“There is no time.” He glanced eastward, where the clouds rose up in an impassable grey wall. “The Undergrave…I need to find it. Tell me where it is.”
“I don’t know, not exactly. I’ve never been there.”
“I will find it all the same.”
He looked to the grass, wet and flat, near where he had slept. He saw what he hoped to see. A Sarcophage’s rusted sword, its toothy edge as cruel a thing as he had ever seen, lay not three paces away. He pulled away from Ona’s grasp and knelt before the blade. His fingers ached when he lifted it, his flesh hating to touch it.
“The dead men were real,” he murmured.
“Yes,” Ona exhaled. “You never let go of the sword. I wish you would’ve.”
“Still sharp.” He flicked the blade with his finger. “It will do.”
Ona sidled up behind him. She opened her mouth. To dissuade me. To remind me how hurt I am. To woo me.
Ona’s lips parted, but no words came out. “You should go,” he told her. “Find a village with food and fresh water. Take as much as you can and flee westward. I expect all of Thillria will soon fall ill. Better for you to survive than die with me.”
“But Garrett…”
“I feel the beginnings of something terrible here,” he said. “Your father has designs beyond tormenting his daughters. I must go alone.”
He sucked a shallow breath in and started to limp past her, but she bounced in his way and pushed against his chest with all her might, halting him before he reached the grassland beyond the trees.
“You can’t!” she pleaded. “You aren’t from Thillria. You don’t even know where the Undergrave is. Your leg will fester, and you’ll die two days from now, alone and starving.”
“I will not,” he said.
“How do you know your friends are still alive?”
“I do not.”
“And how far will you make it? A few hours? A few days before the fever takes you?”
“I have survived worse.”
She let loose of him. “Garrett, please stop. Look at me.”
A sudden wind washed over him, cold, then warm, and then cold again. He snapped awake as if from a dream and saw Ona as she truly was. The warlock’s magic, he sensed. A spell, breaking even now.
He breathed, and the true Ona stood before him. She had changed with the wind, as though her emotion had awakened the best part of her. Her eyes were no longer grey and melancholy, but the deepest shade of amber, gold within gold. The frosted pallor of her flesh had warmed to a healthy pink hue, her cheeks warm as roses beneath the sun. She looked no longer like a cunning replica of Andelusia, but instead the way she should look. A dweller of Denawir. A bright-eyed fisherman’s daughter, and the fairest woman in Thillria.
“Don’t go, Garrett,” she begged. She sounded less like a girl, much more a woman. “Come away with me. Escape with me to the west. Father says nothing but the wind lives beyond Thillria. You and I could be together. We could leave all this behind.”
“This smells like another of his snares.” He looked her up and down. “My eyes deceive me. My ears hear your sweetness, but my mind tells me otherwise. He uses you to keep me away from the truth. He turns your eyes to gold. Even now he lives in your heart, bending you as he likes.”
“No, this is me.” She grasped a fistful of his shirt. “I swear it. What must I do to prove myself?”
Either she is a master of lies, he thought, or she means every word.
“Garrett.” She tugged him. “Answer me.”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“There is nothing you can do to prove yourself,” he said. “No matter how hard you believe in what you say, I cannot trust you. So long as your father lives, he owns a part of you. I cannot say which part. It matters not.”
Hurt and heartbroken, she stepped back from him. As she hung her head, the sky answered her sadness with a drum of thunder, crackling in the sky to announce the coming storm.
“You mean to say he made me love you?” she asked.
“I mean to say I do not know.”
“Then I am cursed. How do I know if these are my feelings or his? What can I do? Help me, Garrett. Please!”
He touched her, caressing her neck before stealing his fingers away. “Your master is not the only power in Thillria. I hope he listens now, that he might hear me. I will go to the Undergrave. If he has harmed a soul, I will do to him as I did to Furyon.”
“Garrett, don’t be reckless. You don’t know what he’s capable of.”
“Ona.” He lifted his hand, silencing her. “Do not say my name again. I am leaving. I want to remember you as you are right now. If we never meet again, I want to know you are somewhere out there, alive and happy. Turn around. Walk away. A dark hour is coming. Only swords can solve this.”
He shouldered the Sarcophage’s sword and walked away. He left her standing in the grass, her gown whipped by the wind, her hair streaming across her face. At the beginning of the grass ocean beyond Rose, he glanced one final time upon her, and then marched into the storm.
In the spacious realm between Denawir, Shivershore, and the rest of Thillria, Garrett walked for many days. The rain trailed him. The winds tore at his black Midnon raiment. Limping eastward, he hunted the storm-shrouded earth for a place he knew nothing of. The Undergrave. Rellen. Saul. Andelusia. When other might have turned back, lost and hopeless, he persisted. I will find it, and I will find them.
