Page 14 of Cursed Shadows 4 (The Dark Fae)

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I am on the opposite bank of the river that I fell into.

If, for a moment, I thought that wouldn’t be a problem, it was a moment riddled with delusion.

On this side, the forest floor has risen.

Moments, minutes, hours of walking, and the earth has risen so far above the river that it is now a steep drop down to the water.

The threat of the fall has pushed me deeper into the forest.

Shelter is my priority.

Still, I forage along my aimless route, picking the right berries, sweeping away nettles from leaking sap.

The direction of my steps has no purpose.

I wander for the most part, but I never stray from the rushing music of the river. There is distance between me and the killer water, but I don’t stray too far, lest I lose my bearings.

The string of an unfastened leather pouch is looped around my finger. Every so often, I crouch down by berry bushes, inspect the fruits, turn them over in my palm, then store the safe ones in the pouch. I was lucky enough to find a fallen beehive about a half-hour back, and I stole a chunk of honeycomb. It’s broken into pieces and stored in the pouch with the berries.

I keep them for when I might need them.

The net of fish—just two left—is tucked in my bag. But to eat them, I must cook them. Build a fire. And Dare told me not to risk that during the darker hours.

I don’t know how long it’s been dark now. I just know that it is—and the dokkalves will be out.

I am headed upstream, and so with every step I take, I draw closer to the threat of enemies, the threat of warriors either aiming to capture me or kill me.

The wariness of my swift moving gaze is as much for the dokkalves as it is for the litalves. Where the litalves will kill me—no doubt about it—the dokkalves will maim me, then drag me up the mountain to the summit.

I avoid both.

I watch out for both.

Both are my enemies.

Hours of walking. I feel it in the tension that lumps my muscles into stiff boulders and stones. My hamstrings ache most of all, and I stop to rub them.

This incline might be the end of me. It’s not impossible to simply collapse from exhaustion and wither away.

The bitterness of the thought flattens my mouth into a slanted line. If that’s how I go out, I’ll be pissed.

Eventually, I tug away from the crashing song of the river and tread deeper into the forest. I stuck too close to it for too long, and so maybe I’ll have better luck finding a place to hide out if I go deeper.

I scan the woods around me as I go, but for a while, I see nothing more than foliage and nettles and fallen pinecones, some rodent droppings, and a hole that dips under leaves and twigs that I suspect is a burrow.

I leave it be.

That shelter won’t fit me.

And I can’t climb these trees.

Pine trees, too tall, too dangerous, an impossible climb.

One I can’t risk with my muscles tensing beneath my fatigue.

Still, I consider it.

For a moment, I stand, almost swaying on the spot with the exhaustion spindling through me, and look up at the thick, scented greenery. The heights that it reaches trickles an icy sensation down my spine, and a strange wave of dizziness rolls through me.

I drop my head and look at the thick, brown trunk, sturdy unlike me. I lift a boot to retreat, to resume my aimless wander until I probably pass out on the forest floor.

But the moment my boot flattens on the nettles and pinecones, I am struck still and silent.

My breath hitches—and traps in my chest.

It’s only a whisper, but I hear it.

The zing of a dagger. Freshly drawn from its scabbard. It whistles pure metal through the air—

Then strikes another blade.

The clang reverberates through the forest. The clean, crisp air of silence suddenly vibrates with the song of battle.

I was wrong about contenders not landing this far down the mountain. Or I didn’t give enough attention to how far I have climbed upstream.

Tension stiffens me.

I’m bolted in place.

One wrong move, breath, blink will announce my presence.

The battle is close.

So close that I can smell it, the metals, the leathers, the sweat and grime. My gaze swerves, wide and sharp, but I see nothing, no shadows moving, no blows landing.

I loosen a shuddering breath, soft and near-silent. At my sides, my hands curl into fists as though to grip my slipping resolve.

I stare right into the soul of a pine tree, one that remains firm, stays steady. A tear falls down my cheek. The fear is nothing short of ice trickling through my veins, because I know where the battle is.

On the other side of this tree.

The trunk is thick, it is lush, boulders mound and curve all around it. I am protected by it. Shielded from whatever battle clashes on the other side.

But that might not be enough.

I lift my boot.

My movements are slow as I twist my leg around the side of the tree trunk, then flatten my boot on a patch of dirt. I lean my weight on it, slowly, my teeth gritted as though that’ll somehow help me keep quiet.

I slip around the tree, my shoulder so close to the bark that just one filling breath will close the distance and the tree will scrape along my sweater.

