26
“Why would the gods want our swords?” I say over a flickering fire.
We headed north through the woods, away from that main road, for a full day, until we reached where it turned into a stretch of mountains. When Raker managed to catch a wild boar, I didn’t object. I sat and watched him
set the fire with his stone. Roast it.
And hand me a good portion of it.
By going back for him … it seems a rock in the wall between us has been removed. His mask still hasn’t. There are still secrets thrumming between us. I can feel them.
But there is also the start of a different type of partnership. One with a push and pull. I hand him a smattering of nuts I found a few hours ago. He takes them without a snide remark. I hear them crunching in his mouth.
“Mine’s pretty nice,” he says.
And there he goes again, proving just why I want to throttle him.
I nod. “What a relief,” I say, chewing on the meat. Swallowing. “You were starting to be a little too tolerable for my taste.”
He makes a huffing sound that isn’t quite a laugh. He finally answers my previous question. “The gods hoard power. Haven’t you noticed?”
I have. But I just thought it was being hoarded on this side. I didn’t know … I didn’t know they were keeping so much of it from the immortals too.
Now I’ve seen the truth. The villages are better off than the ones on Stormside, of course, but not by much.
The nature here is beautiful, the fruit and vegetables are plentiful, but the land is too dangerous to cross. The roads are full of perils. What good are all these resources if most can’t access them? The God of Travels has
outlawed maps and stationed Masks at each major trail. Now it all makes sense.
The gods want to keep the immortals weak and reliant on them. They want to keep them separate, lest they form an uprising.
“The gods were supposed to protect us,” I say.
Raker snorts. “The only thing you can ever count on is your metal, Aris.”
I suppose that’s what he thinks. Is that why he hides himself behind it? Is that why he hides at all?
“Can I see yours?” The question spills out of me before I can help it.
He tilts his head at me.
“Your sword,” I clarify.
He just stares at me, and my cheeks heat. It sounds so stupid. I’ve obviously seen his blade before. I just had it pressed against my fucking throat. But I’ve never been able to actually examine its details. “I work in a forge,” I try to explain. I shake my head. “Never mind, I—”
In a flash, he stands, unsheathes his weapon, then, carefully, warily, places it flat in his hands, holding it up for me to study.
I blink too many times, shocked. A moment later, curiosity has me scrambling to my feet. I’ve admired and hated this blade in equal measure for years. I’ve only ever seen it when it’s being used or standing proud in
front of him.
But up close … It’s magnificent. Its cross guard is made up of sharp pieces of shattered metal, expertly melded together. Its blade is long and broad, sparkling and smooth, perfectly straight, with a fine edge. It’s so big, it’s a wonder he can fight so effortlessly with it. My hands drift toward its steel.
“May I?” I ask, glancing up at him, only to find him staring down at me.
Just when I think he’ll refuse, he nods.
My fingers lightly brush the metal, and Raker shudders.
With anger? With disgust that I’m touching his blade? I smooth my fingers down it, all the way to the hilt, studying the detail, taking it in, and all the while, Raker is tense and silent in front of me. I might be overstepping, but I curl my hand around the hilt, just to see what it feels like, not even able to get my fingers all the way around, and— Just as fast as Raker drew his sword, he sheathes it.
“Now you know what a real sword feels like,” he bites out.
I glare at him. “I have a real sword.”
“Maybe. But forging weapons and even claiming them doesn’t mean anything if you can’t use them.”
“Then I guess I should get to work,” I say through my teeth. I don’t spare him a glance as I creep to the mouth of the cave we’ve settled in and cycle through the different positions he taught me. I won’t beg him to train me again—but that doesn’t mean I still don’t need training. My own knowledge is better than nothing.
Raker puts out the fire, leaving me just the moonlight. For once, I know his action isn’t out of malice. The flames are too much of a risk, knowing we’re being hunted. On horseback, they’re faster than us. They could catch up at any moment.
The storm is still raging. Rain reflects off my metal as I move my sword up and down, fighting an invisible opponent. I go through my memory of battling the split-skin immortals, repeating my motions, then changing them to be better. Envisioning myself in another duel.
I train until my muscles are sore. Only then do I creep past Raker. He’s facing the wall. But his breathing—it isn’t steady. If he’s awake, he doesn’t turn around.
Slowly, I lie down on the stone floor and stare up at hanging rock, sharpened into fangs. Each piece is just slightly glowing, with hidden crystal. Beautiful—with an edge. Just like our swords. Just like Starside.
His deep voice echoes through the cave. “Your footwork is sloppy.”
I roll my eyes. “Thank—”
“Your back foot. When you retreat, make sure it moves first.”