In the Thillrian countryside, he journeyed the same as a wounded wolf. During the daylight hours he walked without halting, but at nights, whenever the rain swept hardest across the grasslands, he skulked into villages and farmsteads, stealing food and water. He met only a few folk in the wilderness, the poorest people in all of Thillria. “The Undergrave?” they questioned him. “Well…just keep going the way you’re going. You’ll find that miserable pit deep in Sallow. Look for the hills and stunted trees. There’ll be the grave you’re looking for.”
Driven by the darkness growing in his mind, he skirted a half-dozen villages, cut through a hundred thickets, and crossed a thousand fields. His leg burned, though just as often felt frozen and ready to shatter. He dared not remove Ona’s bindings. She had tied strips of her dress painfully tight to his skin, but as long as I see no blood, it stays.
During nights, after his thieving, he slept beneath the open sky, the Sarcophage’s sword lying on his chest, the nights devouring him. He learned not to drink the rain, for though it fell without end, each time he touched his tongue to a drop, the water turned to ashes in his mouth. The warlock’s doing, he suspected. Else I am fallen and this is the realm of ashes, wind, and death.
He marched and marched, until the days and nights felt the same. He lost track of time, of how many days and nights he had walked. If Thillria were real any longer, he could not tell. Beyond Rose, the grasses were grey and the earth dry despite the rain. Shadows lived always at the edge of his sight, black silhouettes stalking every horizon. The longer he walked, the more driven he became. The earth felt sick beneath his rotting boots, and the skies looked so like the dreams Andelusia had often told him of. He began to believe all of Thillria, perhaps all the world, lay beneath the warlock’s spells. Every shadow, every raindrop, every lurker on the horizon…his doing. And here I am with a dead man’s rusted sword and a living man’s rotting leg. Fine work, Garrett Croft, to be so vulnerable. Just walk. Walk until you die, and keep walking afterward.
And try harder to forget Ona.
The Falling
At dusk, Garrett shambled to the pond’s edge. The still, silent water stretched out before him, a mirror of the roiling clouds. The hard hills rose up on the pond’s far side, their flanks riddled with twisted, thorny trees. After splashing himself clean in the shallows, he hunkered on the shore. The storm rumbled in the sky, the collisions of the clouds shaking his world in every direction.
Time to remove the bandages.
Wet and rotting, his
seven day-old bandages dangled in tatters from his leg. He trimmed the loosest strips away with the Sarcophage’s sword, and as the lightning flashed he stared at what remained. Hurts less than before, he thought. If I tear these rags and find black skin beneath, tonight will be my last.
One by one, he peeled Ona’s bindings away. The flimsy cloth clung to his skin, stuck in place by a week’s worth of sweat. He grimaced as he pulled at the final strips. When he came to the very last, he looked to the sky, exhaled, and tore.
But for a scar, his wound had healed.
He let the strips of Ona’s dress fall from his fingers. Realizing he would not yet die, he sat among the weeds and considered what his survival would mean. Thieving. Wandering. More rain turning to ash. I shall be as alone as ever I was. And when it comes to it, the dead man’s sword will draw blood again.
The last of the sunlight died. In the darkness, his bones ached, his belly growled for lack of a substantial meal, and his head swam with memories of in Midnon. He lay in a patch of wilted grass, the ash rain crumbling on his skin. He remembered what the farmer he had met the previous night had said. “The Undergrave?” the old man had paled. “I wouldn’t, were I you. Nothin’ there but death.”
Nothing but death. Everywhere I go, it is the same.
He might have lain like a stone until dawn, but at the night’s deepest hour a noise awoke him from his brooding. At first the snaps and rustling sounded like an animal foraging in the grass, but he knew better than to believe it. He snatched up his sword and crept away from the water. At the prairie’s edge he overlooked the grass ocean.
Ona.
She strode through the grass. He heard her sandals clicking, and he glimpsed her face when the lightning shredded the sky. Her black gown discarded, she wore a thin, loose frock and carried a sack over her shoulder. In the next flash of lightning, she caught sight of him. Her smile erupted on her lips, her tired eyes wide with joy.
“Garrett!” she called to him. “I caught you!”
Of all the encounters he had prepared for, Ona was least among them. He shook his head, thinking at first she was a dream, but as she swept through the grass he saw her smile again. Not a dream. Not a ghost. She followed me all this way.
“A fine night this is,” she mused as she approached. “If not for the lightning, I’d have walked right into the water.”
