They’d left the last farmhouse an hour past. Since then, there had been nothing but pine and stone and the low moan of wind threading through the rocks. Once, far off, Lain thought she heard a raven.
By midmorning, the mist had thickened into fog. It clung to her cornette and beaded on her lashes. The road narrowed, hemmed in by slopes of old scree. At a bend stood a shrine gate, two pillars and a crossbeam carved with serpents, their faces worn smooth by years of weather. Someone had once laid offerings there; a handful of feathers, the bones of a hare, the remnants of a bell cord turned green with lichen.
They paused beneath it.
“Rest here,” said Darrin. His voice was low, unreadable.
It felt too soon for a rest. The sun had barely cleared the ridge; she could still see their breath. But Thomas had already set his pack down against the stone base of the gate. Lain followed, grateful at least to stop walking, though her heart was uneasy.
The fog moved strangely here, curling in slow, deliberate shapes. She rubbed her hands together for warmth and glanced toward Darrin. He was watching the mist drift through the trees. His expression was distant, almost peaceful.
“Is this the pilgrim’s way?” she asked. “This is a shrine, is that so?”
He looked at her, and for a heartbeat she thought she saw pity in his eyes. “Something like that.”
Thomas crouched nearby, his back to them, checking the straps of his satchel.
Lain drew her cloak tighter. “It’s colder here.”
“The mist steals the warmth,” Darrin said. His hand rested on the hilt of his sword. She shouldn’t have felt threatened, but something about the movement had the ease of someone rehearsing an inevitability.
A stillness settled over the clearing, heavy as snow. The world felt paused, waiting.
When Darrin finally moved, it was sudden and quiet. One step, then another. He caught her arm before she could flinch away. His grip was strong, not cruel, but final.
“Darrin?”
Thomas stood sharply, his own hand going to his sword.
Darrin’s eyes flicked to him. “We talked about this. You watch the road. I’ll take care of her.”
Thomas hesitated, jaw clenched, then turned to face the road, his shoulders drawn tight.
Lain’s pulse hammered in her throat. “Take care? What are you doing?”
Darrin didn’t answer. He drew a length of cord from his belt, one of the thin, concentrated bindings used for ritual animals, its surface oiled and gleaming. His eyes flicked toward Thomas’s back, then to her. “Walk with me a moment,” he said quietly.
He guided her off the road, down through the brush. The fog thickened, swallowing the sound of the bells at his sword. She stumbled once on a root, and he steadied her with a hand at her elbow.
For a few steps they walked like that, and hope, foolish and bright, rose in her chest. He was leading her away. He was taking her away from Thomas, from the road. Perhaps –
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“You’re letting me go,” she whispered.
They stopped. Darrin turned toward her, still holding the cord. The look in his eyes wasn’t cruel, but it wasn’t merciful either.
“No,” he said softly. “I’m not.”
Before she could breathe he looped the cord around her delicate ankles, the oiled fiber slick in her fur. She kicked once, twice, and he caught the leg, binding it tight to the first. His hands moved with the calm of ritual, practiced and sure. When she fell backward with a yelp from lack of balance he caught her in one fluid motion and lowered her the rest of the way to the ground with devastating gentleness.
“Please,” she said, grasping at the ropes that bound her ankles, trying to push him off. She put her bare hand to his neck so he might feel her through the Tuning, and for a moment he froze, absorbing her fear, and she felt the hair prickle all up his flesh –
But he snagged her by the wrist, and pulled the other hand close to bind her further.
“Do you know why the Brighthand always leave their hands open to the air?”
“You don’t have to do this –”
“I do.” When he finished, he tested the knot, then began dragging her toward the deeper mist. Her cornette snagged under her head and pulled away from her hair, left behind in the snow. With her ears free the sound of the woods was immense, the scrape of her form through the snow, Darrin’s labored breathing. “We leave our hands open because of the Tuning. We’re not Tuned, mind you. None of the Brighthand are. But to protect our charges –” he huffed as he rounded a large stone with his writhing package in tow. “–we must be able to resist it. Particularly the Tuning of a Kelthi. It’s not the same as a human’s.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
He ignored her. Snow soaked through her robes, the cold biting straight to the bone. She had the strangest instinct to be still, suddenly, as if freezing might convince this predator that she was dead, and not worth eating.
He dragged her until the road was only a suggestion of pale light through the fog. He rounded a boulder, the rock at Lain’s back, the road beyond it. There he stopped, and she knew that he’d chosen this spot because Thomas, the younger, would not be able to see them. Thomas would not have to watch his elder kill her.
“I’ve felt the Tuning of many of your kind,” he said. “I already know how it will feel, when you die.”
The world was soundless but for the slow creak of the cord as he shifted his weight.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He turned to face her, and unsheathed his sword. “He shouldn’t have saved you.”
“I don’t understand,” she sobbed.
“Better you had been left to die. It’s cruel, what they’ve done, filling your head with hope. I’m sorry, child.”
He brought the sword to lay against her neck. Lain’s world narrowed to the edge of a blade. She couldn’t close her eyes.
“I’m sorry they made you think a Kelthi could be a saint.”
Then, by some act of grace, lines of the Morning Litany came to her head, emerging from her mouth as she quavered there, staring at the blade. “Let the flesh fall quiet. Let the breath be still. Let the shoulders release. Let the throat be open.”
He paused.
She carried on in a panicked whisper – if she must die let it be with the prayer on her mouth. “Let the bones remember. Let the blood slow. Let the voice –”
Faintly, from up the road came the crunch of movement, a voice talking gently. Lain heard it first, her eyes flashing away from the sword Darrin’s gaze lifted to follow hers.
“Let the voice –”
She heard the scrape of steel, a choked cry.
Darrin froze, listening.
Another sound, closer this time – Thomas’s shout, a blow, a body striking stone. Darrin might not have heard the earlier sounds; her ears were far more sensitive than a human’s. But he must have heard that.
Darrin hesitated, cursed under his breath, then turned toward the road. He left her there in the snow.
Lain lay still, the road hidden from sight. Before her was a steep drop; if she rolled that way, bound as she was, she would fall. She could only hear the fight: the dull clash of metal, the wet gasp of breath, the silence.
The world narrowed to the sound of her labored breathing. The cords bit into her legs; her fingers were numb as she tried to reach the knots.
The silence thickened, pressing at her ears.
Footsteps arrived, slow, heavy, and uncertain, crunching over crusted snow.
She fought down the tears, tearing at the cord with fingers that couldn’t feel.
The steps drew nearer. Something heavy dragged across the ground – a boot, a sword, a body? Lain flinched at the noise, twisting against the bindings until the cord cut deeper.
Finally, the walker paused beside her. For a moment there was only the fog, the sound of breathing. Then a voice, low and strained and unmistakable.
“Saint’s sake,” Mallow said. “You’re hard to find.”