by Imogen Sera
If they’d been kidnapped from their beds and abandoned on a mountainside, there was no reason to expect that the fire came from anyone other than their captors. There was no reason to expect that someone who’d plucked two sleeping women from their rooms had anything resembling good intentions.
•••••
They walked for a little while, following Juliette’s nose. The rock was sloped up here, but level enough to not slip, and covered a great expanse that stretched further than Elsie could see.
They walked along for some time, each hoping that past every rocky outcropping they would find the source of the smell. There was no sign of life, though, and as Elsie walked her teeth began to chatter more fiercely.
“Have my cloak,” Juliette said, pausing as she looked Elsie over.
Elsie shook her head. “Then you’ll be as cold as I am. One of us should be able to function.” She smiled faintly. “I’ll be fine.”
Juliette eyed her skeptically, but turned and continued on their path. “I don’t like this,” she said, pausing and wrapping an arm around Elsie. “This feels...wrong. I mean obviously the whole situation is wrong, but—do you feel like you just want to run away from here? My skin is crawling, being here.”
Elsie nodded.
“I really don’t like this,” Juliette repeated.
Elsie’s legs were heavy as she tried to move them onward, and after she stumbled a few times, Juliette led her next to a tall boulder to block her from the wind.
Juliette sighed heavily as she insisted Elsie sit. “I’m going to run on ahead,” she said carefully. “I promise I’ll be back within half an hour. Stay out of the wind and stay warm, and I’ll be back with help just as soon as I find whoever lit that fire.”
Elsie nodded up at her. She didn’t want to be left alone, but she dearly wanted to be finished walking. Each step had sent a painful kind of ice shooting through her legs.
“You’ll be alright,” Juliette said, pulling the shoulder of Elsie’s nightgown up from where it had slipped down her arm. “I promise.”
Elsie nodded again, and then watched as the shorter woman left at a much quicker pace than she’d followed before. She was out of sight within minutes, and Elsie found herself looking around the peaks surrounding her and feeling very small.
If she died here, if Juliette died here, would anyone ever find them? It wasn’t so much her bones bleaching in the sun that bothered her about the thought, but more thinking about who might miss her. Vivian and Olive would, certainly, and not ever knowing what had happened to her seemed a cruel fate for them.
She thought about the man who had brought her there. He’d been...inhuman. The shifters that she lived with were perfectly mistakable as men; the person who had plucked her from her bad had been anything but. It wasn’t so much how he looked, although he was clearly filthy and unkempt. It wasn’t the way he’d spoken, either, although that had unsettled her. There’d been a strange kind of aura around him; something distinctly wrong had filled her room when he’d been in it.
She thought about her mother as she sat. She didn’t know how she couldn’t, because her mother had died in a similar way to the one which Elsie was increasingly sure that she would. She wondered about her mother, as she always did. She would die without knowing what she’d looked like, even if Elsie somehow made it off this mountainside. There was no one left to tell her.
Juliette appeared in the distance, and when Elsie tried to smile faintly to herself, she realized that she couldn’t move her face. Numb from the cold, she supposed, or else something much worse. Her eyes drooped as she watched Juliette walk, and then run closer.
Not Juliette, she realized after a moment. This person was much larger, much taller than Juliette. It was a man, she realized. Although she supposed she should maybe feel alarmed, she couldn’t muster it at that moment. She couldn’t even muster keeping her eyes open.
A minute later, warm hands circled her and lifted her. The whole man was warm, and she leaned in and pressed her face closer in search of heat.
They were moving, and Elsie didn’t want Juliette to return and find no one. “My friend is here,” she managed through chattering teeth. Her entire body trembled against the man as his grip tightened on her, blocking more of her from the wind.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, she found me.”
Four
Elsie finally opened her eyes some minutes later, partially defrosted and coming back to her senses enough to be terrified. She was in a cave of sorts, the big open mouth of it illuminating the strange room with walls of rock. She was next to a campfire; a fur blanket was wrapped around her, and under her there were many more. She was laid across them, on her side.
Juliette and the man who’d carried her hadn’t seemed to notice that she was awake, so she took the opportunity to study the stranger. He was a shifter, clearly; his height and his build gave that away.
Disheveled was the word that sprang to mind as she watched him.
Not in the way that the man who’d snatched her had been, not feral and frightening, but he had the look of a man who hadn’t had a care for his appearance for some time. There was the beginning of a beard across his jaw; his dark hair was too long to be tamed easily, but too short to be tied back. It hung around his face in a way that nonsensically infuriated her, uneven and clearly cut by his own hand.
She didn’t understand why she couldn’t look away from him, or why his face pleased her so much. It wasn’t a face she’d ever have thought she would like, with the rough lines of his jaw and the harsh planes of his cheeks and the tan that betrayed many hours in the sun. Still, looking at him made her feel comfortable, like he was impossibly familiar.
Juliette saw that Elsie was awake, and aimed a glare at the man before moving to Elsie’s side and smiling her beautiful smile at her. Elsie ignored the strange pang of jealousy at Juliette’s charming smile, at Juliette’s pretty everything, and took Juliette’s slender hand that she offered to help with sitting up.
