“We were going to wait until the end of the week,” Luka confessed quickly.
“There is no end of the week. There is only tonight.”
Only tonight.
I panicked, looking behind me at Luka’s window, at the light very visibly streaming in from his cracked door.
“Winry is in there,” I said, turning back to him. “Kristin is in there. Lindy is in there. Nikolas. Everyone I know—I haven’t even gotten to say goodbye. I have to say something, anything to Winry—”
“You can’t,” Adam said solemnly. “Luka… Please.” His eyes connected with Luka’s silently begging him to convince me, to somehow get me to leave. But my sister was in there, the girl I had known all of my life, the one who I already said goodbye to halfheartedly. I wanted time, I needed to tell her how much she meant to me. A week would have never been enough time, even if she knew I was saying goodbye.
“Wren,” Luka said, his voice low as his hand settled on my shoulder. He was leaving something behind too, someone who he had known just as well. His brother who would have given him anything. A part of him had to regret the decision as well. “You said it yourself, as long as we’re together, they’ll know that we’re fine.”
“But what if they’re not?” I asked, panicking. “What if I hurt her? Or what if someone else does?”
“Wren,” Luka said. “I know that they will be okay. Trust me. Just for the moment, trust me.”
My hand reached up, my fingers wrapping around his. A moment passed, just one, where I looked at him and wondered how we’d gotten there. How one day I had hated him with every fiber of my being, and now I had made him swear to never leave me. One day I had tried to make him into nothing, to forget his eyes and his soft smirk, and the next day he had become my everything. I had tried to resist him, and yet he made me love him, made me trust him more than reason itself.
“Okay,” I said, though a world by his side alone was something terrifying and unknown. “Okay,” I repeated as he reached forward, tucking away the stray hairs that had begun to wander in front of my face. “Okay,” I swallowed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Darkness swirled around us, a thick impenetrable haze summoned forth by a wave of Luka’s hand, making all but what was immediately in front of us imperceptible. Around my neck, the warm light of the lantern gifted to me long ago blazed, its light contained in our cocoon, catching specks of dust floating in the false night and making them glimmer in the face of its flame. Grey tree trunks and soggy leaf clumps passed us by, not even the creatures native to the forest could see through our slice of the abyss.
Of course, that didn’t stop them from pressing against the edges and trying. It had slowed our progress to a saunter, each and every character moving around us.
Only one had invaded so far, causing Luka to turn around to me and say soothingly, “that’s Bugul Noz, you know. It’s a Seelie. The last of its kind. It lives here because of its appearance, because the rest of the world would shun it.” He turned his head back around, “strange that it didn’t seem to care that it passed us by.”
I didn’t bother to tell him that I had already met it.
Luka had always been careful to hide the depths of his powers, vanishing them from view the few times I’d seen them after that initial, terrifying experience in which his illusions had transported me somewhere awful. But now, in the face of danger, he used them with reckless abandon, very clearly a master of his trade and capable of pushing his limits further when needed. He kept me close by his side as his eyes narrowed, squinting to see into the distance. Somewhere, far ahead, sat Whynne’s capital city, Chines. If we reached there, it was only a matter of exchanging some silver, and then we would vanish. The gold that Adam gave us would be saved for months later, when the use of gold outside of the country would escape the notice of the King.
All it would take was a change of clothing and the calm assertion that we belonged in the city. Then, if we were lucky, we would be lost to the bustle of Whynne’s most populous city before the guards could so much as get down the mountain side.
For a moment, however, Luka paused, his body braced against mine, pushing me forward so that we were chest to chest. In that moment I felt the strong pounding of his heart, of him struggling to keep calm as something, God knows what, walked by the edge of the darkness. His eyes shut and his hands tight upon me as a low growl sounded beside us, neither human nor Seelie in nature, but something more animalistic. He clenched me tighter, and I felt a slight prickle of annoyance with the fact that while our shield had done a good job of keeping others from sensing us, it had also rendered me blind.
The King was not the only one who would be looking for us in the woods, after all.
I saw a sweep of a tail invade our space, a long, pure black thing, and tightened my hold, my arms thrown around Luka’s neck and my face buried into his shoulder in case whatever monster it was decided to peek its head in. Some Unseelie were more dangerous than others; they were creatures of death and the unknown and if seen, our lives were as good as over. I didn’t really want to die, so.
A black pelt swerved into the edge of Luka’s shield. Thank God it was just the body of the Unseelie and not the eyes. For a moment, it stayed there, another close encounter teetering on the edge of danger. I could hear my heart thumping loudly in my chest.
And then, just as suddenly as it had pushed through, another snapping twig gained the thing’s attention, causing it to release a low growl, the claws on its hind legs flexing into the earth. A louder, popping sound, and the beast took off.
“A cat-sìth,” Luka confirmed as the tail pulled away. “A large black cat fae, one of incredible speed and strength alongside intelligence; upper Unseelie. Not something you could have fought.” He said that about the majority of the things we came by. This had not been the first to test our boundaries. “They steal souls,” he said. “And I’d like to believe you would want to keep yours.”
