Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)

Deeper than any of the coruscating sparks of hurt, lay an exceedingly bad feeling in his gut. This was not good. It was so not good that he couldn’t even bring himself to think of what had occurred. He could only act.

His gloves had shredded when he hit the rocky earth. Slowly, he pushed himself to his knees. His breath caught against his ribs. From his knees, he pushed himself upright onto one foot. His ankle dissolved into a fire of pain from even that tiny amount of weight.

“Holy Christ,” he swore aloud.

Blasphemy didn’t make the pain any better. It sure as hell didn’t make the truth any more palatable.

He didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to take off his damned boot to feel the telltale fracture. But he knew with a sick, sure certainty, knew it with the grinding pattern of pain he felt, pressing his foot into the ground.

Somewhere in that fall, he’d broken his leg.

The black despair that seeped into him was all too familiar. At least this time he actually had a reason to feel it. It felt like little tearing claws, that sure knowledge that he’d failed, that he’d made Kate another promise he couldn’t keep. He’d thought he was good enough. He’d imagined he could do anything. But that had been sheer pride. Reality now stripped him of his arrogance.

Failure settled about him like a lead cloak. He wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t strong enough. He was an idiot to have allowed Kate to rely on him, and now she—and Louisa—were going to pay the price of depending upon someone who was fool enough to think he could be a hero.

At that moment, Ned should have given up. Any reasonable man would have done so. He wanted to give up, to simply declare this task impossible so that he wouldn’t have to stagger through the pain that awaited.

But then, this wasn’t the worst thing to happen to Ned.

He shut his eyes. A privy, a dunking, a boat on the ocean. In some ways he felt he’d left a part of himself there on the water. The sun on that boat had scoured away so many of Ned’s illusions, all except one—when you needed to live, you kept on going, no matter how impossible the future seemed. And you didn’t stop.

Kate didn’t need a hero who could slay dragons. At the moment, she needed one who could stand up and walk.

And so Ned took the fear and pain yammering in his head and set them to the side.

“If I can do this,” he said aloud. “I can do anything.”

It could have been worse. Compared to that moment in the boat at sea, when his own will had betrayed him, a little thing like a broken leg was a picnic in the park, complete with beribboned basket. It was a baby dragon, belching tepid puffs of flameless smoke.

Ned didn’t want to stand—but then, he’d practiced doing what he didn’t want to do for a good long while. His leg hurt. Good thing he’d practiced pushing through physical pain before. When he shifted his weight, his breath hissed in.

On its own, he doubted his ankle could have supported him. But the stiff leather of his riding boot was as good as a cast. Well. He thought it would do. It was going to have to.

Before he put his full weight on it, however, he felt around the forest floor.

“Damn,” he said aloud, as if talking to himself would make the pain leach away. “I encountered enough branches on my way down. There has to be one here.” The leaves rustled around him in grim appreciation of the joke. He found a suitable piece a few feet away. It was crooked, and the bark rasped roughly against his skin. But it was long enough to lean on, and strong enough not to snap if he put his full weight on it.

He was going to make it to Berkswift.

One step was agony. Two steps sent shooting pains up his leg. Three… The pain didn’t get better as he went along; it got worse. It invaded his bones, his tendons; the strain of holding himself upright tested muscles he’d rarely used.

If he could do this, he could do anything.

He would never again need to flinch when he thought of his early years. He could win, step by step, yard by yard. Ned kept going. The first mile gave way to the second. The second, more slowly, gave way to the third. The third turned into a bone-jarring, fatiguing crawl uphill, where even the thought of success couldn’t drive him on. By the fourth mile, the pain had deranged him enough that he imagined the sound of bone grinding against bone with every step.

He reached the top of the hill, much relieved. There was the fence of the old goat pasture where Champion was kept. Ned paused and grabbed for the rail. It supported his weight better than the battered branch he’d been using. He shut his eyes, and tried to remember if the fence wound all the way to the stables. It did—but unless he crossed into the pasture, he’d be diverted an extra half mile. If he could just cross this final acre, he might finally be within shouting distance of the house.