I peer around the thick brown trunk.

My throat tightens.

I should have been prepared for this. Better prepared for the… violence.

Dare taught me to hunt, to fish, to cook, to escape—he taught me a lot, but not to prepare for the grisly sight of the dead.

I am not a fae familiar with death. I saw no battles in my youth, I face no debt to the defence of the light lands. I am sheltered, a darling, raised to brandish brushes of lip paint, not swords.

I am ill-prepared for the grim sight in the clearing ahead. The portal spat out warriors here. Like where I fell, more landed nearby, some in clusters. Condensed areas.

This was one of them.

The clearing, if one can call it that, is a kill site of more than warriors. It’s cracked trees, bent and crooked, exploded by lightning strikes, and the bodies littered around the tree cemetery aren’t all that different.

A dokkalf landed in his own death. Impaled by the torn trunk of a split tree.

At least three others fell here.

Two more dokkalves—and one litalf.

But I don’t see the battle that I can hear ringing in the air. Metals colliding, grunts and the heavy thudding of punches.

That fight is close.

So close that I keep my breath bated and my steps soft as I inch closer to the dead.

Bent at the knees, I keep a low crouch as I sneak towards the clearing. My gaze sweeps the area, sweeps the bodies. A throat torn out, a limb shredded, as though it’s exploded into fleshy ribbons.

An acidic burn trickles up my throat.

I swallow it back and steel myself.

I’m not viewing the violence, the brutality for nothing. I search the faces for anyone I might know—and the breath that escapes me is curt, a soft relief, when I come up short.

I only recognise the litalf as someone I have seen around the High Court from time to time, and the vaguely familiar face of the impaled dokkalf as a face I saw around the barracks of Comlar. But no one I know .

Before the relief can slump my shoulders and relax the grimace of my face, a guttural cry disturbs the air.

I drop.

I fall to the forest floor, right behind the split tree. Above me, the gaping face of the impaled dokkalf drips blood.

A grimace steals me as I slide out of the way, but not before an inky droplet lands on my muddy shoulder.

Can’t worry about that now.

The clash of metal, the cries, the grunts—I’m reminded of the nearby battle, the one in the shadows of the trees around me.

I reach up for the charred flesh of the tree. My fingers glide over the smooth lightning singe before I tighten my grip. Slowly, I pull myself up, and peer over the edge to the clearing ahead.

A breath cuts through me.

The burly back of a dokkalf faces me. Standing, and very much alive. His black leathers ripple over thick muscle as he hoists up a blood-stained sword. Red blood, crimson, litalf .

Whoever he faces off with is a mystery to me.

This meaty fae blocks my view. But it must be a litalf—and he charges at him.

Sword raised, there are no battle cries or feral shouts that rise up as he leaps over the body of a fallen fae. The body is fresh, eyes glazed and fixed up at the skies, a stream of blood flowing out from his ears, his eyes, his nose.

The dokkalf has forgotten that victim of his.

And he brings his sword down on another.

A clash rings out. A grunt accompanies it. A tired, weary sound of fatigue, and so I know without seeing him that this litalf still standing is on the verge of falling.

I flinch.

The dokkalf chokes on a bloody sound.

He stills, his knees trembling, and—as though the mountain has slowed everything down around me and time just creeps by—his arms drop to his sides.

The sword hits the dirt.

Then the dokkalf crumples.

Fallen onto his side, his face is slack, stunned, and black liquid oozes out from his throat. An open throat, cut right through to the bone, maybe further.

I flick my gaze up at the litalf who took him down.

And my heart swings through me.

His cherry-blossom hair is soaked with blood, red and black, his porcelain face purpling in angry splotches. He staggers around, stealing his face from my view just as another dokkalf rushes at him.

They move slow. Both of them.

It strikes me.

Since they landed here, all those hours ago, they have been fighting, battling, non-stop—until only two are left standing. Barely.

I should creep away.

I should hide from this final breath of battle.

I should turn and sneak from the clearing, go far away, because litalf or dokkalf, it doesn’t matter who survives.

Both are a threat to me.

But I find I can’t move.

I can’t just leave them to fight to their fatigued bones. However long this battle has been going on, it’s long enough that their steps are slow and staggering, their arms weak as they strike out with daggers—

And my heart aches for the litalf.

Because he is my friend.

Now, I am stuck in a whole other way.

I am stuck between saving myself—and helping Ridge.

I don’t move.

I just watch, frozen.

The dokkalf lurches at Ridge.