“I do like the idea of keeping it inside my body where it belongs,” I said, my hands loosening just as his did. “It gives me a little something extra, I believe.”
“It’s more dangerous since we’re on the mountain,” he admitted. “There are things that live mountainside that do not lurk by Greenable, or even Lynn.” I had no doubt in that; the deeper we went through the trees, the more dangerous things felt. But the paths leading down the mountain were the most obvious choice, so we couldn’t even risk them. “Soon we’ll be out,” he said, squeezing me to his side before I pulled away.
“They know that we’re here, don’t they?” I asked, once again moving behind him. “The Unseelie.”
“Yes,” he said flatly. “They can tell by the way the air smells and the wind moves. I can’t account for those oddities. Visually, they can’t see us, but like the sìth, they have an idea that something is there.” His hand reached out yet again, pulling me towards him, looking around him with a hiss. “A green man,” he whispered, “I should think you wouldn’t like to meet one.” From the sounds of it, I wouldn’t. I was not a fan of being blind. “The woods are alive tonight, something is rousing them and it’s not us,” he noted darkly.
“I couldn’t use my powers to shock the sìth,” I said, “and you seem to think I couldn’t handle the green men or much else here, so what use am I to the King?”
“Perhaps he has a large lightbulb,” Luka mused. “If I had to guess it’s not about what your powers are, but the obvious depth to them. You try to hide it, but you do have little moments that hint at some sort of control akin to Adam’s. I mean, you shocked Lindy via current, and with how unpredictable electricity can be… Plus you had the ability to show it to Camden and make it visible, I would guess that not many have that level of strength.” He froze for a moment, and I followed suit. Around us, the leaves rustled and my frustration rose.
“What sort of things are in these woods,” I asked when he finally breathed again, skeptical about the safety of the situation. “What liv
es on the mountain?”
“If you read any of the books I tried to give you, you would know,” Luka scowled, once again hustling me along, eager to keep me moving but also safe behind him. “But I supposed you wrote them off and figured I would be the one to read them.”
I shot him a sheepish look, practically pressing myself against his back.
He reacted stiffly, hesitant to admit the truth to me before finally giving in, probably figuring that it wasn’t worth another fight, not there. “There’s a rumor about the Unseelie and the Seelie, that we’re creatures carved from the trunks of these trees. The ash that the Seelie came from burnt long ago in the fire set by Mikhail, it’s sapling is on the king’s lawn, but the Unseelie? They came from an elder tree, one that was long since chopped down but continued to spread its roots to grow somewhere deep in the forest.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said, and he shot me a look.
“I’ll not ask what you’ve found in your misadventures, Wren,” he sighed.
“You know,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “If you told me five months ago that I would be walking through these woods at night with Luka Kinsley, I would have laughed.”
“No, if I told you,” he drawled, “you would have scoffed.”
I snorted, my hand reaching out to grip the waistband of his trousers as he sped up walking down the mountainside. Being unaware of my surroundings, I didn’t want to stumble and go tumbling down the mountain. For Luka, however, the idea was likely incomprehensible, seeing as how he looked back to me with a questioning gaze. “You’re moving too fast, and I can’t see,” I explained. “I don’t want to fall.”
“Trust me when I say that if you could see, you would want to move even faster,” Luka muttered and my hand tightened on him, frightened of what exactly he could mean.
A part of me wondered if the darkness surrounding us was to keep them out or to keep me levelheaded, the hair on the back of my neck stood up at the idea he had provided. Sensing my hesitation, his arm urged me forward, unfortunately causing me to stumble ever so slightly and forcing him to slide further down the mountain as he moved to catch me. The two of us skidded to a stop near enough for me to see what was on the edge of the darkness, less than two feet of ground prefacing a deep cliff.
I looked up to Luka with worry in my eyes.
“The wilder Unseelie like to catch their prey,” Luka said. “Not toss it off hillsides and hope for the best.” Still, he relented, letting the shield around us vanish, the muted light of early evening setting in. Above us, the moon hung low, full and bright. I was thankful for that.
“How much longer do you think?” I asked, looking back at him. He merely grabbed my chin and turned it, allowing me to look out.
Below, the lights of Chines glowed, brighter than any star or planet. It was a large, sprawling city, one that seemed to stretch endlessly, so unlike how small and discrete it had seemed in comparison when we were atop the mountain. We were close, so close that I could see the lights of automobiles moving on the streets. A few more miles and we would reach it, a few more miles and we would be safe.
“I have to admit, we’ve been at this for a few hours, and I am tired,” Luka said, tucking his hands in his pockets. “But that city down there? I’m going to say it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen today.”
“For a second, I thought you were lost,” I admitted, stepping closer to the edge.
“How could I be lost when the only direction we were heading was down?” Luka asked, moving with me. I looked up at him to see the city lights reflected in his eyes then. His eyes were softer, more hopeful.
“How much silver do you have in your pockets?” I asked, turning back to the city. “Because when we get down there, I want to find a vendor that’s still open and have a crepe with spinach and cheese.”
He laughed, “and what will I have?”
“Whatever I don’t eat.”
He squinted at me, sighing before finally accepting it, “fine, whatever you want. Just remember, this money has to last us for a while.”
