Edgelanders (Serpent of Time)

by Jennifer Melzer

  “I’d give anything for a bath,” she confessed, laughing uneasily as she drew away. “The water is freezing though, and I’ve no clean clothes to wear if I get these wet.”

  The council had given her clothes before they sent them off to their death: a raggedy pair of brown wool pants that were so large she’d had to tie a rope around the waist to keep them from dropping down to her knees as she walked, a cream-colored shirt and a fur vest that would barely keep her warm at all once they’d reached the colder climate they were meant to eke out the rest of their days. He should have known just from looking at the clothes they’d given her that the council never intended them to reach Rimian alive, and if on the off-chance they did somehow make it, they wouldn’t last a day in those threadbare clothes.

  “You could always wash your clothes out here and dry them by the fire. They would be dry before we set out again.”

  “And what do I wear in the meanwhile?”

  Finn’s eyebrow arced upward with ease. He had no objection to her wearing nothing, but the clever smirk she wore when she lifted her eyes to meet his again seemed to suggest walking around naked in front of him and his brother was completely out of the question. Not everyone was as shameless as he was. And then a slight twinge of jealousy flared inside him at the thought of his brother ogling her like that.

  “I’ll give you my shirt if you want to take yours off to wash it.”

  Inspecting the blood spatters painted down his chest, she compared them mentally to her own clothing and shook her head. Despite the amount of killing he’d done in her name, his clothes were surprisingly much cleaner than hers. “It’s cold out here. You’ll freeze.”

  “Nah. I barely even feel it. Here.” Reaching down to untuck the fabric from the belted waistline of his pants, she leaned back and eyed the exposure of pale, bare skin, the dark patch of soft hair across his chest that trailed down the taut muscles of his stomach and disappeared below his belt. “Change into this and wash out your clothes so they have time to dry.”

  Hesitantly, she reached for his shirt, clutching it loosely in her wet hand before rising from where she’d crouched. For a moment Finn just stared at her, almost as if he were waiting for her to strip down right there in front of him, but when she cleared her throat he snapped his attention back to reality.

  “I’ll wait for you over there.”

  “Thank you.”

  Stalking away from the stream’s edge, the temptation to turn around and catch a glimpse of her was almost more than he could fight. Watching over her while she slept, he’d noticed hints of freckle decorating the bare skin of her shoulders and collar bone. At the time he’d wondered if those freckles covered every inch of her milk white skin, and he imagined kissing every one of them and reveling in the soft sound of her sweet sighs. A little peek wouldn’t hurt, would it? On the other hand, for a guy who was trying desperately to win her trust, sneaking a look at her while she undressed probably wasn’t the best way to gain her favor.

  “You’re not looking, are you?” she called back to him over her shoulder, as if she heard the silent debate he’d been having with himself.

  “If I was, do you think I’d say yes?” He snorted a laugh, reaching out to absently swat at a long blade of dried grass in front of him.

  “It’s hard to tell. What kind of man are you, Finn? Your brother says you’re mad, and I’ve seen that proven to be true, but are you an honest man, at least? A gentleman?”

  “I’m as honest as they come, Princess,” he said, “but gentle? I don’t know about that.” He could be gentle, if that’s what she wanted.

  “What is it about men, that they think gentleness is a sign of weakness?”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “All right. You can turn around now.”

  She literally swam in the shirt he’d given her, the loose folds drooping around her shoulders and exposing the pale skin of her back, the sleeves so long she had to fold them up several times before her hands stuck out the bottom. She carefully knotted the excess length at her side, tugging the fabric tight across her chest before dropping down onto her knees in front of the water again. She began to work the blood stains from the fabric of her shirt and cloak, scrubbing and wringing them in the stream until the dried flakes dissolved and colored that muddy section of stream a faint shade of red.

  She didn’t look up from her task as she spoke. “I used to watch the soldiers in the training yard from my window, the way they were with each other, always acting so tough and strong. Showing pain was grounds for punishment and derision. Displays of kindness were treated as weakness. And gods forbid one of their wives ever showed up to have a chat with them while their friends were around. The way they treated their women around the other soldiers was appalling. And don’t even get me started about the things I saw at court. The way my father…” She stopped herself min-sentence and corrected the thought before moving on, “The way King Aelfric treated my mother, my sister and me. Like we were inferior beings unable to decide when to squat and make water without a man telling us it was time.”

  “My father would have never treated my mother that way,” he admitted, and he would never treat her that way. And then it occurred to him that in his own way, he already had. He’d picked her up when she wouldn’t listen to reason, thrown her over his shoulder and carried her away from danger, but what else was he supposed to do? Just leave her there to die? Would Deken have done the same thing to Eornlaith if he’d thought it would save her life? Even if it had earned him a hard hit to the jaw once he put her down? “I didn’t know him, but my mother would have never put up being treated like she was an inferior being. She would have put a stop to that real quick, with weapons if necessary.”

  “Maybe that’s why Aelfric would never let me learn to wield a blade. He was afraid I’d become too independent, start thinking for myself out loud.”

