Chapter 41
Forty-One
Sorin
“It’s okay, love. Come with me.” I hold my hand out to Elora, ignoring that I can’t feel anything around me.
Not the wind or the rain. Not the chill that should be deep in my bones.
My eyes settle on the blood around her mouth, the soaked tunic and fear lined in her eyes. “Take my hand.”
She reaches out as her eyes roll closed, our fingers brushing against each other. And despite the hollow vat in my chest, when our fingers touch, a spark ignites in me.
Like a fog slowly rising, her spirit lifts from her body, free of the blood and the pain. She glances over her shoulder before facing me again.
“You’re here?” Her fingers trace a line down my cheek, and I feel it in every part of my body. Deep in the marrow of my soul, I feel her .
“I’m here.” Wrapping her in my arms, that spark burns through me, heating me from my core to my fingertips and with it comes a slight movement in my chest.
A beat.
“Elora,” I whisper against her hair as the wind picks up, cages us in a tunnel of leaves.
“Elora,” I say again, but she doesn’t answer. I pull her back to see her face, but it’s no longer her.
Her face has changed, from the freckles across her nose to the usual pink on her cheeks. Black is inked into her veins, her cheeks sunken and hollow, and then she’s slipping from my grip. Her soul disappearing right before my eyes.
The wind and rain lashes around us, thunderous claps reverberate the trees and she’s fading away.
“Wait!” I scream after her soul, clawing my way across the forest floor, endlessly reaching to no avail. The beating in my chest grows stronger and as I take a lungful of air, she’s gone.
I snap my eyes open. Sam is cradling me in her arms.
“Sorin,” she says, shaking my shoulders. “Thank the Mother!” She’s crying, her tears painting lines down her face.
I take a large breath. And another and another but choke on the cold sting of air.
“It’s okay,” Sam says as I sit up. “You’re okay.”
My breathing mellows, falling into a steady rhythm.
Sam checks my back for wounds, her hands frantically searching, pulling up my tunic but there’s no wound.
No evidence of Galen’s betrayal.
Ruse yips next to us as she paces back and forth.
“We need to go,” I say, my voice hoarse. Ruse meets my eye again before she tips her nose to the sky and howls.
“Give yourself a minute,” Sam says, hugging me tightly. “It’s a miracle you’re alive.”
“No,” I say, my voice gruff like I’ve just woken from sleep. “It’s a curse.”
“Slow down!” Sam shouts, but it’s no use. I’m running through the trees as if I wasn’t just dead on the forest floor. Wasn’t just watching my sister grieve me. As if I didn’t just speak to Elora from the other side.
I shake off the memory, not willing to lose my focus on getting to her as fast as possible.
Maybe there’s still time.
Maybe I can save her.
“I can’t,” I shout over my shoulder. “We need to find Elora, now!” My legs nearly give out, but I continue on. The wolves have darted ahead, their connection to Elora leading our way.
“What’s the hurry?” Sam is breathless behind me. “She and Jarek are together, it isn’t as though?—”
I stop so abruptly, Sam barrels directly into my back. I turn toward her, and the expression on my face must scare her because she backs away, tears still stained on her cheeks.
“What is going on?”
“She took my bargain from Grawgeth,” I admit, my chest heaving from the pace we’ve been keeping.
Sam sighs, bracing her hands on the tops of her thighs. “What?”
I cradle my head in my hands. “And she didn’t just take the same debt. She didn’t trade the last years of her life.” I look at her again, my stomach dipping with unease. “She traded her life for mine, she must have.” I nod to just beyond the hill, where we just came. “I saw her when I died, she was there and—” I bite my tongue, the pressure mounting in my chest near painful. “She traded her life for mine. And I died back there, Samaria. You know I died and then I was brought back.”
A tear slips from my eye, the reality of my words bringing me to my knees. The soil is damp beneath them. A pain pushes through my chest but it’s faint, like it’s long been healed.
“No,” Sam whispers, crouching to the ground next to me.
A breeze fills the spaces between us, stinging against my cheeks and ears.
My head tips up, looking at the sky. “I died and then, before I could argue my way out of it, I was alive again. Don’t you see what that means?” My voice cracks on the last word as I stand, Samaria pulling me to my feet.
“She’s gone…” she whispers, flicking her wrists up. “I don’t feel her spirit.” Her eyes light up as she glances behind her, as if she’s checking to see if someone is there. “Perhaps she isn’t gone?”
I turn, marching up and over the hill where the wolves wait. “We need to hurry.”
We rush down the hill, the increasing rain making it that much more difficult to traverse. I spot Alaric first, then Ruse, then the pups.
“Jarek!” Sam shouts and sprints in his direction. But I don’t follow. My feet remain planted in the soil. Her body lies crumpled in Jarek’s lap.