“That’s why we’ll only have one hotel room,” I said. “To afford my crepe.”
“You have a few hours until you’ll get that crepe, we still have a long way to go,” Luka said. “And unfortunately, I’m going to have to conserve my energy for the time being,” he looked back to the darkened woods. “Thankfully, it’s not the Unseelie I am afraid of this time.”
“Do you think that they know that we’re gone?” I asked. He shot me an exaggerated look. “Do you think we’ll outrun them?”
“I can only hope,” he said, “but I do not know. I’m afraid to look back.”
I knew why, I didn’t have to ask. I could see the moving orange lights in the corner of my eyes, guards working through the trees. I had tried to write it off, I wanted it to be something else, like the Will o’ the Wisps, who guided people to their destiny. “If we keep moving against the cliffside, we can make it,” I muttered, because we had to, because I didn’t know if he really could keep up his magic much longer. “The trees have been groaning again, I think they’re moving the paths.”
“It’s nice to see that something isn’t working against us for once,” Luka mumbled, his arms wrapping around me as he settled his head over my shoulder, inhaling deeply. It was only a momentary action, and then he straightened, almost as if shocked.
He heard something.
“We should keep moving,” he said quickly, pulling me back. “If we linger too long, we won’t hit the city until daylight.”
I nodded tightly, flicking my wrist so that the sparks were present again, dancing between my thumb and forefinger. He swallowed, looking from me to the woods, knowing that though the idea of a cliffside stroll was appealing, the woods would take us down far faster.
“It’s coming from under us,” Luka said. My eyes flickered with concern. “Not the ground, but lower on the mountain. They’ve realized. They’re going to try to herd us upwards.”
My eyes widened as I edged to the side of the cliff, staring down. Sure enough, there were orange lights down there as well, still far apart, but growing closer. We had to move.
“I’m going to do something incredibly stupid, Wren,” Luka said in my ear, his hands grasping my cloak, “something that likely only you would be crazy enough to do.” In a motion, he pulled it from my shoulders, I looked over to him in horror.
“I’m not going to jump,” he said with a roll of his eyes, already moving past me, already tying my cloak to the side. He kicked a small stone over the side to test a theory, one which he didn’t explain, and then sighed in relief when we heard it fall just seconds later.
“Luka?” I jerked around to face him, my heart slowly beginning to race.
“I don’t think this cloak can hold both of us, and it will still be quite the fall. But I have healing on my side, and you don’t,” Luka said. “I’m going to climb down as low as I can get, and then you are going to jump and trust that I will catch you.”
“What?” My voice was far louder than intended, and he flinched. “Luka, I am not jumping, and you’re not leaving.”
“Trust me,” he insisted. “Wren, I need you to believe me. I will catch you.”
“It’s not about you catching me—” I began, but just as soon as I said it, he was disappearing over the side of the cliff. “Kinsley!” I rushed to the side, nearly stumbling over it as my face turned white, terror overwhelming me.
I heard a soft groan in response.
“Luka!” I yelled back, my toes practically in line with the edge.
“Jump!” A strained voice called back.
“Are you insane?” I snapped. “Luka!” My eyes turned desperately to the side, looking for my cloak. All that remained was a ripped scrap of cloth.
“Wren,” a voice warned.
“I’m going to find a way down, I’m going to get to you,” I hurried, looking for a solution. I didn’t have time however, not before the metallic tang
of magic hit the air—
I don’t think I’d ever screamed so loud.
One second there was ground, the next second—
I fell into Luka’s arms, amazed to see him still standing. Both of his eyebrows were raised as he looked at me, unimpressed with my hesitation and waiting for a reaction. For a moment, I could only stare at him, astounded by how boldly he moved. Then, reality began to sit in.
“I’m going to kill you. I’m glad that you’re not dead, because I am going to kill you,” I hissed to the man holding me. “I will strangle you with my own two hands, Kinsley, and then once I am done with that, I am going to kick your body senseless until I am sure that you are dead.” I swore as I shoved my way out of his arms. “We could have died!”
“I only rolled my ankle.”
“I am going to roll your nose right off your face, Kinsley,” I threatened, settling on the ground, holding my fist up to his jaw. “Ears,” I demanded, glaring at him.
“I hardly think that’s necessary, Wren,” Luka replied.
“No, it is, because my Luka would never do something even half as stupid,” I spat, grabbing the lobe of his ear and jerking it around to inspect. Harsh, purple scars greeted me. I furiously ripped my hand away from him. “You could have been seriously injured.”
“It’s nice to see that you now worry about my safety instead of wishing me dead,” Luka said dryly as I began to stalk away. He tucked his hands in his pockets as he walked behind me. “It’s a nice change of pace.”
“Do not compliment yourself by thinking that I do not wish you dead right now.”
“Considering your prior experiences in these woods,” Luka hummed. “I would think that you are very glad to have me.”
I glared, spinning around once more to face him and jabbing my finger into his chest. His hand caught it, amusement shining in his features as he lightly gripped my pointer finger… but then the color in his face faded.
Quill and Cobweb (The Chronicles of Whynne Book 2) Page 19
