains that House Vidar straddles. About twenty minutes after their hasty departure, when the path narrows and they have to slow, he calls over his shoulder, “Do you have a way out?”
She can feel his heartbeat against her palm, much too fast. He needs a doctor, now.
“I still have a tracker in my shoulder,” she says. “We just need to get far enough away that it’s safe for them to pick us up.”
He urges the horse on. She can feel every shift of his body like this, pressed against him. Every stutter of air into his lungs. It’s too much to know about a stranger, even if he is a stranger who once bound his life to hers with an oath.
They go up and around a rock garden where boulders the size of houses lie cracked and moss--covered, and then down, into dense trees with thick underbrush.
There’s no trail here. Elegy watches little creatures in the trees flitting from branch to branch, weaving in and out of the leaves with the buzz of insect wings.
They’re quiet except for the sound of hooves on rock.
A cloud drifts away from Cedre Station, rendering it a stark white spool above them, and in the moonlight, she looks at the tattoos on Theren’s hands—-black bars between the knuckles of his right, and on his left, the vine she noticed before, between his thumb and index finger.
She wonders what they mean. She knows priests of the Fever have tattoos, but on their throats, not their hands.
She hears splashing. They’re at a low point between two peaks, and the horse is walking in a stream. She feels the strength go out of Theren’s body, and she stiffens with alarm.
“Hey!” She jostles him. “Hey, wake up!”
He straightens, rouses.
“This is far enough,” she says. “Let’s get down before you fall off.”
She’s hurt, but not as hurt as he is. Gritting her teeth, she swings her leg over the horse and drops to her knees in the stream.
The water is cold, but shallow, only going up to her calves.
She offers Theren a hand, and he takes it, and all but topples into the water.
She helps him to the bank of the stream, where the earth is wet and smells clean.
The horse turns and trots away, going back the way it came.
“Stay awake,” she says. “I’ll activate my tracker.”
Theren sits, and braces himself against his bent knees.
She steps away and positions her thumb over the hard spot in her shoulder muscle where the bead was inserted.
She pushes down until red light flashes deep inside her body, lighting up her bones for just a second before receding. Relief makes her fingers numb.
When she looks back at him, she can already see blood seeping into the ground beneath him.
“Let me see,” she says.
He shakes his head.
“Fine.” She pulls her sweater over her head, so she’s just in the T--shirt beneath it. The air is so cold she’s already shivering by the time she’s folded it and reached for his side.
Theren jerks back, but he lets her press the sweater to his wound.
“We thought you were dead.” She’s been speaking Talusar to him this whole time, and he’s never corrected her.
It’s just one of a thousand things she needs to say, to explain, and probably not the right one to start with, but it’s too late now.
She adds, “They sent us your trackers in a box. All bloody.”
“Only Lisia and Furik died from Fever,” he says. “The others died—-after. But—-”
With his free hand, he tugs his shirt to the side to show her a silvery scar right above his collarbone.
She knows he’s the same person who swore the oath. But the scar more firmly connects the two men in her mind: this is him, her Knight, whose death has been hanging over her for four years. He’s alive.
“We had to cut them out,” he says. “Or the Fever would have forced them out.”
She hears something. A hum—-an engine. Undulating, as if the craft is slowing. The humming gets louder, and louder, and she comes to her feet. Now she can see it—-a dark shape moving through the sky, fast. A Sparrow.
They got here quickly. They must have already been looking for her, thanks to the device Larke planted on her ship. The one that almost got her killed.
Before it gets too loud for him to hear, she says, “I would have come for you sooner, if I’d known you were alive.”
Theren is staring at her, staring, like he’s confused by something she said, only she doesn’t know what.
Then he says, “What do you mean? You came here just for me?”
The ship descends. She crouches next to Theren and lifts his arm over her shoulders so she can help him stand.
For a moment, as the wind picks up, and the gears of the hatch grind together as it opens—-as all these mechanical, distinctly Cedrae noises churn around them—-their faces are close enough that she doesn’t have to shout.
“I came to get you out,” she says. “Obviously.”