She’s gone.
The proof not only right before me, but inside of me.
When Sam reaches Jarek's side, she looks to Elora and covers her eyes. It takes everything in me to go to them. But step by step, I do.
Ruse and Alaric whimper as I drop to my knees beside Elora in the dirt, the puppies sitting uncharacteristically still.
I scoop her up and place her head in my lap.
“There was nothing I could do, Sor.” Jarek’s voice is broken, but I don’t look at him.
I stroke Elora’s hair, pushing it from her face. I clean the edges of her mouth with my cloak, freeing it from the blood that’s begun to dry there.
“We should have come with you,” Sam says through her tears. “Maybe we could have stopped this.”
“Nothing could have stopped this,” I whisper. I run my finger between Elora’s brows, smoothing the crease before finding her hand and grasping it in mine.
“But if we had helped you—” Sam sobs.
The wind shifts, rustling the leaves that litter the forest floor. The rain slices lines down my face and arms.
Before long, the leaves create a tunnel, much like the one I was encased in when my heart stopped beating. They swirl around Elora and I. I hold her tightly, hoping it’s enough to keep her here with me. My father’s ring is on her finger, the black metal coated in mud. My fingers twitch to reach for it, but I leave it instead.
The leaves and wind are ferocious and as the skies open up further, Elora begins to fade.
“No!” I shout but it doesn’t do any good. Little by little, her body dissipates into the wind. From her boots to her hair, she floats away from me like stardust.
I clutch the soil beneath me, digging my fingers into the leaves and dirt. Grasping for any lingering piece of her that may still remain. That piece inside of my chest that belongs only to her cracks open wide, and I scream and curse and clutch the ground until my throat is hoarse and my knuckles white.
Memories flash so quickly behind my eyes that I can’t be certain if what I’m seeing is from this life or the past.
Each memory is filled with golden hair and a freckled nose.
A hard-earned laugh and an easy scowl.
A passionate kiss and connection that comes all too naturally.
A crown and a storm and a bargain made.
Then, she’s slipping from my grasp. Fading away into a world of black nothing. No matter how hard I try to find her hand, she’s just out of reach.
“Can you sense her, Sam?” Jarek’s voice pulls me from the depths of my memories.
My head rolls forward, hanging limply from my shoulders.
Sam doesn’t answer him right away. She watches me rise, dirt and blood caked on my hands and clothes. Her face breaks and I know her answer. I push my hair from my face with trembling hands and look away from my sister.
I can’t bear for her to see me like this.
So broken.
“I can’t sense her,” Sam says.
“Because her spirit isn’t here,” I say. “It’s now bound to the Wicked Wood.”
As soon as I see Amis back at the Jade Guild, a small piece of hope ignites in my chest. I don’t wait to explain my plan before I place myself in the saddle.
“Sorin!” Sam shouts as she catches up to me. “Where are you going?” She’s panting as she reaches the horse. She grips the reins tightly, as if that will do anything to stop me from going.
“I am going to get my wife.” I yank the reins from her hands. “You and Jarek will join the others at the Onyx Guild immediately.”
She shakes her head, her lip quivering. Her eyes move past me for a moment and then to her right and then quickly to her left.
“Samaria, look at me.” The sharpness in my tone has her snapping her attention from the spirits I’m sure are flooding her and focusing on me. “I know it couldn’t have been easy?—”
“Seeing you die?” She frowns, biting her bottom lip.
My chest deflates, and again I find myself torn between two worlds. The one where my family is here and alive and the one where Elora is dead and may never breathe again.
But I have to try.
I know that I’ll never be able to live with myself if I do not try to get her back. If there is magick in the world strong enough to trade our deaths, surely there is magick strong enough to bring her back to me.
My stomach swirls at the thought, drifting to Galen. To his sister, long dead and burned and yet he still fights for her. A sick and twisted thought turns over in my mind, making my already empty stomach churn.
Grief will drive you to depths you weren’t sure existed. And he has lived with his far longer than I have. Long enough to drive him to madness.
Sliding down from Amis, I cup my sister's face, forcing her to look at me. “You will go to Onyx. You will convince the members of the Guilds to wait for my arrival. You will see to it that no harm comes to our people when I am gone?—”
“Sorin, I can’t.”
“You can,” I whisper.
Her fiery eyes flicker, a beacon of warmth in the otherwise dreary forest.
“You can and you will because there is no one more capable than you.”
She doesn’t smile as she wraps me tightly in a hug.
“I’m sorry for what you had to see,” I say, and her body tenses. “But let me try and make this right. I have to.”
She takes a step backward, nods, and by the time Jarek steps forward to grab her, Agnes joins us.
