Page 73 of Crown of the Dunes (The Ballan Desert #2)

He stood frozen, as if his mind had snapped along with the tempered steel. Turmoil poured down the tether in my gut, maddeningly loud. I shouted a wordless warning to Erix as the tricrith I had been fighting skittered toward him, the beasts advancing on both sides.

He spun, but with a broken sword, he wouldn’t have the reach to wound them.

I threw my hands up, pointing my own sword to the ceiling of the tunnel. All the power flowing from Erix I let pour into my own well of magic. It spilled over, spreading out through every inch of my body—burning through me in a wave of fire.

“Run!” I screamed as power pulsed out of me—both mine and Erix’s, one and the same. A giant fissure formed in the ceiling, spreading out in dozens of fractures from where I stood. Erix’s eyes widened and I met his panicked gaze for a split second just before the tunnel caved in.

A screeching hiss was cut off by a sudden crunch as the tricrith between us was crushed in a pile of rubble. The bolt of satisfaction that ran through me lasted only a second before something hard hit me on the head, and the world went dark.

I couldn’t move. Consciousness seeped back into my mind, thick and slow like honey, and I latched onto that horrifying truth. I tried to flex my muscles, but my limbs were pressed down by an inexorable weight.

In fact, I could barely breathe, my chest brushing the sides of the tiny space I lay in as it expanded. Panic rose up to choke me, escaping in a tiny whimper. I had always thought I would at least die out under the open sky with the company of the desert to comfort me.

Tears began to gather in the corners of my eyes, and I trembled. A sob wracked my chest, the sound swallowed by the rock and earth pressing in on me from all sides.

Keera . The name seemed spoken directly into my soul, almost imagined but clearly in Erix’s panicked voice. I reached for the tether at the base of my spine and grabbed on to it. I would not be completely alone .

“Keera!” This time I did hear the voice with my ears, although it was distant and muffled. I frowned, straining to hear more, and I was rewarded with the sound of shifting rocks and digging.

“I’m here,” I croaked, my voice choked and dry from all the dust lodged in my throat.

The scrabbling intensified. Dust fell on my face as the whole pile shifted. I coughed, not able to get enough air. A thin line of light cut through the darkness. My eyes watered as I blinked and continued to cough.

The weight lifted off my legs and then my arms. Familiar hands grabbed my shoulders and pulled, hauling me free of my dark prison. Then, my face was pressed into a broad chest, and I burrowed into the rough fabric as my body was wracked with a mixture of coughs and sobs of relief.

“I’m here,” Erix murmured into my hair, wrapping his strong arms around me. As the energy and magic that had bolstered me through the fight fled from my body, I found myself collapsing into him. I wanted to stay there, in the safety of his arms for as long as I could.

Too soon, he grabbed me by the shoulders, holding me back away from him so he could look me up and down. I blinked at him through watery eyes. He raised one hand to my face, using his thumb to scrub dust from my cheek.

His own expression mirrored the relief mixed with shadows of fear that I was sure I wore.

“I’m all right,” I reassured.

Finally, some of the storm of emotion twirling in my gut abated. The air between us shuddered as he let out an unsteady breath.

“Do you have strategies for fighting desert monsters that don’t involve you nearly getting crushed to death?” he asked.

I leaned my cheek into his hand. “I suppose I’ll keep doing it as long as it keeps working. And I have you to keep saving me.”

Something dark flickered in Erix’s eyes, but it passed as he trailed his hands down my arms, clearly checking for injuries.

I joined him, taking inventory of my body.

A painful knot pulsed on the crown of my head where I had been hit, and various bruises and scrapes competed for my attention, but I appeared to be in working order .

“The tricriths?” I asked.

Erix glanced over his shoulder. I looked past him to find crushed remains—the curled legs of one tricrith stuck out from under the rocks, while the back end of the other had been detached from the front, the black blood on the floor glimmering in the scant sunlight.

Sunlight ?

My gaze trailed up the wall of collapsed rock, further and further until I stared up through a distant hole to a small patch of blue sky.

“Sands” I breathed.

“At least you were considerate to make us a way out when you did your best to trap us.” Erix’s tone was dry.

“I aim to please,” I said. “Really, I did the first thing I could think of to stop them. With your sword…”

Oh. His sword.

Erix’s hands spasmed where they still held my forearms. He looked down and to the side.

I followed his gaze to the ground beside where he kneeled.

Both pieces of Kelvar’s saber lay, a raw, jagged edge where they should fit together.

Letting go of me, Erix reached for it. His right hand picked up the handle, while his left hand gingerly reached for the severed piece of blade.

Despite the care he took in picking it up, the lethal edge sliced his finger. He hissed as blood welled up and began to dribble over his palm toward his wrist. He had always kept his blade razor sharp.

“I knew I sharpened it too much,” he admitted, ignoring his cut. I reached out to hold his wrist, trying to smudge away the blood and only succeeding in smearing it over his skin, where it mixed with a thick layer of dust.

“The more deadly the sword became, the closer it came to breaking,” he said.

My heart squeezed painfully. I knew he didn’t only speak of the weapon in his hand, but the weapon he had become—honed constantly into a lethal edge by Lord Alasdar.

“Now you can’t even hold it without being cut,” he lamented.

“I’m not afraid of a little pain,” I admitted, reaching out to take the weapon from him and examine the broken edge. Perhaps it could be mended .

He pulled away before I could take it, and I frowned. His gaze did not leave the broken sword cradled in his lap as he spoke. “I have to leave.”

