“Just a superficial wound.” Aphen glanced over, making sure, and Arling quickly nodded in reassurance. Aphen turned back. “I can’t just sit here and do nothing!”
“Just stay with me. It won’t … be for very long.”
She was crying freely. “You should have waited for me!”
“There wasn’t time. Besides, the moor cat …” He trailed off. “Things were … already decided.”
Aphen put her hands over her face, ignoring the blood that streaked them.
“Take Arling … home,” Cymrian said. “Don’t let … anything stop you. Arling is decided. She knows. Don’t … make her doubt herself. Help her … stay strong.”
Aphen nodded, her mouth a tight line. She took her bloodied hands away from her face and placed them over his.
“I wish I had more time …”
“You know I love you,” she interrupted.
His eyes steadied on hers. “I know.”
“I should have said it more often. I should have done more for you.”
“You did enough. Don’t question it. Just remember …”
He coughed, and blood sprayed from his mouth. Aphen bent down quickly and they whispered hurried words to each other that Arling couldn’t hear. Aphen clutched at him as if to hold him back from what was coming. It wasn’t enough. Seconds later, he sighed and went still.
When Aphen lifted away from him, she had a look on her face that Arling had never seen before.
It was a look of utter despair.
That night, as Aphen lay wrapped in her grief, unable to think or act, Arling asked her sister what she had said to Cymrian. The Elven Hunter’s body lay wrapped in blankets and sheeting at the rear of the vessel’s cockpit. Aphen had refused to leave him, even though he had asked her to, telling her not to waste time but to just go.
“He never thought of himself,” she said. “Not once.”
“He didn’t love himself like he loved you.” Arling waited a moment before asking again. “What did you say?”
Aphen looked down at her blood-streaked hands. She had done a poor job of cleaning them, but she didn’t seem to care. “I told him I loved him enough that one day I would find him again. I would come for him wherever he was and we would be together.” She paused, shaking her head. “Stupid words. Foolish promises. But I meant them.”
“What did he say?” Arling pressed.
Her sister began to cry. “He said he would be waiting.”
Twenty-seven
Their journey to reach the huge pit that occupied the center of the valley required Redden Ohmsford and his companions to proceed much more slowly than they wanted to. Huge cracks split the floor, some of them hidden by brush and rock until they were right on top of them. In daylight—or as much daylight as there ever was within the Forbidding—it would have been an acceptable risk. But with nightfall coming on and the already weakened light rapidly giving way to treacherous shadows, it became especially dangerous.
At the same time, none of them wanted to be caught out in the open after darkness where they would be exposed and vulnerable to predators.
If not for Tesla Dart, the boy and the shape-shifter would have been hopelessly handicapped by their unfamiliarity with the terrain and their inability to cover the distance demanded of them in time. But the Ulk Bog had no trouble finding her way even in the closing dark and kept them moving steadily across the valley floor toward their goal, urging them on with hisses and grunts and anxious movements of her head, all the while warning of unseen dangers and potential pitfalls. She scampered and darted as if possessed, a mirror image of the Chzyk Lada, who by now only appeared in flashes of muted color when coming back to speak with his mistress. The odd procession snaked its way across the blasted earth in short, choppy bursts and with constant shifts of direction, led mostly by the small lizard.
“It would help if we were Chzyks, too,” Oriantha observed at one point.
It was almost completely dark when they reached the edge of the pit, the skies overcast with high clouds and low-hanging layers of mist, the air dry and murky within the vast cup of the valley’s walls. On reaching their goal, Tesla brought them to a halt and pulled them close.
“Now we choose. Go down in dark or wait for light. Sleep until sun or use torch.”
“Which do you think?” Oriantha asked.
The Ulk Bog scrunched up her feral face. “Dangerous in dark. Many steps, deep down. Then tunnel and cavern where magic kept. Hard to see with only torch.” She shrugged. “But hard to see with only torch in daylight, too. Not so different. No sun in cavern.”
“Helpful,” Redden observed.
“So it doesn’t matter?” Oriantha pressed.
Tesla Dart thought about it. “Doesn’t.”
“Then we should go now. The quicker we go down there, the sooner we get back out. Besides, it’s dangerous everywhere in this country.”