Page 62 of A Land So Wide

“W here’s Ellis?” Greer demanded as Finn pulled her to her feet.

The tunnel was a mess of shrieks and death rattles.

There were too many bodies sprawled in too many severe angles for Greer to truly understand what was happening.

The bites on her body pulsed, screaming with hot, fiery agony.

She could feel where every fang had sunk in, each puncture ragged and inflamed.

“He’s safe.”

Finn tugged her through the mess of wounded Bright-Eyeds, moving the two of them deeper into the mine with a skittering speed that made Greer want to throw up.

Elowen’s rage echoed after them. “Bring her back!”

There were murmurs of protest, cries of outrage and death rattles as the Bright-Eyeds Finn had wounded took their last, heaving gasps.

“Stay with me,” he ordered.

Greer wondered who he was talking to. She was right beside him, keeping up as best as she could, though now that she thought of it, she wasn’t entirely sure her feet were moving.

Perhaps Finn was moving so fast that she flew along, trailing after him like a pennant in the wind.

She could feel pounding jolts ricocheting through her body, but wasn’t certain if they were her footfalls clattering down the stone corridor or the painful clunk of her blood pulsing through her veins.

She was woozy with blood loss; her thoughts were as lethargic as her heartbeat.

“Greer!” he shouted as the tunnel faded in and out of focus. “You have to stay with me!”

He means me, she realized, the thought imploding through her like a dying star. Why wouldn’t I stay with him?

Greer didn’t know how much of her mother’s magic had been drunk from her. She could still feel a residual dark energy lingering in her limbs, wanting to strike and bite, but it no longer consumed her every thought and impulse.

I’m here . She wanted to say it, but pain spiked across her shoulder as Finn jerked her arm, hard. Electric fury radiated into her fingers. She reached out, disoriented, but couldn’t find him anywhere. Greer blinked, trying to push away the haze filtering her vision. She gasped.

Elowen had caught up to them, emerging from a split farther down the corridor.

She’d snatched Finn away from Greer and now struggled to hold him back.

She swung her legs forward, scratching at him with curved talons.

Her wings snapped forward, striking punishing blows at his head, smothering him in an enveloping embrace.

Their brawl left lingering phantom trails across Greer’s retinas. As she watched Finn’s shape blur, stretched and elongated into impossible forms, a terrifying realization struck her.

I’ve been poisoned .

Something in the Bright-Eyeds’ bite obscured her reason and made clear thoughts impossible.

She knew some predators used venom to stun their prey, subduing them to an apathetic death.

She tested her reflexes—opening and closing her hands—and felt certain the Bright-Eyeds were behind her indifference.

Greer slapped at her cheeks, trying to rip herself from the fog.

She needed to help Finn, but she struggled to understand the fight.

A thrown punch, the tear of talons across webbed membranes.

Bared fangs and the smash of skulls knocked together.

She caught only slivers, and could not stir herself to action.

But then Elowen was down, screaming and clutching at her face as her form sank into the shadows, and Finn was back, his grip an insistent pressure, digging into her shoulder.

“We need to go,” he gasped, fighting for breath. His voice sounded garbled and choked with blood; Greer didn’t know if it was his or Elowen’s.

“Go?” she echoed.

“You can’t face her in this state.”

She lost track of where they were. Tunnels bled together into a labyrinthine nightmare. There were too many turns to follow, too many corridors that looked just like the ones that had come before.

“Where are we going?”

“There’s another way out. A back entrance, from when the cave was first explored. It’s hard to get to. It was never mined.”

“Are we going to see Ellis?”

As the words fell from her, she knew they were not the right ones, knew there was other things that should be asked. They needed to form a new plan, strategize and plot. But the only thing her muddled mind could focus upon with any clarity was Ellis.

Finn didn’t respond.

“Where is he? Does he know…”

She stopped, unsure of what to ask. Did he know what she was?

She’d seen the look of understanding cross over his face before he’d thrown the knife at Elowen.

Did he know about Ailie, about what her mother’s plan had been?