Ridge stumbles back, his footing uneven.

Beneath his brown boots, foliage slips and skids, and he loses his balance. He topples over—and his spine crunches on a jagged boulder.

I cringe.

Fingers gripped onto the split tree, my gloves wrinkle around my tensing hands.

Ridge rolls onto his front. He scrambles to his feet—and my mind is screaming at him, get up, get up, get up .

But the dokkalf is quick to close the distance.

He plunges the knife into Ridge’s side.

A guttural breath shudders through me.

I feel the horror slackening my face.

I can’t shake the sudden swell of guilt that swallows me. That I am just as responsible for that knife in his side.

Because I hide.

My teeth bare in pure, unfiltered reluctance.

No, no, no, no.

But not even I can stop myself.

I stagger around the split, my boots scuffing louder than their fight—and I manage the lamest distraction I’ve ever conjured up.

“Hey!”

Heat flushes my cheeks, hot.

The dokkalf looms over Ridge, the hilt of the blood-soaked knife firm in his gloved grip, the blade buried deep in Ridge’s flesh. Tension ripples through him, stilling him.

Ridge throws a wild look at me. Nothing less than absolute shock widens his lilac eyes.

Slowly, the dokkalf turns his chin to his shoulder. His short lashes flutter, his nostrils flare—and he knows exactly who I am.

He pulls back from Ridge. Takes the knife with him. The slicking sound is enough to shudder my spine.

A grunt comes before Ridge slumps, slipping off the boulder. He thuds to the ground. A pained tightness hardens his face, and he aims it right at me.

The dark one turns.

His eyes flare on me.

And I am frozen all over again.

Beyond ‘ hey! ’, I didn’t have much of a plan.

My mind scrambles. It lurches from scheme to scheme but can never really land on anything longer than a racing heartbeat.

The dokkalf takes a step closer.

His boot flattens on the foliage in a way that mine never does. His bootstep crunches, it breaks twigs and nettles, disturbs crisp greenery—it annoys nature.

And here I am, judging him for such a small slight against nature, but ready to be captured, all because I didn’t have a plan.

The stands at Comlar must be snickering.

I can picture it now.

Father on the stands, a grim twist to his mouth, utter disappointment in the dull shake of his head; Pandora loosening a sigh and hiding her face in her palms, her thoughts racing around in circles with only one word: silly .

Silly little halfling.

Silly Nari.

She wouldn’t be wrong.

Then the thought strikes me—and I am both ashamed that I didn’t think of it sooner, but also ridiculous for presuming that this will work at all.

I plant my boots, firm.

My fingers spindle out a hilt from my holster—and the smile that the dokkalf gives me is nothing short of amused. Like I am little more than a child learning to play with wooden swords on the street.

Fucking patronising.

I’ll wipe that smile clean off his face.

I do.

I lift the dagger.

And I press the bite of the blade to my throat.

The dokkalf stills, instantly.

His eyes flash. Nostrils flare. Chest rises.

That arrogant smirk fades.

Looks like he wants nothing more than to snap my neck.

But he freezes.

I try not to show my relief, to let my shoulders slump or to heave the breath pinned to my chest.

I lift my chin a touch higher.

“Leave.” The command is as firm as my tone. “Leave him be—and me.”

His brow lowers. Furrowed eyebrows darkening mint-leaf eyes, his irises grooved with creases and shadows.

He considers me.

“You want to doubt me?” I arch a brow. “Question that I have it in me?”

Still, the muscled statue just watches me. Blood drips from his sawdust hair, sandy like the shores around the seas of the Queen’s Court, but stained with death.

A bitter grin steals my face, and I’m sure it’s as ugly as the writhing of my insides.

I press the blade firmer.

Warm droplets roll down my neck and catch on the dip of my clavicle.

“We both know my fate if I let you take another step towards me,” I whisper—but he hears me just fine, and his jaw tenses, sharper than a fistful of knives. “I won’t go with you,” I add. “I won’t let you harm my friend. You have nothing—no choice, no play. You know as well as I do, you must leave.”

Thin trails of blood still roll down my neck, then curve over the bump of my clavicle, and some gather into little stagnant pools in the dip of my collarbone for a beat before falling down my front. The threads of my sweater soak up the blood.

The dokkalf’s face thins. His mouth purses, his pride thrashes within him, battling with his scheming mind.

Whether this dokkalf is smart or a fool, I can’t be sure. I just know that this won’t work on all of them.

This is nothing less than a stroke of luck in the place of the gods. And maybe I’m starting to see that I might be favoured among them.