Oh. I didn’t realize I was doing that.
“Thank you,” I say, my voice losing some of its bite.
I go to bed turned toward the cave wall.
The thundering of a hundred hooves wakes me. The ground shakes. Rocks fall from the ceiling, stabbing into the stone floor, shattering.
They’ve found us.
How? We only had the fire lit for a few minutes. Maybe they haven’t found us at all. Maybe they’re just going into the mountains, like we are.
That theory all but dies when the horses stop.
And I hear voices.
Raker is pulling me up in an instant. “We need to go.” Still half-dazed from sleep, I stumble forward, grabbing my sword.
“Go where?” Heavy metallic steps sound just beyond the cave’s mouth.
If we go out there, we’ll run right into them.
Raker isn’t going toward the mouth, though. He’s going in the opposite direction, deeper into the mountain.
It’s early morning. Only the faintest curl of light follows us as we run straight into the darkness.
The ceiling slopes down and loses its glimmer. Raker has to duck, maneuvering around mounds of sharp rocks dripping like teeth. I follow the slight shine of his armor. We run for several minutes without slowing.
The path is wide, but instead of moving forward, he suddenly takes a turn. He rushes toward a dark corner. I’m about to ask what the hell he’s doing when he says, “There’s a hole. Another level, below.”
Without warning, he’s gone. I blink—and can barely see the trace of a circle on the ground. A gap in the rock.
I stand very still.
The light from the mouth of the cave has been all but ripped away. The entrance has been wholly blocked.
Fear roots me in place. Because—because I can’t go down there. I know
that.
The memory grips me.
Flames guttering into pure and utter darkness.
Screams melting into silence.
A starless night, like even the galaxy was closing its eyes, like even it didn’t want to see what had happened.
Only my sobs, because everything that I loved, everything that once burned so fiercely, all of that was burned, and it was all my fault.
I’m alone. In the dark. Screaming.
Alone forever.
A metallic step echoes from the other side of the cave. It won’t take them
long to get here.
“Aris, you need to jump.” Raker.
His voice barely reaches me. How far is the drop? I blink, but I can’t see
anything. Not anymore.
Just like that night.
Clutching ash. Trembling in it. Smeared with it. Gasping— “Aris.”
“I’m scared,” I say, my voice quivering. My eyes burn as memories from that night blind me. As they echo through my mind just like those metallic steps through this cave, getting closer. Closer.
Then him again. “I know. I know, Aris,” he says, and his voice is devoid of its usual cruelty. He says my name almost like a caress.
“I’m afraid of the dark,” I gasp, and hearing it out loud … how pathetic it
is … “I know,” he repeats. “You told me.”
I did. Beneath the stars, I did, in the same breath that I told him that I could learn to love the night. But this isn’t night. It is a dark, cold place.
“You need to jump, Aris,” Raker says, his voice harder now, like he can hear them coming. “I’ll catch you.”
I shake my head. No. I can’t trust him at all. I can’t trust anything in this place. Especially when he’s saying my name like it’s something to savor.
The Raker I know would never be this patient. Maybe Raker left. Or maybe he’s dead, in a heap below. Maybe this is an entirely different beast speaking to me. I’m reaching for any excuse I can not to jump into that dark hole as I say, “How do I know you’re not a demon? Or a creature like that
man in the mists?”
A pause. “You saw the man in the mist?”
I blink, momentarily distracted from the approaching steps. The yells as they find the remnants of our fire. “Did you?”
I think about what the Gardener said. That he had only ever met one other person with as much suffering … just now.
He couldn’t have been talking about Raker. Heartless, cold Raker.
He doesn’t answer.
Instead, he says, in a frustrated growl, “You snore in your sleep.”
I rear back, shock melting away some of my fear. “What?”
“When you’re not waking up half the world with your fucking nightmares, you’re keeping me up with your snoring.”
Do I?
“That doesn’t prove anything,” I say.
“Why would a demon care about your sleep habits?” he demands.
“Why do you?” I hurl back.
“Aris, just fucking jump,” he says.
Just as a boot echoes right behind me—I do.
And he catches me, just like he promised. Before dropping me right on my ass. “Fucking hell, Aris,” he snaps, before he drags me back into the shadows.
There’s murmuring above. I don’t dare breathe. I don’t dare move.
Then there are steps as the warriors keep going, right past the hole.
They’ll find it eventually. I hear calls for torches.
It’s more than we have.
I tense, fear like ice in my veins as I realize we are beneath a mountain.
In pure and utter darkness.
My breath hitches. I feel around for anything I can, which is mostly Raker. I get close to his hood, and he rears back.
