9. Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Erix
The mood by the fire was slightly lighter when I returned, making me feel like an unwelcome storm cloud as I approached.
Keera looked up and smiled at me, and I nodded back as I lifted the oryx down from my shoulders.
Its ribs and hipbones poked out painfully—I wasn’t sure how much meat we would get off it—but I felt the need to come back with something to explain my absence.
To make it seem like I hadn’t just left the group to give myself a few moments to give in to the shivering madness coursing through me where Keera couldn’t see—to calm myself with the pain I had promised her I would not turn to.
My clothes scraped painfully across the small cuts and bruises that littered my arms and thighs, and I was grateful for the way it distracted from the tingling in my throat and the unpleasant metallic taste that was ever-present in my mouth these days.
If Keera saw how quickly my magic consumed me, she would try to shoulder more of it—to calm me with her warm eyes and callused hands.
I did not have the will to refuse her. In fact, I craved her closeness more than anything, like a physical thirst leaving me parched and desperate.
But the image of her suffering like I did, if my violent magic pulled on hers too strongly, burned even stronger.
I had seen the moment of pain in her eyes as she calmed me in the darkness after the bone spider attack—when she chased after me in the darkness instead of helping Elion rescue Dhara, leaving Aderyn and the horses alone.
If I didn’t control my madness myself, I could risk the entire mission.
Keera had told me that we would fight my madness together.
It was an idea as seductive as it was dangerous.
Every time she tried to light a fire with her power, it sprang forth violently, even though she had already learned to ignite the kindling with just a spark.
I knew it was my own magic spurring hers forward that pushed the flames beyond her control.
I had already upset the peace of her mind.
Three nights ago, Kelvar had come to me in the night again, his voice both painfully loud and silent in my head.
Before he could say more than a few words, I pressed my fingers into a wound on my arm, tearing it open again.
Each time he appeared, he seemed even more real, and I feared one day I would reach out and touch him and never find my way back to reality again.
And each time I saw him in the night, Keera began to toss and whimper as if caught in the throes of a nightmare.
My pain was the best way I knew to protect her.
So, I stole away on secret hunts and made sure all my self-inflicted injuries were well hidden by the time I returned to the fire.
As I began skinning and gutting my kill, Keera meandered over, knife in her hand and ready to help. She kneeled next to me, her thigh brushing mine. Despite thinking that I should pull away, some of the tension in my shoulders and jaw relaxed.
I wondered if I just transferred my stress to her. We had always seemed to balance each other: She had calmed my power in the moment hers had awakened. But now I wondered what would happen when the equilibrium shifted too far and we spiraled out of control.
Keera bumped her shoulder against mine, drawing me from my thoughts. Then she murmured low enough so that the others would not overhear. “Would you like to wager on if Dhara is going to kiss Elion or stab him first?”
Something in the lightness of her manner, even in the face of unspeakable odds, did finally relax some of the shivering tension under my skin.
Her unyielding grip on hope had let her survive against all odds, and now she leant some of that optimism to me.
My own hope guttered and dwindled, but it was not gone yet.
“What are the odds on her doing both?”
I woke to metal on my tongue and a tingling sensation crawling down my chest. I knew before I opened my eyes the sight that would greet me.
It was something about the eerie mix of silence in my ears with a deafening roar in my head that told me Kelvar was back.
Sure enough, when I opened my eyes, I found a figure standing a few feet away with his back to me.
Without my consent, my hand reached out to Keera, hoping for her touch to chase him away before he could taunt me with our shared fate. I pulled myself back, just before my fingers brushed her bare shoulder.
Beneath my ribs felt hollow at the thought of pulling her into another nightmare.
I was strong enough to banish him on my own.
Standing from our sleeping mats, I walked to join him, staring out at the dunes—almost as if he were keeping watch.
“Leave me alone,” I hissed, trying not to wake the others.
Kelvar frowned. It was eerie watching the expression twist his features—like looking in a mirror that wasn’t quite behaving. “I can’t.”
I ground my teeth in frustration. A conjuring of my own mind shouldn’t be so belligerent. “I need you to leave her alone.”