I blinked, the words refusing to make sense.

“Leave?” I echoed dumbly.

“Once we get the Heart, I have to leave Kelvadan,” he explained.

Something dark and sinister reared its head in my gut. It was familiar in the way an old friend was—easy to fall back into even when you hadn’t seen each other in a while.

“I am going to have to take the Heart to the temple at the edge of the ocean,” he continued.

“I can go with you,” I argued, but the words sounded petulant to my own ears.

Erix shook his head. “The journey will likely take months. Kelvadan can’t be without a queen for that long.”

Somehow, it was a truth I had conveniently let my mind skate over whenever I thought of restoring the desert—the same way I had let my brain skip over the realities of what my future entailed when scratching survival off rocks at my oasis.

If I acknowledged the fact that I was likely to die there without ever knowing another home, I would not have had the strength to get up and hunt another day.

In facing down the challenge of saving Kelvadan and restoring the desert, I had forced my attention to the challenges immediately before me.

“You said you would rather carve out your own heart than abandon me again,” I said, my voice shaking.

Erix’s gaze snapped up to meet mine, a familiar darkness shadowing his gaze.

“And I have,” he snarled. “Letting you marry somebody else—knowing that you could only ever be mine in secret, while I would have to watch him stand by your side in public. I have had to tear my beating heart from my chest to keep from burning Kelvadan down, just so you wouldn’t have to marry Calix to save it. ”

I blinked, some of the fire within me banked by the icy coldness his words evoked .

“I have ripped my heart out to stay by your side,” Erix’s voice cracked. “And even if I have to leave—both so I can save the desert, and so you can save Kelvadan—then I will leave that heart with you.”

His words were as sharp as the shattered sword in his hands—as jagged as my own broken heart in my chest, cutting me every time I tried to draw in a breath.

I broke his gaze to look down, finding that he had closed his fists around it, and blood welled up between his knuckles.

He did not seem to notice. I reached forward and peeled his fingers back from the jagged edges, before gently pulling it from his grasp.

“I’m not sure I’m strong enough to let you go,” I admitted, my voice cracking on the last words.

I can’t watch somebody I love ride away while I’m left alone again.

Erix’s angry expression softened into a sad sort of smile. “Of course, you are. You’ve always been stronger than me anyway.”

“Do you promise to come back?” I asked, hating how pitiful my voice sounded.

Something flickered in Erix’s eyes, but I couldn’t name it. “I promise to fight through life and death to return.”

It was my turn to smile sadly. “If I learned how to do anything in my ten years of exile, it was to wait. I’ve watched the horizon for many years. I’ll watch it for you.”

Silence stretched between us, and I thought I could hear my heart cracking. The moment was interrupted by a distant, high-pitched whinny of panic. Both of our gazes shot upward toward the exit from the pit far above us.

“Alza,” Erix breathed. “She does not like to stay when I am off elsewhere.”

I related to the sentiment.

“How are we going to get out?” I asked.

“Thankfully, I have had a lot of practice climbing the side of the palace every night, and it was hewn from stone with no joints to use a fingerholds. We should be able to climb out.”

I stared dubiously at the collapsed slope of rock and earth, so vertical it would be more accurately termed a wall. “I’m not so sure,” I admitted.

Erix kept squinting at the sky above us. “Can you climb a rope? ”

I nodded. It seemed like a much easier proposition than digging my fingers into sliding sand and earth.

“There’s some rope in Alza’s packs. Once I get to the top, I’ll lower it down for you.”

With that, he stood. Stopping at the beginning of the upward slope, he stared down at the curled tricrith tails. Reaching over his shoulder, his muscles tensed as his fingers closed around thin air. His broken sword still lay in my lap.

“Can you use your sword to cut off one of these tails? We can bring it with us to extract the venom.”

I stood and walked over to him, offering out the two halves of his shattered blade.

He took the blade first, dropping it tip first into his scabbard.

Then he took the hilt, sliding it in after, until it looked like it always did.

A stranger wouldn’t be able to tell it was shattered from the outside, but the despair in Erix’s eyes remained.

With that done, he turned away from me sharply and set to the climb.

I watched him ascend the first part. Small pebbles tinkled and slid in tiny avalanches as he scrabbled for footholds.

I raised my brows at the way he hung from just the tips of his fingers.

With the width of his shoulders and the bulk of his muscles, it didn’t seem like it should be possible.

Once he was nearly a third of the way up, I shook myself, turning to the task he had left me.

I retrieved my sword from where it lay near where Erix had unburied me.

Then I lifted it over my head and swung down at the joint between two sections of armored tail.

The wet crunch it made sent a shudder of disgust up my spine.

I wrinkled my nose and hacked again. Black blood splattered over my boots and the end of the tail finally severed.

I stared down at it in thought for a few moments before unwrapping the long fabric of my hood from my head and shoulders.

Gingerly, careful to avoid the lethal singer that decorated the tip, I used the cloth to pick it up before wrapping it in the length of maroon fabric.

Then, I used the loose ends to tie it around my torso, so the severed tail was cradled against my chest like a deformed baby .

So distracted was I by the thought that I nearly leaped out of my skin when a weight dropped on the top of my head. I jerked my chin up to see a rope dangling down from the edge of the cavern. Erix had been surprisingly swift.

Squaring my shoulders, I grasped the knotted end, bracing my feet against the rocky wall and walking myself up. At the top, Erix tugged the rope, and I let him pull me up and out of the darkness.