Blood-Bound [ Lore of Penrua: Book I ]

39

A sound Mhera had never heard greeted her ears. It was a rustling, a whisper, almost like the hushing of the sea at the Haven but lighter and less dreadful. As she came back to herself, she recalled the roaring of the wind and the sensation of being pulled out of place and time. But now there was a sense of stillness all around her—stillness, and the sound.

Mhera stirred, but her limbs were leaden. She was lying on her back on the ground somewhere outside. She smelled grass and earth, and she felt the dampness of dew on her cheeks.

Mhera slowly opened her eyes. It was night. The first thing she saw with her waking eye was the velvet expanse of the dark sky and the globe of the blue moon, hanging low; it had just begun to rise. Stars strewed the sky, and as she followed the glittering points of light with her eyes, trying to ground herself as she had in the lorekeeper's tower, she saw them: the trees.

The shock of it was enough to bring her to her elbows. Her head swam with a wave of dizziness and she had to close her eyes for a moment, fighting the sudden urge to be sick. When the dizziness had passed, she pulled herself up to sit and looked again at the trees.

She was on a grassy sward, and rising up a distance away was a forest. Mhera was of the Holy City; she had been born there, had lived there all her life, and had left for the first time to be taken to the Haven. Never had she traveled on land beyond those pearl-white walls. She had seen small trees in the palace gardens or here and there in the streets of Karelin. And she knew of forests, of course; she had seen maps and paintings.

But she had never seen a real forest with her own eyes. To see it was overwhelming: it was an army of towering, black-trunked sentinels, their sprawling branches crowned with leaves that were blue-black in the night. The wind moving through branches had caused the rustling that Mhera had heard.

A scent came to her over the sward, carried on the night breeze. She could only describe it as earthy vastness. In this place she felt very small, and the trees were grim and terrible.

As Mhera pulled herself to all fours, her every muscle strained with exertion. Her aching body did not feel like her own. It was heavy and slow and weak. Again, the urge to be sick struck her, and this time she could not fight it. She vomited her supper into the grass. Her sweat-dampened forehead felt clammy in the cool air. She spat several times, trying to clear the taste of bile from her mouth, and wiped her lips on her sleeve.

Some distance away on the grass, Matei lay prone, his senseless face turned to the sky. A pang of fear struck Mhera when she saw him at first: he looked dead. Looking around, she saw nothing and no one else. There was only the endless expanse of the fields on one hand, stretching on toward an inky horizon, and behind her, the looming forest.

"Matei?" Mhera's voice was feeble in the wide, open space.

He did not answer.

Mhera crawled across the grass, every movement seeming more than she could bear. The muscles in her legs and arms quivered; her abdomen felt tight and hot, threatening to make her sick again. The water skin sloshed heavily, swinging by her belly and encumbering her. She had to stop and breathe for a second, swaying on all fours. Then she crawled again, until she came to Matei's side.

The sun-bronzed color had drained out of Matei's cheeks; he had the pallor of a corpse. It made the marke he wore look bolder. His hair fell across his brow in disarray and his lips were slightly parted, making it look as if he had simply fallen asleep. But the way his arms lay sprawled at his sides, with the pack and the water skin some distance away, did not suggest a peaceful rest. Kneeling over him, Mhera gazed at his unconscious face and was suddenly afraid that his eyes would open and he would grab her. She had the urge to move back again.

But he didn't wake. Cautiously, Mhera reached out and laid her fingers on his throat. His skin was cold and damp, but she could feel the secret movement of his pulse beneath the skin. She pulled her hand immediately away, wiping her fingers on her gown. He was alive, at least.

"Matei."

Still he did not answer. Mhera looked around again, shivering under the dispassionate gaze of the stars. She didn't know what to do. Would he recover? Had the spell taxed him so badly this time that he would die? Would she die, then, out here in this cold open space, far removed from anything she knew?

She took off the water skin, pulling the strap up over her head, and held it up in the moonlight to figure out how the thing worked. Simply enough, it seemed. There was a stopper at the top. She pulled it out to open the skin, hearing water slosh within it. Then, she leaned forward and poured a thin stream of water over Matei's face.

His eyes clenched shut tighter and he turned his face away. A response, at least.

"Matei."

The man groaned. Suddenly his limbs began to quiver. Mhera shuffled back away from him as he rolled weakly onto his side. She saw his body bend in an involuntary spasm, and he vomited into the grass.

Mhera grimaced, unconsciously wiping her lips again on her sleeve. She raised the water skin and took a tentative sip to clear the remembered taste of bile from her tongue, then held the skin out to Matei.

Matei shook his head, lying now with his face half turned toward the ground. She could hear his breath whispering through the blades of wet grass. "Where?" he asked weakly before vomiting again. Just watching him made Mhera intensely aware of her own soreness, and she knew his must be worse.

"That is a stupid question to ask me," Mhera said without pity. "You are the one who knows where we're going. There are trees over there. Lots of them. I suppose it is your Duskwood."

Matei seemed unaffected by her tone. He nodded, the tense set of his shoulders melting a little. He retched a third time, and the next word he spoke was a curse, very colorful despite its brevity.

Mhera put the stopper into her water skin and slung it over her body. She settled back into the grass, not yet trusting her legs to hold her. The damp leached through her skirt, chilling her. Her fatigue and dizziness were still there, swimming around the edges of her consciousness. "Will you live?"

"I certainly hope not," he replied, his voice a groan.

"If you are expecting sympathy, I am afraid I have none to spare," Mhera said. She had never been so cold to anyone in her life, but she hated him.

Matei opened his eyes, casting Mhera a slitted glance. "Pitiless woman."

Mhera ignored him and turned her attention up to the sky. It reminded her of nights at the Haven, where the sky was endless and no city lights drowned out the winking stars. She felt the same sense of isolation as she had on the rocky isle, the sense that the sky could swallow her whole. She would be forgotten by everyone she had ever known, forgotten by history and time. She shivered.

Matei was pushing himself up to his hands and knees. His arms shook beneath him; the simple task of getting off of the ground was almost too much. He tipped his chin up enough to see the landscape. The wordless sound he made when he saw the trees was one of grateful relief. "We made it. Goddess above, we made it. We need to get under the cover of the trees."

"Can you walk?"

"I must, and so must you. Where ..." He brushed his hand along the ground, searching. He plucked the bloodstone up from where it had lain concealed in the damp grass. It still glowed with a ruddy light although the light of the moon and stars was pale blue.

Together, the pair of them rose unsteadily to their feet and turned to face the Duskwood.