While some part of me always knew I would go mad and had grown to accept it, I hadn’t known I would be bound to somebody like Keera when it eventually took me.
The idea that she would share my fate, as we shared so many thoughts and sensations, filled me with an icy fear.
My breaths came faster and my vision blurred when I considered losing her to the grips of insanity.
Kelvar glanced over his shoulder at where Keera lay sleeping.
“She’s incredible. I’ve been watching.”
After several visions of him, I was almost used to the hard to discern cadence of his voice, but his words confused me. Of course he had been watching. He lived behind my own eyes, twisting the power in my mind into knots.
“It turns out many great romances start with tying a woman to your horse in the dead of night.”
I almost detected levity in his words. At least the manifestations of my insanity had a sense of humor—a trait I had never particularly prided myself in.
“I need you to leave, before she gets hurt,” I practically growled.
All the lightness left Kelvar’s expression, and it turned hard as stone. “Nothing either of us can do will stop that.”
Anger bubbled up in my chest, hot as lava. He was wrong—he had to be. I would go to any length for Keera. I would control my madness at any cost, to keep it from spilling into her own mind.
I grabbed my dirk from my belt and drove the tip of it into the front of my thigh.
Fire bloomed in my flesh, and Kelvar vanished between one breath and the next.
Even as my chest clenched with the overwhelming pain, my heart jumped in surprise at how thoroughly he’d disappeared—like he had never even been there.
He hadn’t been there, I reminded myself.
With a hiss, I yanked my blade out of my leg. Warm rivulets of blood trickled down my thigh to my knee, the heat contrasting sharply with the cold night air. I closed my eyes and held on to the sensations in my body.
The single-mindedness of pain was a balm to my whirling thoughts. My awareness narrowed to the pulsing in my leg. I hadn’t driven the knife in very deep—no more than an inch—but the shock of it was enough to serve my purposes.
Quietly, I set out cleaning and bandaging the self-inflicted wound. I had carried far worse injuries into battle. With luck, nobody would notice one more scar.
If Keera saw it, she would know the lengths my madness had driven me to. She would insist on risking herself to save my own shattered mind, even though I had long known I was doomed. She would tear herself apart out of loyalty, and I could not let that happen.
The ground was treacherous today, and my teeth creaked in my head as I watched Alza carefully pick her way along the crested top of a sand dune. Wind had whipped the terrain into sharp slopes with high peaks cresting into even steeper cliffs.
The inclines were too pitched for the horses to traverse; they slid down the shifting surface every time they tried. So, we plodded along the crested peaks, but the threat of a bad step that would send us tumbling down the perilous slope remained.
I watched Alza’s dark hooves land, every footfall sure despite my worry. She was steadier than I these days. As she took her next step, a strange undulation in the sand beneath her caught my eye.
My brow furrowed as I stared. The ground was often rippled and ridged—looking like Keera’s skin in the places her burns had left it scarred. This pattern though looked more uniform, like something heavy had been dragged.
“Stop,” I held up my fist, and we all halted, in a single file line across the ridge as we rode.
I slid down from Alza’s back, taking a few steps forward to get clear of her own hoofmarks. A shadow fell over me as I crouched to inspect the tracks. Keera had been riding just behind me and now peered over my shoulder.
“Animal tracks?” she asked.
I shook my head, although there did seem to be some sort of trail. I didn’t recognize the prints of a red wolf or the sinuous swirl left by a large snake. A large divot dragged down the middle of the churned sand, as if disturbed by many legs.
“Could it be a bone spider?” Dhara asked, having stopped next to Keera. She stared down at the path with folded arms and a furrowed brow. Her question was neutral, but I didn’t miss the way she clenched her fists as she tucked them under her elbows.
She was not as unaffected by her last encounter with the monsters as she would like to appear. I could not fault her.
“It could have been dragging something,” Keera pointed out.
I frowned, trying to figure out how a bone spider might leave such tracks. Even if it had many legs, they would end in recognizable prints—feet from beasts and animals of the desert I was familiar with. “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure what else could have made such tracks?”
“Let me look.” The voice came from Aderyn.
She picked her way around the line of waiting horses, toward where we gathered.