The dokkalf takes a step back.

A retreat.

His head lifts, a proud twist snarling his mouth. It physically pains him to withdraw.

But he takes another step back.

And another.

And I watch, blade cutting into my flesh, as he slinks back towards the direction of the river.

His gaze doesn’t leave mine.

Ridge traces him with a narrowed stare.

His voice is harrowed, thinned by wounds he wears, “I will tell her if you return—if I sense you again,” he warns him. “Do not return.”

The plan shatters in the dark one’s mind.

I see that in the darkness that clouds his face. He cuts his mint gaze between us, searching for another scheme he might unearth, a way to trick me, catch me.

But if he loiters around us in the woods, I won’t drop this knife. If he returns, Ridge will sense him and warn me.

And, as far as this dark one understands, I will cut my own throat.

He doesn’t know I can lie.

“If you come back,” I tell him, firm, as though it’s the absolute truth, “I will take my own life before you even set your eyes on me.”

Ridge’s brows hike.

I don’t take my gaze off the dokkalf, but my peripherals find Ridge.

He throws a startled look at me. He’s quick to mask it. To set his face, firm, then turn it back on the dark one.

He watches us. From dozens of trees in the distance, his gaze is cutting. But his slow retreat continues—until he’s far out of the clearing and out of sight.

I don’t lower the blade.

Stiff, I watch the trees.

My breath is bated, my chest unmoving, and my hand like steel around the hilt.

It’s only when there comes a sigh from Ridge that I move.

I look over at him.

He’s slumped against the boulder, his bottom planted on the foliage, and his cheek is turned to the direction that the dokkalf disappeared.

His senses, I trust.

The dokkalf is gone. Not for long. But for now.

Lilac eyes lift to me. “Why did you help me?” There’s a hoarseness to his breath that flurries a panic in my chest. “He wouldn’t have killed you.”

I know what he’s really asking me.

Why save me when there is a chance, however small, that I might kill you?

I lift my chin and look down my nose at him.

Our gazes lock—and hold for a long moment.

I frown and, slowly, lower the knife to my side.

I don’t consider him now, right here before me. I consider the Ridge who, in memory, helped me up from the mud when I was a child, and walked me home. I consider Ridge who I have suspicions loves my dearest friend, who smoked valerian with me on the roof of Hemlock House and visited the human realm to skate on ice and drink at loud clubs.

“You won’t.” I speak it with such certainty that it is no compliment, it just is.

I push into step towards the dead dokkalf that Ridge took down, the burly sword-wielding creature of nightmares.

If I had the energy to be impressed, I would tell him so.

This dokkalf would be no easy defeat.

But I am short of the urge to chit-chat, and so I tuck the knife into my holster as I advance on the fresh corpse.

Before I reach the puddle of black blood, a small smile flickers over Ridge’s lovely pink mouth. An unspoken response to my certainty that he won’t harm me.

I pretend I didn’t see it and crouch at the limp arm of the fallen dark one. I spare him a frown for only a heartbeat, then reach out for his trousers.

I riffle through his pockets.

A ghastly thing to do, a depraved act I never thought myself capable of, but now that my hand is buried deep in a trouser pocket, and I’m wrangling out a small pouch of what feels like nuts, I decide it all came too easily to me.

“He will come back for you,” Ridge wheezes.

I throw a look over my shoulder at him.

He’s moved from the boulder. Now, he’s standing, his back leaning against the mossy trunk of a tree.

My frown settles on the slick crimson of his glove.

He has his hand pressed to his side, where the dark male plunged a knife.

The stream of blood leaks, all the way down his leg.

“He’ll find more of his kind,” Ridge says with a faint nod, and I suspect his mind is slowing down, “and return.”

The truth of his words doesn’t strike me.

I would have been an idiot to think that the dark one would just simply vanish and leave us be.

He was always going to return.

I just don’t plan on being here when he does.

My gaze lingers over the wound.

I stuff the pouch of nuts into my backpack, then wrestle the straps over my shoulders.

“How bad is it?” Forgetting all about the dead dokkalf, I stride towards Ridge. “Let me see.”

“It’s just a wound. No organs or arteries there—I’ll be alright.” The raspiness of his voice snares my attention.

With each step closer to him, I notice the beginnings of a glossy sheen sweeping his brow. A sickly pallor has taken him, in the lilac of his eyes, even the cherry blossom hue of his hair—the strands not soaked in blood—resembles the frost that dusts the other side of the river.

It takes me a moment.