“Your fear, Aris?” he says, that cutting voice back. Any hint of patience is gone, like it never existed in the first place. “Get over it.”
It’s said like an order, a general telling his warrior to do something,
without any room to argue.
I swallow.
He’s right. I’m not going to make it out of here if I can’t even get a full breath.
I remember what I did in the forest when I encountered that screaming woman. My memories were a tether. A light through the darkness. I can do
this. I have no choice.
“I will,” I say.
“Good.” He turns. I hear his steps, getting farther away. Desperately, I stumble forward, trying to follow in the direction he’s moving, not wanting to be left alone again. My pulse picks up when I can’t reach him, when I don’t know where he’s turned. I hear a deep, rumbling sigh before he grabs
my arm.
Together, we walk through the darkness.
Walk is generous. He all but drags me, because it’s almost impossible to walk quickly when I can’t see even an inch in front of my nose.
The tunnels are narrow. I know that, because the wall scrapes my arms every few seconds. My breaths echo. The air is stale. It feels like—it feels like I’m trapped.
But I focus on the steady heat of Raker’s long fingers around my elbow. I focus on his and my breath merging. I use his strength to steady myself, for even though my strides are cautious and unsure, his are not. He walks just
as smoothly as he does in a field. He is like a blade cutting through everything, bending the world to his will.
I cling to that strength, try to let it call to my own. If he is not afraid, then I will not be. I slow my breathing. I steady my steps.
Then I pluck one of those remaining memories I covet.
I think about the time my father told my sister and I the story of how he and my mother fell in love.
They were neighbors. They had known each other their entire lives.
His father died young, so my father had to help his mother take care of the family. He would travel far away, to where thicker trees still grew, cut them down, then drag the wood back to the village in a sled. There wasn’t time to play in the streets, like the other children, but he would watch them as he cut that wood. He admired my mother from afar. He said she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He said he liked the way she threw her head back when she laughed. She was doing it that day, as she and the other children played a game.
The wolf came from nowhere. Its ribs were visible through its flesh. It was starving. It grabbed my mother by the back of her dress and dragged her through the streets, all the way into the forest, a patch of trees that were sickly and half-rotted. She screamed.
The other children ran away, but my father grabbed his ax and ran after her. He ran right into the woods.
Before the wolf could take a bite out of her, he chopped the fabric from her dress, freeing her.
And—as my mother added—it wasn’t the fact that he saved her that made her fall in love with him. No. It was the fact that he did not kill the wolf, even though he had an ax in his hands.
Instead … he brought it food.
It came back. And my father fed it again. And again.
What my father loved about my mother was that she forgave the wolf.
She had mercy for it too, and she found flowers with soothing properties, to mend the scrapes on its paws. Little by little, the wolf became a friend.
Of course, the first thing my sister said after the story was over was that she wanted a wolf as a pet. And that, if one attacked me and she saved me, could we keep it?
I still remember the look our parents gave each other. Like maybe they shouldn’t have told us the story after all.
And I’ll never forget the love in that expression—like an entire lifetime of memories was trapped in that one look.
I blink, and the darkness is just as deep as it was a few minutes ago. But it has lost some of its weight and teeth.
“Can you see anything?” I ask, wondering how Raker is walking so
assuredly.
“A little.”
“How?”
He waits a few moments before answering. It’s like every word has to be dredged out of him. “We trained in tunnels sometimes.”
I frown. “I didn’t know there were tunnels on Stormside.”
“There are several.”
I suppose there’s a lot about our side that I don’t know. “And what … what was the rest of your training like?”
His voice is sharp as a scythe. “If you’re looking for a distraction from your fear of the dark, then this isn’t it, Aris.”
I don’t know why the bottom of my spine curls every time he says my name. Even if it’s with irritation, like just now.
It’s been weeks of this, though. Just like he sees right through me, to my weakest points, I see right through him.
I exhale heavily. “That bad?” Is that … is that the suffering he endured?
The one the Gardener spoke of?
He huffs a cruel laugh. “You don’t know what bad means, Aris.” His fingers tighten against my skin. “You don’t know what fear means. Or pain.
You don’t know any—”
“You don’t know what I know,” I say, my voice coming out so sharply, it cuts him off. He doesn’t say anything in response.
Silence. For several moments, it’s just silence.
Then curiosity overtakes me, and I break it. “How many people have you killed?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “I lost count a long time ago.”
“Hundreds?”
A pause. “More.”
I take a stuttering breath. So many lives … gone at his hand. This same hand that is now steering me through the darkness.
I shouldn’t be shocked. I know his reputation. I have seen him in action.
“The only way you get good at killing is by killing, Aris,” he says.