Had Finn explained it? She doubted any version of the story Elowen might have told would have been accurate.

Greer barely comprehended it all herself.

Did he know—despite everything that had happened, despite the thing she’d become—that she loved him still?

Greer would never be able to voice that question aloud. Not to Finn. Everything he’d done had been to help her achieve what Ailie had dreamed of. Greer didn’t know if it was his devotion to her mother or an affection for her, but to ask now would be too cruel.

Ahead of them, the tunnel opened up, revealing a large cavern. With what remained of Ailie’s heightened senses, Greer could just make out the larger space; she estimated it was at least a few hundred feet long. A questionable-looking bridge of ancient ropes and wooden planks spanned it.

They stopped at the end of the tunnel, where the ground fell away, plummeting to depths that even Greer could not see.

“What is this place?” she asked, reaching for Finn. Her head spun from confusion and vertigo. She worried that if she toppled over the edge she’d never stop falling.

“The way out,” Finn said, shifting so he could steady her with human hands. “We’ll find somewhere you can clear your head.” He peered down with such concern, she wondered how wild she must look. “You can’t fight them like this, and I can’t hold off so many on my own.”

Even through her bewildered haze, she noted the deep gash blooming across his chest, reddening his shirt. She opened the collar and caught sight of four deep gouges carved into his chest. “You’re wounded.”

He nodded. “We need blood. There’s nothing in these tunnels.”

“It feels bad here,” she whispered, her lungs tight in her chest. The air around them seemed off, too thick and bristling with unseen barbs.

Finn nodded across the bridge. “The miners had only just begun clearing out this section of the caves when Laird was attacked. There’s still so much iron…” His eyes flickered over the dark rocks on the other side with trepidation.

“Is that why they aren’t following us?” Greer glanced back down the tunnel they’d come from and coughed. “It hurts too much.”

Finn nodded. “And they’re taking stock of their dead, I’d guess. I saw the remains out in the yard.” He offered her a faint smile of praise. “You did well. I think…when the time comes, the court will respect you.”

Greer looked up at him. “I don’t want to lead them,” she admitted. “I don’t want to have anything to do with them, with this place, with any of it.”

Finn considered the cavern, taking in the ancient bridge, the thick, rocky walls, the entire weight of the mountain pressing down upon them. “It doesn’t have to be like this. If we lead them north, out of the mines and into the wilds, we could—”

Greer shook her head, silencing him. “They’d still be cruel. They’d still be calculating and crave human blood. They don’t listen to Elowen; what makes you think that would change with me?”

“But with Ailie’s—”

“It’s nearly gone!” Her head throbbed with the force of the outburst. “They drank almost all of it.”

Finn looked horrified. His jaw clenched, and she could practically hear his grinding thoughts. “Then we finish them,” he finally said, his words surprising in their simplicity, ringing as hollow as a bird’s bones. “All of them.”

Greer stared up at him, wishing her head was clear so that she could say everything she wanted to. But it wasn’t, so she only nodded, her throat tight.

“But first…”

“Blood,” she agreed.

“You take the lead,” he said, gesturing to the bridge.

It was too narrow for them to walk across together, but as Finn nudged her forward, Greer’s hand slipped into his. It was an act of solidarity, a promise of commitment. They would do this terrible thing together, as a team. And after…

Greer didn’t know.

Though she couldn’t guess at what her future now looked like, she felt certain Finn would have a place within it. Not as consort, not as husband or lover, but as a partner all the same. What they’d done, what they would do, would forever bond them. They were sealing their fates in blood.

Every step forward hurt.

Greer felt the iron like a wall of fire. Its sharpness singed at her, sizzling little dots of red blisters along any exposed skin. Her throat and nasal passages were raw and stinging. Her fingers swelled and hurt to move.

“Why do they live here?” she gasped, struggling to put one foot in front of the other. “Why would Mama have ever chosen this place?”

“The other tunnels aren’t bad,” he began, his words strained and tight. “They’re warm and offer protection against the worst of the winter storms.”

“Isn’t there any other way out?”

“Not without doubling back to Elowen.”