But then it clicks in my mind, like fingers snapping.

Panic should stab my heart like an ice dagger. It should drop my gut to my bottom.

Instead, I find more of a caution in my gaze as I spin around and eye up the fallen dark one. It’s not the same dokkalf who stabbed into Ridge’s flesh, but I eye him as though he is that very one.

Not far from his limp hand rests a knife, short and simple, a chalky texture. The texture glistens with soaked crimson, as though it has absorbed the blood of its victims.

Black metal.

Ateralum.

Soaks up poison.

I turn on Ridge.

“Do you have the white powder?” I breathe the question with a gust of urgency and, in three running steps, close the distance between us.

I only have black powder on my person, a small phial wrapped in a cloth and buried deep in my backpack. But that is for cuts, gashes and lost organs; it is only for physical wounds, not poisons.

We need the white powder.

Ridge nods his head, a weary gesture that he manages just once before his lashes flutter shut.

“Can you walk?” I whisper the question I’m afraid to learn the answer to, because we can’t stay here—not with fresh dokkalf blood pooling on the ground behind me. A scent that will draw in a nearby contender, and if the warrior who comes to investigate is litalf, then I should consider myself dead already.

I think even if Daxeel was standing here with me, right by my side, the target would be on me. I’m no warrior, I am far weaker than the warriors in this Sacrament—so I am a hell of a lot easier to take out than Daxeel is.

Right now, I only have Ridge.

And he’s on the verge of passing out.

He slumps entirely against the tree now, and the wobble of his legs tells me how close he is to dropping to the ground.

“Wait here.” It’s all I say before I lunge for the low hanging branch. Leaves fall past me as I propel myself up the tree. The branches prove sturdier than their appearance suggests—not one snaps or cracks under my weight.

This isn’t a climb I wanted to risk. Not with my weariness, my hunger, my aches. But I have little choice now, and I climb a few metres up—enough that I can make out some of my surroundings.

The river is just where I left it. That was a mild concern of mine, just how tricky the magic of this mountain would be, how far off I wandered.

The cliff drop to the river stretches on too long. It turns to frost and snow not far from here. If we walk in the direction opposite the waterfall, it will take at least five hours to reach a point of crossing the river.

Ridge won’t make it five hours.

He needs the white powder now. And then hours to pass out, let the powder work.

I don’t need a crossing of the river.

I need shelter.

Pressing my spine against the trunk of the tree, I move around to face the other side—in the opposite direction of the river. Further down the mountain slope.

My legs tremble as I take careful steps to the other side of the tree. Ignoring the deep ache of my back, probably black and blue from my landing and the battering of the boulders in the river, I narrow my eyes on the cliffside that plummets into something of a ridge.

Huh.

If that isn’t irony, I don’t know what is.

And if I hadn’t climbed up here, I wouldn’t have figured it out. The forest is narrowing. Pinched in from both sides, two cliffs, one that drops to a river and the other into a ridge.

If I followed this path, this forest, the way I was headed before I heard the battle, then I would have been led further up the mountain, and right into the colourless woods of frost and ice. Barren, dead land I want to avoid.

I doubt there are many berries up there to snack on, and far too many fae to fight off.

Finding Ridge might have saved my life. It seems to have at least saved me some time.

Maybe it isn’t irony that I found Ridge, then saw the ridge from my vantage point. Maybe it’s fate.

I side-step another branch, then lean around to check the other direction.

A rockpool down the way, less than a half-hour walk.

It’s hard to make out from this distance, but the puddle of water glimmers blue—and it’s interrupted in a wedge of grey. I guess it to be a rock overhang from the cliffside.

A small little curve of rock-shelter, beside a water source. It’s less than I hoped for. But it’s more than I asked for.

Shelter and water.

I murmur a curse under my breath.

With no other options in sight, none as close at the overhang, then that is the one we have no choice but to take.

My descent of the tree is slower than the climb. Whether it’s the worsening sharp pains in my side, or the sudden slippery surface of the dewy branches, I don’t know, but by the time I land on the mossy ground, Ridge is on his bottom, head leaned back on the tree, his lashes low over whitish eyes.

If I was in a romantic mood, I might think him a perfect blend of this mountain, something that was crafted from the frost and ice, then the gods breathed life into him.

But I’m not, so I grab his arm and, not so gently, wrench him to his feet. If he was unconscious already, there is no way in all my muscles that I would find strength enough to lift him. But the gods are giving me so many favours on this mountain, and Ridge clinging to the land of awake is one of them.