He’s right. And maybe that’s been my biggest flaw all along, the biggest threat to me reaching the gods and getting my revenge.
I am not as heartless as Raker. I can’t just turn off my emotions. And … and it makes me reckless.
“Have you ever been anything else?” I ask quietly. There is nothing but our voices in this tunnel. “Anything beyond the killing?”
I can’t imagine him as a child. Laughing. Carefree. Hell, I don’t even know if he has a face. I don’t know if he’s badly wounded, or monstrous, or anything at all.
Did he have a family? Was he born into one of those orphanages where the children are trained to fight from the time they can walk? Is that how he joined the king’s guard?
I want to ask. But—but I don’t want to ask anything I won’t answer, if he
turns it on me.
It doesn’t matter.
That’s the question that quiets him, and turns into miles and miles of
walking in endless silence.
And I can’t help but wonder why.
We walk in darkness for a full day.
The tunnels groan and shift around us, as if constantly being shaped with magic, and Raker guides us through different paths. He’s our compass, moving assuredly, and I really hope he knows what he’s doing.
I start to fear we’re traveling deeper underground. That maybe there is no ending, and we’re forever lost in the maze of the mountain. Maybe we’ve just been walking in circles. In this darkness, I’d never know it.
Even my memories can’t keep cold terror from settling in the pit of my stomach. Or, after a day without rest, my legs from wobbling.
They finally give out, and Raker only plucks me from the ground and drags me along again. “I can’t,” I say, blinking away dust. My voice is just
a rasp. My body is spent.
“You can” is all Raker says.
And the fight in me that rises at those words, that wants to scream at him … it is enough. It is enough for me to dig into that pit of strength again and find more.
His hand is still splayed against my spine, where he fisted the fabric of my shirt and pulled me to my feet again. It’s a large steadying presence,
keeping me upright. His fingers are long across my sword. But he doesn’t
take it. He just keeps his hand there.
“How are you not tired?” I ask.
“I am,” he rumbles.
He doesn’t sound it. He doesn’t feel it. That hand is radiating strength, and I am taking it, as if leeching some of his years of training.
I take a rattling breath. “My third fear,” I say. “Of … of dying in a stupid way … I—”
“You are not dying in these caves, Aris,” he says, with so much credence that the next words die in my throat.
“Okay,” I say instead. I believe him. And I steal some of that confidence too. I focus my mind not on if I will make it out of these caves, but when. I imagine rays of sun spilling into these tunnels of darkness.
And I keep walking.
Hours later, I finally see it.
Sunlight. It hurts my eyes, after all this darkness, but I keep looking.
Everything in me wants to run toward it, but I don’t need to. It’s … getting closer, like it’s barreling toward us.
I frown, and that’s when I feel something else. The bite of magic, just like in the Storm Woods, an energy pulling all my senses toward it, begging me to give it my full attention … I don’t think. I grab Raker and shove him against the wall as hard as I can. I press myself against him.
“Don’t look,” I say. I close my eyes tightly.
Then, all at once, there’s fire at my back, the suffocating heat of this demon, or whatever it is, begging us to look. To make those flames grow so large, they might flow right through these tunnels.
Look, it whispers, its voice calling to my blood, to my wants, as if to pull them out one by one. Everything you desire, I have it. Right here.
It feels like it does. I can almost taste the whisper of everything I’ve ever wanted right behind me, so close I can see it in my mind. So close, if I just look, it will be mine.
My body trembles with the need to turn around and have everything I’m envisioning. And it’s not just innocent wants that it has pulled from me. No, treacherous wants sear along my skin in flames so hot they draw a whimper from my lips.
I lean harder against Raker, to get farther from the flames … but also, for other reasons.
And instead of pushing me away, like he always has, Raker curls his hands around my hips— And pulls me closer. I draw in a ragged breath, in pure shock. I don’t know if it’s an attempt to hold me still … or if he actually wants to touch me. But no one’s ever dared, and I’ve never even gotten close to this, what with my markings. And in this darkness, with our eyes closed … All these buried wants are clawing out of me, and I’m trying to stop them, but part of me doesn’t want to. My palms are against his armor. Our chests are flush—and his is rising and falling just as rapidly as mine is. His breaths are labored. His body … it’s trembling, like he’s fighting something too.
Slowly, my hands slide up to his neck, giving him plenty of time to stop me, but he doesn’t. My fingers brush against his pulse … and it’s racing. I need more. I—I need to keep touching him.
“Raker,” I say in a strangled whisper, lifting to my toes, to be anywhere near his significant height.
Like a seal has been broken, his fingers slip beneath the hem of my shirt, and my blood ignites.