“Mum? You should have left hours ago,” Sam says, gesturing her forward. “Elora?—”
“I know, Sam,” Agnes says. Her gaze slides to me, and the memory of her on the ground, struggling to breathe makes my throat tighten. “That's why I stayed.”
I’m abandoning them when they’re hurting the most.
“Follow the path as the crow flies,” Agnes says and at my puzzled look she raises her hand. “In order to get her back, follow the path as the crow flies. There you’ll find that of which you seek.”
“I know how to get to the Wicked Wood,” I say through a sigh, exhaustion seeping into my bones.
“Yes,” Sam says, cutting me a scowl. “He’s been there two too many times.”
Agnes steps forward, placing herself between Sam and myself. Her hands tremble as I wrap them in my own. “Follow the path as the crow flies, there you’ll find what you seek. The crones always come in threes, it’s only with them the bargain can truly be broken.”
“The crones?” Jarek steps forward and wraps his arm around Samaria.
Agnes nods, her honey eyes blazing against the dimming light. “The Fates, Sorin. You must find the Fates. If there’s any chance at saving Elora from the Wicked Wood, any chance of you ending the blight, they’ll give you the answers you need.”
Shaking my head, I run a hand through my hair. The Fates have not been seen since the founding king and queen died. They are more myth than anything. “What makes you so certain they’ll show themselves to me?”
“Because, son.” Agnes smiles, her eyes crinkling. “They’ve met you before.”
My gaze snaps to Sam and then to Jarek, their wide-eyed stares match my own.
“What do you?—”
“Be safe,” Agnes says, reaching out her hand. I take it I look at Sam again.
“Be swift,” Sam says. “Be bold.” She wraps me in a hug. “I know you are a Rudhek by blood,” she says quietly, “but you were raised a Trednik. So act like one and let that unrelenting stubbornness guide you until she’s back.”
When she pulls away, it feels as though miles are stretched between us. Her sobs as she held me on the ground echo in my mind, but the wolves step next to me, distracting me from my racing thoughts.
“You’re all coming?” I glance at Alaric. His amber eyes are glazed over, his heart, I’m sure, just as shattered as mine. But when I look at Ruse, there's nothing but anger and spite lined in those emerald eyes. She bares her canines and I don’t question her again.
A caw breaks the momentary silence between us and my gaze darts upward. Sure enough, as Agnes Saw in her vision, a crow flies overhead as if leading the way.
“Straight to the Onyx Guild.” I point to Sam but she’s busy snuggling Hati, giving her a scratch behind the ears and ruffling her head. Hati whines but as I heel Amis in the sides, she follows Ruse and the others.
I run Amis almost all night, pushing her as far as she can go, following the distinct caw of the crow. I don’t stop for water, relying on the small canteen attached to my saddle. Don’t stop to eat, and only when the puppies have exhausted themselves, do we rest. This continues for three nights. For three nights we weave our way through the rain-sodden pine trees. Through the bogs and swamps. The wolves keep their pace, occasionally howling and barking at the pups to press on. The caws overhead, the only indication we’re still going the correct way.
On the fourth day, the sun is barely rising when the crow stops and perches on a low branch.
Amis whinnies, her hooves stomping in the dirt. I run my hand down her mane. “Easy girl.”
The crow tilts its head to the side, its silver eyes boring into me, making me advert my gaze. Around us are naked birch trees much like those of the Wicked Wood. The ones filled with black sap and tangled branches. The ones that have haunted my nightmares for many years. But my eyes catch on a particularly disfigured grove, their branches bent and trunks impossibly crooked.
“Didn’t think it could get much worse than the Wicked Wood,” I mumble as Amis prances unsteadily.
My ears ring as the crow caws again before taking flight directly to the grove. “Of course, that’s where the crones would be.” I guide an unsure Amis toward the trees, the wolves at her sides. “Why couldn’t they live somewhere like a meadow?”
My breaths get trapped in my throat, and as we approach the grove of birches, I realize that the center is actually a pool of inky, dark water.
I tie Amis off, giving her a much-deserved rest. All six of the wolves join my side. Alaric nudges my hand, so I run it slowly along his coat. Reassuring him as best I can. Ruse’s stony demeanor hasn’t changed for a moment. The wolf pups whine behind us, and when I turn around, I realize they’re sitting in a line, watching.
“Not coming?”
Ruse breaks her gaze from the trees only to snarl at my question.
“Fair enough.” They are her children, after all.
I tuck my hands in my pockets before taking a long, tiresome breath. Something cold and foreign brushes against my fingertips. I pull my hand from my pocket and suck in a sharp breath.
Roman’s necklace.
I don’t know when he gave it to me, but it stings as I slide it around my neck, the weight of it like an anchor. Steadying myself, I take my first step into the grove.