Her Balance | Nikolai x Reader x Darkling

~ Chapter 17 ~

Long overdue!

Let's get into it.

First Person - Y/n

At dawn the next morning, while the others damped the fire and gnawed at pieces of hardtack, I drew on my coat and walked back a little ways to look at the falls.

As much as it looked like fire, it was beautiful.

The mist was dense in the valley. From here, the bones at the base of the falls just looked like trees. No ghosts. No fire. It felt like a quiet place, somewhere to rest.

We were packing up the ash-covered tents when we heard it—a cry, high and piercing, echoing through the dawn. We halted, silent, waiting to see if it would sound again.

"Could just be a hawk," warned Tolya.

Mal said nothing. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and plunged into the woods. We had to scurry to keep pace with him.

The climb up the back of the falls took us the better part of the day. It was steep and brutal, and though my feet and legs were used to hard travel, I still felt the strain of it.

My muscles ached beneath my pack, and despite the chill in the air, sweat beaded on my forehead.

"When we catch this thing," panted Zoya, "I'm going to turn it into a stew."

I could feel the excitement rippling through all of us, the sense that we were close now, and we drove each other to push harder up the mountain.

In some places, the rise was nearly vertical. Zoya and I tried to experiment with shadow beds and strong rushes of wind but eventually, it ended up with us having to pull ourselves up.

At one point, Tolya brought out iron spikes and hammered them directly into the mountain so we could use them as a makeshift ladder.

Finally, late in the afternoon, we hauled our bodies over a ragged stone lip and found ourselves on the flat top of the cliff wall, a smooth expanse of rock and moss, slick with mist and split by the frothing tide of the river.

Looking north, beyond the abrupt drop of the falls, we could see back the way we'd come—the far ridge of the valley, the gray field that led to the ashwood, the indentation of the old road, and beyond it, storms moving over the grasscovered foothills.

And they were just foothills.

That was clear now. Because if we turned south, we had our first real view of the mountains, the vast, white-capped Sikurzoi, the source of the snowmelt that fed the Cera Huo.

"They just go on and on," said Harshaw wearily.

We made our way to the side of the rapids. It would be tricky fording them, and I wasn't sure there was a point. We could see across to the other side, where the cliff simply ended. There was nothing there. The plateau was clearly and disappointingly empty.

The wind picked up, whipping through my hair and sending a fine mist stinging against my cheek. I glanced south at the white mountains. Autumn was here and winter was on its way. We'd been gone over a week.

What if something had happened to the others back in Dva Stolba?

"Well," said Zoya angrily, "where is it?"

Mal walked to the edge of the falls and looked out at the valley.

"I thought you were supposed to be the best tracker in all of Ravka," she said. "Just where do we go now?"

"Zoya, wait," I said as Mal  Mal rubbed a hand over the back of his neck.

"Down one mountain, up the next," said Mal, "That's the way it works, Zoya."