“How are you feeling?” she asked gently.
“Better, I think,” Elsie murmured. “Thank you.” It was unsettling how uncomfortable it was for her to talk; from breathing cold air all night and day, she imagined.
“Tate—” Juliette jerked her head toward the not-quite-handsome stranger, “—and I were just discussing how you and I will get home.”
Elsie’s gaze flicked toward him with a hopeful smile. He was next to her, suddenly, staring at her as if she were important, watching her as if she were fragile. He was so close that she could reach out and touch the line of his jaw, if she wished, or the ends of his dark hair that swept across his cheekbones.
“It’s you,” he said oddly, something strange on his face. “You’re here.”
Elsie opened her mouth to respond, her brows furrowing at his unreadable expression.
“Where’s here?” Juliette demanded, exasperation plain on her face. “Why the hell are we here?”
His gaze stayed on Elsie for a moment, before he blinked and turned to Juliette. He straightened his back and something in his manner...changed. He was more powerful. More formidable. “That’s a question I should be asking you,” he growled. “If you think you can intrude on my people here without repercussions—”
To her credit, Juliette didn’t back down. “Are you serious?” she spat. “We were snatched out of our beds by some filthy fucking creature and dropped in the middle of nowhere. I’m frozen half to death, and Elsie’s worse off than I am. You need to get us some shelter and arrange a trip home, or you’re going to have a pissed off dragon king raining hell on you.”
Elsie watched the exchange with wide eyes, and didn’t realize she’d been unconsciously edging closer to the fire until the man again turned his gaze to her. He hadn’t reacted to Juliette’s threat at all.
“Elsie,” she heard him murmur before he took a deep breath.
Juliette turned her brilliant smile on Elsie.
“Our negotiations are g
oing well,” she said bitingly.
Elsie smiled nervously, her gaze moving back and forth from the man—Tate—to Juliette. She turned her face downward when she saw the looks they both gave her; one, intense and searching, the other, exasperated. She didn’t know how she’d gotten in the middle of this fight, and she knew that she should have been fighting along with Juliette, but she was intensely uncomfortable at the moment.
She examined the tips of her fingers as she held them out to the flame. They had an odd cast in the orange light, but she could see that they’d been much more damaged than she’d thought, from her sad attempt to climb up the wall. Most had been shredded around the nail beds, and one nail on her left hand had been torn clean off. She hadn’t felt it happen with her numb hands, but as they warmed she could feel it persistently: a rhythmic heartbeat in the tip of her finger, and something sharper, biting at her nerve endings there.
“You’re hurt,” the man said.
She shook her head and balled her hands into fists.
“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. Elsie cried constantly, much to her embarrassment. If she were at home this injury would have sent her to her room to sob privately in her bed. A small bump on her shin would make her eyes water; anything less than perfect kindness from a friend would make her chin wobble. She hated it and she didn’t understand it, but she found that there was very little she could do to prevent it.
She usually excused herself for privacy to weep at least once a day.
His focus stayed on her hands as he rose to his feet. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said quietly. He turned to Juliette. “Stay here; don’t do anything stupid.”
Juliette raised her eyebrows at him and opened her mouth to defend herself, but he was already gone. “He gives me the creeps,” she said, turning to Elsie. “Is it just me? There’s something...off about him.”
Elsie didn’t know what to say, so she gave a noncommittal shrug. He seemed to have quite the opposite effect on her.
“I think we’ll be safe here through the night, though. I can make him take us home in the morning.”
Elsie considered that. Juliette was pretty—beautiful, really, probably the most attractive of all the women at the palace. She knew just how to deal with men, and generally had them falling over themselves to please her. It wasn’t just how she looked, though, it was how she carried her self; it was how she was aware of herself. She was utterly confident of the world and her place in it, despite coming from a failed marriage and a desperate situation. If anyone could win Tate over to their cause, it was Juliette.
The thought was unsettling, and Elsie’s stomach gave an unpleasant lurch, but she didn’t know why. It was likely their best hope; given the conditions and the obviously long journey it had taken to get there, they clearly couldn’t make it home on their own.
Juliette began to plan aloud as to how they could best get home, and how they could exact revenge for their abductions. It scared Elsie slightly, unsure if she was joking or not, but after a few minutes she couldn’t focus anymore and returned her attention to the fire.
She didn’t realize that Tate had returned until she saw his bare feet in front of her, until she looked up into his glowering face.
Her legs were folded in front of her, her chin resting on her knee. The finger with a lost nail was bleeding more, now that her blood had finally thawed enough to pump through her veins. She looked away from Tate and back at it, trying to hold back tears.
When he crouched in front of her, with a small pail next to him and a length of cloth in his hand, she bit her lip hard to keep her face still. She didn’t want to cry in front of him. She didn’t like the way he watched her, didn’t like the way he was so imposing, so solid that she would feel like a delicate weeping thing before him.
