The air was, once again, unnaturally quiet.
I approached the dead slyvik. It had fallen awkwardly into a narrow part of the cliffs, so its body was suspended above us. One broken, shredded wing dangled to the ground, its twisted neck wedged against the stone.
When it was moving, it was difficult even for me to get a full sense of the scale of the creature. Now, I felt a little dizzy that I’d just thrown myself at that thing. It was perhaps the length of four grown men, nose to tail.
I touched the wing, and a darker realization settled over me as I sensed the remnants of its aura.
“This is a juvenile,” I said.
Erekkus muttered an Obitraen curse.
“What were you thinking?” Atrius’s voice snatched my attention away. He approached me, palpably furious. But my attention immediately fell to his shoulder, which was soaked in blood, and his right arm, which hung uselessly at his side.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
Erekkus eyed the corpse. “A juvenile,” he repeated.
His tone of voice said it all.
“I don’t think they get much larger than this,” I said, “but they do get stronger. And cleverer. They usually don’t venture this far south.”
“Or wander away from the pack,” Atrius said.
No surprise that he’d done his research.
Erekkus’s eyes went wide. “Pack?” he yelped, grabbing his bow again.
“There aren’t others here,” I said quickly. I pressed my hand to the stone again, making sure I hadn’t just made myself a liar—but I felt no other living creatures but us, save for the distant reverberations of what must have been other slyviks far ahead.
“This is a young male,” I went on. “They’re often driven away from the pack when they reach maturity.”
“And this one wandered far from home.”
Atrius touched the corpse’s tail, and I wondered if I imagined the brief pang of sadness in his voice, at something that maybe seemed a bit too familiar.
My attention fell again to his shoulder. And his arm. He still hadn’t moved it at all.
I cursed myself for not being a more useful healer.
Atrius must have read the look on my face. “It’s fine,” he muttered.
“You’re right-handed.”
A brief pause, like it struck him I had noticed. Then, he said breezily, “I’m just as good with both hands.”
Arrogant man.
“We’ll patch it up,” I said. “And then we need to get moving. We’ve wasted too much time already.”
Erekkus was already rummaging through his pack, withdrawing a roll of bandages and a bottle of medicine. He started to approach Atrius, then, when Atrius scowled at him, he handed them to me instead.
“Tell the others to be ready to move,” Atrius told him, wincing as I poured the medicine over the wound. Up close, I could feel the heat of the broken flesh—the teeth had cut deep and torn, and the saliva posed risk for infection. Nasty stuff. I prayed that his vampire hardiness would fight it off better than a human could.
“That wouldn’t have happened if I was awake,” I muttered, as I lifted his arm to wrap the bandage over his shoulder.
His other hand caught my chin, tipping it toward him. “You did an incredibly foolish thing,” he snapped.
Weaver, I was sick of being told how stupid I was.
“You—”
But then he said, “Thank you.” And his kiss was so soft and quick that I barely felt it before it was just his breath cooling on my lips.
I paused, startled more than I’d like, before resuming my bandaging.
“You’d do it for me,” I said quietly. It was the only thing I could think to say, and I wasn’t even sure why—until I realized that it was undeniably true.
Atrius and I didn’t say anything else as I finished his bandage. I secured it, and then we were off into the mists once again, one step after another.
40
The next days came and went in a blur. Walking until exhaustion. Eating until sleep. Sleeping in shifts, in the sparse, fractured hours. Waking and walking. Repeat. There was no sun or moon to track the passing of time. The terrain grew rougher, my shins and ankles sore and bruised, and often scraped because I couldn’t focus on navigating for the group while also navigating for myself. I leaned on Atrius more and more heavily, and in turn, he leaned more on me—because as the stone grew rougher, so did our path forward. Now, the path branched very frequently, forcing me to stretch my awareness through the stone far ahead to cut off dead-ends and find the safest route forward.
Sometimes, even the paths that went nowhere stretched on for miles, making it almost impossible to truly tell which was the right way. At some of these branches, I sagged against the rocks, my cheek pressed to the stone, sweat beading on my forehead as I reached through the threads for many long, agonizing minutes to make a decision.
I was forever conscious that the stakes of these choices were high. The further we went, the more frequently we came across the remnants of travelers who were far less lucky than us. Some were ancient bones, clad in dented, cracked armor rusted away with time. Others were fresher—fresh enough that one could make out the teeth and claw marks from the slyviks who’d picked their body clean. The freshest we came across were a pair—an adult and a child.
Erekkus had paused at that one, a brief, powerful stab of sadness in his threads.
“Why would someone bring a child—” he’d started, and then shut his mouth abruptly, as if halfway through the question he’d understood exactly what the answer was.
Of course he did. We all did. Desperation. Perhaps the same desperation that would make a man bring his child to wander the world to strange foreign countries, searching for a new home.
Atrius laid his hand on Erekkus’s shoulder, gently nudged him forward, and we didn’t look at that tiny little corpse again.
As we drew further north, I began to sense the slyviks more frequently. With every branch in our route, I was now checking not only for dead ends that would have us walking in circles to our deaths, but also for the beasts. This far north, they tended to congregate in groups, which made them slightly easier to avoid but also much more dangerous to encounter. Sometimes, I took us on dangerously convoluted detours in order to avoid clusters of them that I sensed nearby. Though it slowed us down, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision when we’d hear those not-distant-enough screeches.
Atrius kept track of the days with marks in a little, bloodstained notebook he carried in his pocket, though I was skeptical of how accurate his sense of time was. I was convinced that none of us, him included, were really sure how much time had passed.
The cycle was endless. Walk. Sleep. Walk. Hold our breaths. Change course. Walk.