Partisan - Book II

City of Ghosts

Stay with me.

He mouths the word, his voice lost in the buffet of icy wind and the thundering of broken tree limbs and crashing stone. Just above it all is the high, keening wail of a wolf.

Allayria, stay with me.

Ben's face is the only thing she can see, close and peering into her with those brilliant gray eyes. His brow is crinkled, in that quiet way that speaks of caution and alertness. The wind whips his hair down across his forehead, which is suddenly flecked with blood.

Hands made of bone and stringy flesh clamp down on her upper arms, cold, so cold, and they're squeezing in, pulling her back. She wheels around, pushing against it, heels burrowing into the squelching, chilled grass and it's Hiran she sees, and Fae, and Tara, and Caj, and Finn. They're dragging her, fingernails digging in deep around her arms and ankles and thighs, they're pulling her over the edge of the cliff.

Stay with me, they mouth, eyes wide and blank. Stay with me.

They all fall over and Allayria jerks in her pallet, eyelids flung open wide against the pressing blackness. The fire is out. Whoever is supposed to be on duty has fallen asleep.

It takes her a moment to really remember where she is—who she is with. After her conversation with Keno and a night spent cooped up in trees on the outskirts of Solveigard City, she, Hiran, and Finn had made it back to the others. In one piece, as she pointed out to Lei. They are on the move now, winding ever so closer to Helm's Hollow, ever so closer to—

She sits up, her forehead feeling clammy as her knees tuck up and her arms loop around them. She rests her head in the cradle they make for a minute, not knowing exactly how she feels, only that she is not okay. Not okay. She rolls up to her feet and strikes a light on her fingers.

Weaving around slumbering bodies toward the fire pit, she kneels down at the stone ring and reaches in to the depths of the twigs and lumber inside.

She's working the flame on a bit of kindling when she hears his voice, just hands-breadth away from her.

"You're awake."

Allayria glances over, tensing more than she ordinarily does—the aftereffects of the nightmare, she reasons—and catches the faint gleam of Caj's eyes in the firelight. He's sitting up, leaning against his pack.

"I was going to relight it when my watch was over," he tells her, voice low and melding in with the surrounding forest sounds. "I like it better with it out."

"Why?" she asks and her voice is rough from sleep. She would think a Smith-caller out of anyone would appreciate the warm glow of fire.

"The smoke blocks the stars," he answers, tilting his head up toward them before returning back toward her. "And you hear more of the forest with it out."

She murmurs wordlessly to this, reaching back in to quell the new flames and shifting around the wood to better protect the simmering embers.

"Having trouble sleeping?"

It's a surprisingly personal question from him, and Allayria glances over before she answers, trying to decipher his expression in the darkness. But he's hard enough to read in daylight, and she only picks out his faint outline.

"I sleep on and off when I'm traveling," she lies. "I got up because the fire was out."

He murmurs to this too, and she hears him shift his legs in his blanket.

"I sleep better in trees," she tells him.

"Trees?" His voice tilts with the word, rising up in surprise. "Never tried that before. Seems dangerous."