  “It’s an U’lfer woman’s right to be independent, to make her own choices. Even once she’s found her mate.”

  “Her mate?” Her eyebrow shot up with intrigue, but the quick flash of hope he felt was immediately quashed by her next statement. “That sounds a little barbaric, doesn’t it? Civilized people don’t mate, do they?”

  “Everyone mates.” He laughed, crossing his arms over the bare skin of his chest, his broad palm sweeping across his bicep to warm the chills away with a little friction. “Well, mostly everyone. Some people just have different words for it. Your people call it marriage, the elves refer to it as the bind, for the cats it’s coupling. I think goblins just call it fu—” The dirty word he was about to speak caught in the back of his throat and he swallowed hard before it could escape him and embarrass her. “Besides, mating isn’t just something two people do together, it’s something they are together. Once the soul bond between mates has been established, no one else exists for us.”

  He hadn’t meant to say us, and for a time she was so quiet he wondered if she’d picked up on his unspoken meaning. Rising from the stream, she wrung as much water from her clothes as possible while he watched. They hadn’t even established the bond between them yet; she didn’t even seem to know it was there, but no one in the world mattered to him but her. He’d do anything to keep her safe, even take away her freedom to make really dumb decisions in the middle of a childish tantrum.

  “That sounds kind of romantic,” she finally said. “Loving someone with every part of yourself, even your soul.”

  “They say it’s the most complicated, yet satisfying bond in the world.”

  “Hmm,” she muttered thoughtfully. “It still doesn’t explain why most men are so afraid to be thought of as gentle.”

  “I don’t know.” Finn shrugged. “I’m not afraid of anything, especially not being gentle. Here, let me carry those back to camp for you so your hands don’t get cold.” Reaching forward he swiped the sopping fabric from her grip before she could protest and started in the direction of the cave.

  He made her go first, fol
lowing carefully along the same path she’d created so he could cover their tracks as if they’d never been there at all. The fire died down quite a bit in the time he was gone, and while she laid her wet clothes out on the floor beside it, he built it back up until it was roaring hot again.

  “You should get some sleep,” he suggested, leaning forward to stoke the fire. “Viln will want to leave this place as soon as the sun goes down tonight, and there’s no telling when we’ll be able to stop and rest again.”

  “What about you?” She lay down on the floor, curling into his shirt on her side and pillowing her head beneath her hands once she was situated. “Or don’t big, strong U’lfer men need sleep.”

  Snorting a laugh, he admitted, “I love sleep. It’s one of my favorite pastimes, but I can’t risk sleeping with no one to keep watch,” he pointed out. “If anything happened to you…” That sentence trailed into uncomfortable silence, and without even looking over his shoulder at her, he could tell she was staring at his back. He could feel her eyes on him, feel the relaxed rhythm of her heartbeat. “Besides, if you ever want to eat, I need to get that deer skinned and on a spit.”

  “I do like to eat.” She stifled a yawn in her hand, her empty belly rumbling emptily.

  “I’ll wake you when there’s food,” he promised.

  “Okay.”

  It wasn’t long before her heartbeat grew even slower, her breathing and her aura both relaxed with sleep. For a while Finn just watched her, smiling contentedly to himself, before pushing up from where he crouched to take care of the deer. In the last twenty-four hours they had made far more progress than he’d ever imagined they could.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A white veil of dream circled around her like a cool mist, dancing through her walking legs like an eager cat greeting an old friend and drawing her feet forward onto a path she could not see. It took her a few minutes to realize she wasn’t really walking at all; she was floating, her feet never touching the ground beneath the vapor. There were moments she glimpsed through the filmy essence of the veil only to see there was no ground beneath her at all. Only darkness glittering with the light of endless galaxies and stars.

  In the distance the constellations loomed in a spiraling dance of worship around the sun, but the only one she could make out clearly was the great white stag. As if he sensed her presence there, he edged his broken horns through the blackness and stepped away from the dance. Walking across the void of the sky, stalking toward her with his head held high, every step he drew closer tightened the nervous muscles of her stomach until Lorelei felt as if the clench of those muscles was the only thing keeping her from falling through the clouds.

  The stag was made from the wispy essence of starlight, a familiarity she felt in memory of all the things she’d seen when the god had entered into her soul. He was the beginning and the end, those memories told her, woven into life on the loom of stars by Heidr at the dawn of time along with his many brothers and sisters. The children born to him by the spirit of the wild hunt were the offering he made to the divine creator of all, and from his central place in the sky, Heidr, the sun who’d given them life, watched with a weary heart as his world turned and his grandchildren battled one another for a favor he would never bestow.

  All those things and more, she remembered, and his nearness brought them to the surface of her memory.

  The starry stag shifted, the ethereal essence of starlight changing shape until it was no longer a stag walking toward her, but the shape of a man glowing as bright and white as the light of a thousand suns. Her eyes should have burned, her skin igniting in the flame of his proximity, but the only thing she felt as he approached was love. Deep, overwhelming love so strong her body felt like it would burst, but her body had already burst, she was nothing more than wispy essence, glowing smoke that trailed with the movement of her arm as she held it toward the man who wasn’t a man at all, but a god.