Greer groaned and pressed forward. To distract herself from the pain, she darted her eyes around the massive cavern. The rocky crevices had been smoothed to a polished luster by millennia’s worth of rainwater and snowmelt. Spiky stalactites dripped overhead, looking like a colony of roosting bats.

They hung across the ceiling, each one unique, a sculpture made not by the chiseling of man, but from the steady drip of water.

Some were simple fangs, blunted points of minerals, but others had formed into fantastical masterpieces.

Greer’s overwrought imagination turned them into undulating curtains, upside-down castle turrets, creatures with gills and fins, tails and feathers, folded wings…

“Finn?” she asked slowly as her gaze landed on the shape directly above him. It was large and dark and shifting with the smallest of movements, the slightest of tremors. It was breathing .

The attack began before she could finish her warning.

The cavern erupted, a messy swirl of noise and chaos as all around them, stalactites unfurled, revealing themselves as hidden Bright-Eyeds.

This was not the five monsters Greer had thought remained, nor even the twelve Finn had guessed at. This court was dozens strong, a hundred, maybe more. It was an army, a horde, a legion.

Greer took in the magnitude of the flying bodies with grim realization.

They would not survive this.

She would not survive.

But Ellis would.

Ellis would, and Mistaken, too, and all of the other outposts and villages, the land’s first people, and all the others who came after, the mountains to the west, the plains to the south, the whole world over.

With one bold action, she could save them all.

And so she ran. Gripping Finn’s hand tightly, she raced across the rest of the bridge, pulling them into the inferno of iron.

The bridge swayed, boards creaking and ancient ropes hissing as their fibers stretched and snapped.

Greer worried the entire thing would pull apart, spilling them into the endless depths of the chasm below.

The only thing she could do was clutch Finn tighter, grabbing at his forearm as he tried to fend off an attacking Bright-Eyed. She pulled them through the confusions of bodies, the slicing talons, the poisoned fangs.

The end was so close, only a few planks away.

Greer dared a quick glance back and noted that the Bright-Eyeds were not as close as she’d feared. They hung back, hurling threats and occasionally diving in threatening feints, but never getting more than a few feet from the cliff, unwilling to face the iron ore, even for their queen.

A smile grew on Greer’s lips as she began to hope that favor had found them.

The court was too fearful of the iron to blindly follow Elowen’s screeched orders.

Brazenly, Greer began to plan her next steps, daring to believe that there would be a life beyond the bridge.

They’d have to endure the last of the tunnel, fighting through the waves of pain and heat, but then they’d—

In an instant, Finn was gone, pulled from her so fast that the silk ribbon he wore looped around his wrist, the silk ribbon Greer had unwittingly given to him so many years ago, ripped.

Greer found herself holding on to only the tattered bracelet and turned in confused horror.

Elowen had swooped out of the swarm, daring to go where her court would not, and had seized hold of Finn.

He struggled in her grasp, thrashing and flipping his body as he fought to shift back into his Bright-Eyed form.

But before he could, Elowen’s teeth sank into the crook of his neck, snapping at tendons, tearing apart flesh.

She drank deeply, guzzling down blood in great, gluttonous mouthfuls, letting it run down her chin as her eyes rolled back into her head.

She let out a groan of pleasure, then bit again.

There was nothing Greer could do.

Elowen was too high, well beyond Greer’s reach, and too ruthless by far.

Finn’s gaze landed on Greer—first panicked, and slowly glazing over with resignation. His hand twitched, reaching for her, telling her to run. Then…he stopped and moved no more.

Before Greer could cry out, the Bright-Eyed tossed his small, broken body down into the cavern without even a hint of remorse.

Greer heard him strike a rocky outcrop, landing at his final resting place with a dull thud.

She wanted to call out to him, wanted to believe that he was still alive and could somehow answer her, but she was too horrified to move, too broken to make a sound.

Sorrow and rage swirled within her frozen body, racing through her veins like a storm.

Without an outlet for release, their energies built, growing concentrated and deadly, until, using up every bit of breath left within her, Greer opened her mouth and screamed.