He took her hand more gently than she imagined he would. Her palm lay across his fingers, and the heat that radiated off of him was hard to not savor. He dipped the cloth into the pail and brought it to her fingertips, rubbing gently to remove the blood. It was uncomfortable, not overwhelmingly so, but the look on his face as he examined her hand made her want to sob. She shut her eyes to avoid it, to imagine being anywhere but here, anywhere but in this tiny cave with an angry woman and a distracting man.
Juliette had quieted, and when Elsie glanced over at her she was alarmed to see a bright red stain across her midsection. Juliette looked down at it, dazed. “Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, I hadn’t noticed that.”
•••••
Elsie jumped up to rush to Juliette’s side, but Tate was there first. He pulled up her shirt to reveal a long, deep laceration all the way around her middle. It took a moment for Elsie to realize what it was from—a dragon claw.
Tate was already at work cleaning and binding it. Elsie wondered vaguely how Juliette hadn’t noticed it until that moment—the same way she hadn’t noticed her fingers, she supposed: they had both been too cold to bleed properly. Elsie stood aside helplessly and noticed tears on her cheeks, but didn’t even brush them away, suddenly not caring about them being seen.
Her useless hands covered her mouth, and it was a long minute of looking on in horror before she realized that she should do something.
“I’ll fetch the healer,” she said finally, after regaining her ability to speak. “Where is he?”
He ignored her and continued his work, his fingers brushing across Juliette’s midsection.
“Where is he?” she demanded. “She needs more than just a binding.”
“There isn’t one,” he grumbled, his voice muffled by facing away from her. “She’ll be fine.”
Elsie was silent but furious as he continued to work. She didn’t have the faintest idea of how to help, but she didn’t want to wander too far from Juliette in case she was needed.
He finished a minute later, and turned a grim face to Elsie. “She’ll be fine,” he said again, and Elsie wondered vaguely who he was reassuring. He sighed heavily and knelt to lift Juliette from the cave floor. “Follow me,” he said, and strode for the mouth of the cave.
Five
They walked along a pebbled path for nearly half a mile before Tate spoke. “There’s a dwelling up here,” he said. “A cabin. It was used before the plague as a place for infants and birthing mothers. I don’t know what exactly is left, but it should be warm at least.”
Elsie nodded next to him, adjusting the fur over her shoulders and casting a nervous sidelong glance at Juliette. She hadn’t awoken since she’d first noticed her injury.
A few more minutes passed before Elsie spotted where they were going. It would have been charming under any other circumstance: a steeply pitched roof, rough hewn wooden boards, and a large chimney above, that promised the comfort of a hearth.
The sight was so well known to her, so achingly familiar that she shuddered as she approached. Tate cast her a strange glance, as if he’d noticed, so she avoided turning to him.
The inside was sparse, but it pleased her. There was a large bed piled high with furs and linens, a bookshelf in the corner with many books in a language that she didn’t understand, and an empty hearth that reminded her to insist on being provided kindling. There was also a trunk that she opened nosily as Tate deposited Juliette on the bed; inside she found many different items of clothing, some even cut for women. She was pleased by that—she wanted to never wear her filthy nightgown again.
There was something strange about the cabin, and after a moment of looking around she realized what it was. He’d said it had only been used before the plague, which had swept through his kind nearly a decade before, but the cabin was clearly still in regular use. There was some dust, but not the heavy layer she’d expected, and the air inside was fresh and clean. She wondered at that as she looked around more.
There was only one room, and while it would be quite cramped with the two women, she didn’t plan on staying long. She realized with a sudden dread that if Juliette was truly inj
ured, then the task of convincing Tate had fallen to herself. She didn’t wonder if she would be able to convince him, she wondered if she would be able to stand herself while doing it.
She turned to see Tate staring at her, but when she met his gaze he blinked and looked away. She wasn’t sure why it flustered her, she wasn’t sure why in this situation his proximity was heating her insides and making her think things that she absolutely shouldn’t be thinking. He stood directly in front of her and she was overwhelmed by his size, in a way that she hadn’t been with any of the other shifters—some that she was even friends with. She had to look up to really see him, and his chest was so broad and hard before her that she wanted to reach out and touch him—
“I’ll leave you to rest,” he said.
“Wait,” she demanded, and snatched her hand back to her side when she realized that it was hovering in the air between them.
“We need firewood. And food and water. And I need some answers, please.” She hated the ‘please’ that she’d automatically tacked onto the end. She was trying to sound assertive, not like the scared little girl that she so often felt like.
He eyed her with something akin to amusement. “I’ll have those things brought to you. We eat our evening meal back at the camp,” he said, “shortly before the sun sets. Find me then and we can talk. Rest until then. Look after your friend.”
•••••
Juliette slept soundly, her breathing even, so once Elsie had stoked up the fire and checked on her a third time, she finally felt comfortable leaving. There was nothing in the trunk that she could change into, but she had found a heavy fur-lined cloak to wear over her nightgown.
When she finally left the cabin, the sky was nearly dark, and she wished that she’d departed sooner. The path had been difficult in the daylight; in the faint light of dusk it was nearly impossible for her to keep her footing. She slid once and scraped her palm, luckily not in view of anyone. By the time she made it back to the camp, the sky was fully dark, and she could only see by the light of the massive fire in the center of the clearing.