  “Why?” she asked him.

  “Because it is so.”

  The stag-man’s mouth did not move when he spoke, but she could feel the reverberation of his voice all around her, trembling through her very soul.

  “The road that stretches before is long and fraught with perils, but it is your path, the path you must travel to please him.”

  “To please whom?’

  Ignoring her question, he continued as though she’d never spoken at all. “At times your journey will be strange and terrifying, but you must not be afraid for we are always with you.” She hadn’t seen it happen, but as though she’d blinked and opened her eyes again she saw another being beside the stag man, brilliant as a thousand suns, her white light flowing as if moved by a breeze Lorelei herself could not feel. “We are always here.”

  His pointing finger reached toward her, hand lingering over the pulsing red energy where her heart beat, filling her with the most overwhelming, powerful light. The being beside him joined her light with his, both of them touching Lorelei’s heart until she could feel it swelling and building up inside her, ebbing outward from her heart to reach the ends of fingers and toes before drawing back through the ethereal essence of her nonexistent body. It was the most beautiful, and yet most terrifying thing she’d ever experienced, but it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. It had to be a dream.

  “A dream, yes. You and I have traveled many roads together in the place where the soul is free to roam, Lorelei. I carried you upon my back across the sands of time and back again, my child. Do you remember?”

  The flash of a thousand journeys ricocheted through her mind, a force of memory so strong it was both painful and wonderful. She wanted to grasp at every one of those memories and commit them to herself so she never forgot them again, but they moved too quickly and fretful doubt began to swell up within her.

  The two voices spoke as one, echoing and reverberating through her. “Even when you can’t remember, you must believe. It is your faith that holds the power to draw our children back from the brink of extinction. It is your trust that will save them all.”

  Extinction.

  She stirred from uncomfortable sleep with that word on her mind, the aching muscles of her neck signaling painful pins and needles in a dance down her shoulder and into her arm. Like retreating mist as the sun rises, dream memory began to fade as she wiggled life back into her dead fingers until she could feel them again. Wincing silently, tiny needles stabbed through her nerves, and she bit down on her own tongue to keep from gasping and crying out over so small an inconvenience.

  The smoky cave was filled with the aroma of sizzling fat and inside her body, her empty stomach churned, the pain of hunger drawing her focus away from her waking hand. She’d never known hunger before, never heard her own belly shift and rumble so noisily inside her, and for a moment her head swam that desperate sort of pain. Her mind was still foggy with sleep, and as she blinked her eyes, scanning the place she’d fallen asleep, memory danced just out of grasp. The blazing fire just feet away burned her body like a fever. Beads of sweat dripped down her temple, across her nose and plopped silently onto the warm stone floor beneath her. The locks of hair that fell in over her face were curled damp with perspiration and tickled the tip of her nose each time she exhaled. She breathed in again, the musky scent of another’s sweat filling her with familiarity.

  Finn. It was his shirt she wore, and without even thinking she lifted the neckline toward her face and breathed in his smell.

  Memories of the last day and a half came rushing back to her like water from a broken dam flooding a river. Waking in Drekne, finding Finn watching over her beside her strange sickbed, discovering her father wasn’t really her father at all and remembering what Trystay planned to do to her. Rhiorna’s confessions, her death. And there had been a god inside her, filling her with everything. Their exiling, the killing and the running. Finn standing behind her on the riverbank while she stripped out of her blood-drenched clothes and into his so she could wash the stains clean. She could still see the
water blooming red around her as it soaked into the dried blood of the men who would have killed them if Finn hadn’t struck first.

  Kill or be killed.

  As she closed her eyes and lowered her head back to the hard stone floor she could see the man on top of her, pressing down as his body writhed and changed in the most unnatural, painful way and then she saw his head sever from his body, the blood spraying all over her like a fountain.

  Lorelei shuddered. She tried to think of it the way Finn said to, that it was his life or theirs, but that was easier said than believed. At least for her, anyway. Finn, on the other hand, seemed to have shrugged it off and gone about his business, as if he had to kill to survive every single day. Maybe he did; she didn’t really know enough about him to say whether or not it was true.

  All she did know for certain was that he’d saved her life, not once, but twice, and since the moment she’d first opened her eyes in that healer’s room in Drekne, Finn had been there for her, reaching out in comfort and friendship. He may have been a little brash, a lot rough around the edges, but underneath his ego-driven rough exterior he was thoughtful and kind. He’d given her the very shirt off his back without hesitation, claiming he didn’t feel the cold, even as she watched goose-bumps trail across the skin, the soft hairs on his chest and arms stiffening and rising against the chilly air.

  Closing her eyes again, it was easier than she thought it would be to call to mind his face, especially his eyes. They were enchanting, as crystalline blue as a winter sky and they should have been cold, but they weren’t. His eyes were warm and kind and honest. Just looking into them made her feel like she was safe, as if she could learn everything there was to know about him if she would only ask, but she was so afraid. He was hiding something from her; she could feel it.