“You have done something foolish.”
“I know. I don’t care.”
She marched right past him, gliding over the grass and straight down to the pond’s edge. “Come. Sit,” she called to him. “I’ve been trailing you for days. I’m tired. I have food.”
The thunder rolled overhead. Too weary to notice, he trotted to the shore and sank to the earth beside her. As the dark water lapped at his boots, Ona opened her sack and dropped a hunk of bread and two fistfuls of uncooked greens into his hands. As he ate, she splashed her face clean in the shallows.
“It’s so cold.” She shivered. “At least it’s real. You’ve learned not to drink the rain, haven’t you?”
He stared, watching as the water dripped from her chin.
“What’s the matter?” She toweled herself with her sleeve. “Still hungry? You know; you might’ve gotten more to eat had you asked the villagers instead of stealing from them. They’re good people. They’re just a bit…afraid.”
She plunked beside him again, smiling, teasing him with tickles from her wet toes. “I should be angry with you,” she sighed. “You left me alone out there.”
“I hoped you would flee.” He found his voice. “I did not know your persistence.”
“There’s nowhere to run, Garrett. Not without you, anyway. Would you have done differently?”
“I try to do what is sensible.” His words felt thick on his tongue. “You fly by the fire in your heart. We are different, you and I.”
“Where are you going from here?” She dipped her toes into the water again.
“The Undergrave. There, across the water.” He pointed. “Deep into the hills and many days east. If it is as the Thillrians say, it will not be hard to find.”
“You’ll be lonely. I’ll go with you.”
The lightning flared again. He glimpsed her face in the pallid light, and though he expected to see her smile, she did not. She is serious. She truly is Ande’s sister.
“So then, where’d you intend to sleep tonight?” she asked.
“No sleep. Not tonight.”
“Don’t be foolish. You need sleep, same as I. Let’s go around the water. I saw a big rock when the lightning flashed. We can hide from the ashes beneath it.”
“I am too tired to argue,” he said. “Tomorrow will be different.”
She stood. “I know. Take my hand. Let’s walk together.”
With her hand in his, he rounded the water. He walked with the lightning as his guide, though with her the darkness feels thinner. Undaunted by the night, she led him to a swath of soft grass amid the crags on the pond’s far side.
“Here.” She halted near a huge slab of rock jutting sidelong from the earth. “Look. It makes a roof. It even has moss for a bed.”
“Tomorrow, we will talk about this.” He dropped his sword and slunk beneath the rock.
“Yes. Tomorrow,” she agreed. “But tonight, we sleep.”
Within moments of lying down, he felt Ona ease onto the earth behind him. Warm, he thought. The other Ona was a cold creature, but now… He drew a deep breath, the chorus of rain and thunder fading, and dreamless sleep tore him away from the world.
The next dawn, he sat up beneath the rock roof and took in the dismal new day. The clouds slogged in slow curtains across the sky, brooding like old men upon the earth. The downpour began shortly after he awoke, but this time the driving rain did simply strike the earth and vanish, but drummed a fearsome rhythm, carving streams into the hill on the water’s way down to the pond. No ashes, he observed. Real rain. If the warlock sees, he will be angry.
The rain fell harder than ever he remembered. Harder than in the mountains. Harder than in Furyon. After a while of the water tearing great gouges in the hillside, Ona awoke. Saying nothing to him, she stretched, smiled, and crept out from beneath the rock roof to stand in the rain. Streams of ashes slid off her skin as she gazed to the clouds and opened her palms to the sky. She cannot come to the Undergrave, he swore to himself. Such a woman deserves to live.
“It’s beautiful.” She faced him, her frock dripping. “The rain is real today!”
“Yes. So it is.” He tried not to look her in the eye.
After another thunderclap, she skittered back beneath the rock roof. Every bit of her was soaking, from her eyelashes down to her wooden sandals. Smiling, she squatted next to him and squeezed several fistfuls of water from her hair. “You should try it.” She gestured to the rain. “This is as clean as I’ve been in months.”
He might have been willing to walk beneath the rain, but something kept him beneath the rock. His stomach fluttered, his fingertips tingling. The feeling confounded him.
“Is something wrong?” Ona asked.
“No,” he murmured.
“Are you angry with me?”
“No.”
“You aren’t yourself. Is it your leg? Are you in pain?”
He pulled up his tattered pant leg. “My wound is gone.”
She looked less surprised than he expected. “It’s the old blood, you know,” she told him. “I might’ve known. It’s thicker in you than father or either of us sisters. It’s a good thing you’re not the one after the Pages Black. To think, the power you’d have.”
Dark Moon Daughter Page 37
