18. Chapter Eighteen Seren Veyr #2
The road had narrowed to less than the width of a cart, rock rising sheer on one side, the ravine dropping into white emptiness on the other. Snow erased distance. The horses danced, panicked by the shifting ground. One wrong step would take all of them down.
“Off,” Seren ordered.
Elira did not argue.
That alone told Seren the situation was worse than she wished to admit.
They dismounted into knee-deep snow. Seren passed both sets of reins to Mara when she finally fought her way back through the storm, then pointed toward a dark break in the rock wall barely visible beneath hanging roots.
“There,” Seren said. “Get Coren and the horses under cover. Now.”
Mara looked at the opening, then at the road, then at Seren. “That is not a cave.”
“It is more cave than standing here.”
“High praise.”
“Move.”
Mara moved at once.
Coren followed with the pale obedience of someone too frightened to waste time pretending otherwise.
The horses resisted, tossing their heads against the storm, but Mara had a way with terrified animals and unreasonable commanders, which Seren had learned often required the same tone of voice.
One by one, they vanished into the dark slit in the rock.
Elira turned to follow.
Then the mountain shifted.
Seren heard the crack before she saw the snow move, that low, final sound of weight surrendering to gravity. A great sheet broke loose from the ledge above them, dragging ice and branches with it as it came down over the road in a white, roaring collapse.
Seren grabbed Elira around the waist and drove them both sideways into the rock wall.
The impact knocked the breath from her lungs.
Elira’s back struck stone. Seren’s body pinned her there as snow thundered past, burying the place where they had stood only a heartbeat before.
For several seconds, there was only white, only the violent hiss of settling powder, only the hard certainty of Elira beneath her hands.
Then the world narrowed.
Snow sealed them into a shallow hollow between the rock face and the fallen drift. Mara’s voice came from beyond it, distant and muffled. Coren shouted something the storm swallowed. The horses screamed once, then quieted.
Seren kept one arm braced above Elira’s shoulder and the other locked at her waist. Necessary, she told herself. The ground was unstable. The drift had not settled. If she moved too quickly, the whole bank might collapse and take them both down the slope.
All reasonable explanations, technically.
None of them accounted for Elira’s breath against her throat.
The hollow was impossibly small. Rock pressed against Elira’s back, snow crowded Seren’s shoulders, and there was no space between them that did not belong to the other.
Elira’s hands had closed on the front of Seren’s coat, fingers twisted in the dark fabric just below her collar.
Their bodies were pressed together from thigh to ribs, armor and wool and damp leather doing extraordinarily little to disguise the shape of contact.
Seren looked down anyway—that was a mistake.
Elira’s face was inches from hers, pale in the snow-filtered light, silver hair caught against the black stone behind her.
A loose strand clung wetly near her mouth.
Her eyes were wide, not with fear of the fall, but with the sudden, dangerous awareness that distance had failed them.
Seren could have moved. Probably, which hardly helped.
“Are you hurt?” she asked instead.
Elira’s fingers tightened in her coat. “No.”
The word came too softly. Seren watched her mouth shape it, which became another mistake in a rapidly growing list. Outside, snow continued to slide in soft, treacherous sighs.
Somewhere beyond the drift, Mara shouted, “Seren?”
“I am alive,” Seren called back, though her gaze stayed on Elira.
A pause came before the scout shouted again. “Both of you?”
“Regrettably.”
Elira made a sound that might have been offense if her breathing had not betrayed her. “You are insufferable.”
“I have been told.”
“By many people, I assume.”
“Only the honest ones.”
Elira’s mouth curved. It was not enough to be called a smile.
It was worse than a smile. A smile could be dismissed as strategy, mockery, reflex.
This was smaller. Uninvited. Gone almost before it appeared.
It made Elira look, for one treacherous heartbeat, less like a secret and more like someone who had forgotten to guard the door.
Seren felt the want before she had time to forbid it.
It moved through her like heat under ice, sudden, unreasonable, and inconvenient enough to be offensive.
She became aware of every place they touched: Elira’s hip beneath her hand, the rise of her breath against Seren’s ribs, the pressure of her fingers at Seren’s coat, the cold damp of melting snow, the faint scent of pine, iron, and something floral beneath Elira’s skin.