Page 17 of Her Cruel Redemption (The Dark Reflection #3)

Chapter Seventeen

R hiandra slipped in and out of consciousness as we rode. One of the others must have realised she was in danger of falling because a pumpkin in my saddle bag spontaneously sprouted, the resulting vine creeping up and around us, binding her to me. It didn’t help that it had started to rain. I could feel her shivering against me and my heart ached at the thought that she was suffering and I couldn’t help her. Not until we found somewhere to hide.

The farms this close to the border were mostly deserted, and we found one set far away from a road. The house was boarded up tight, and Daethie sensed enchantment about when she circled the place, so we didn’t try it. We didn’t want to set off an intruder repellent and draw attention. The barn was warm and dry and seemed a safer option. Elias cut the vines off me and lifted Rhiandra from the saddle, laying her down on a blanket Mae threw across the dusty floor. She was pale and trembling so badly her teeth chattered, her gaze blank as it roamed the ceiling like she was seeing something that wasn’t there.

I could hardly look up from her, too afraid of seeing the faces of the others. There was a thick sorrow in the air, muffling all sound and making it impossible to speak. I didn’t want to see an accusation in their eyes as they looked at me. I didn’t want to see regret. I had led them out of the Living Valley. They had followed my dream here.

And now Kelvhan was dead.

It had happened so fast. His horse had reared, his weight slipping in the saddle, his hands grasping at the pommel to pull himself upright as a soldier surged between Elias and Daethie, sword aimed, meeting his target with terrifying ease, his momentum driving the blade straight through Kel’s back. It hadn’t seemed real. He’d gone rigid, then slid the rest of the way out of his saddle, hands limp, just as Goras had sunk magic into the wooden bridge and brought it to life, shielding us with a wall of vines. The enemy had cut through them quickly, but by then Goras had regained his saddle and we’d regrouped, ready to surge forwards in one shared push. It had worked—we’d escaped.

But we’d left Kel lying dead on the floor of the bridge to do it.

I felt the light touch of fingers at the back of my neck, and Elias knelt next to me. ‘Are you alright?’

The question brought a lump to my throat that I couldn’t swallow. I shook my head, tears springing to my eyes. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and I allowed myself a moment to turn my face into him, my fingers gripping at the fabric of his shirt as I took a few ragged breaths. I shouldn’t be the one crying. I hadn’t known Kel for long. But his death weighed heavily on me. I was the reason he‘d fallen from that horse, and I could see his fall in slow motion in my mind’s eye. The spray of blood, the slump of his body to the right, the thud as he hit the floor. The realisation that we wouldn’t be able to go back for him if we hoped to escape. It had been my call to leave him behind. He would never have one of those glass coffins in the tombs, preserved and loved by those he’d left behind for centuries to come. His body would rest far from home, among those who didn’t even know who he was.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I sobbed. ‘I should never—'

‘Stop,’ Elias murmured, his voice thick. ‘He chose to follow you. He knew the risk.’

‘But now he’s… he’s dead for it.’

‘ You weren’t the one who cut him down, Gwin.’ His hand gently stroked my back. ‘Let’s put the blame where it belongs.’

I took a deep, steadying breath and swallowed down my tears. There was no time to fall apart now. We were still in danger, and there were other injuries that needed seeing to. Goras had taken an arrow to the thigh, Mae had been sliced across her arm. And then there was Rhi. But in my heart, I swore an oath to the memory of Kelvhan, to his heartmate waiting for him back in the Living Valley; I would make his life mean something. His sacrifice wouldn’t be for nothing. It was my responsibility to see our purpose through, to unite the land and bring the Yoxvese out of the dungeons where they were being exploited for their magic.

And as I looked back down at Rhi and took her clammy hand in mine, I had another realisation of guilt. She had warned me about leaving that scout alive, about speaking to the people on the road. If I had heeded her warning, the soldiers may not have known we were on the road in the first place. Maybe they wouldn’t have been lying in wait for us at that bridge. And maybe Kelvhan would still be alive.

‘She wasn’t supposed to use magic,’ Goras muttered as he settled himself in a chair and braced for the moment Daethie would try to dig the head of the crossbow bolt out of his thigh. ‘She risked us all again.’

‘But he was there,’ I replied. ‘She had to use magic. She was defending herself.’

‘Maybe,’ Elias said slowly. He and Goras exchanged a look.

‘Maybe?’

‘Then why didn’t she kill him?’ Elias said. ‘We saw them. He was on his knees. She could have ended it right there. But she ran.’

‘That’s what you saw, but we don’t know the full story. She can tell us what happened when she wakes up.’

‘She can twist what happened to suit her, you mean,’ Goras muttered, wincing as Daethie began ripping at the fabric around his wound.

‘It isn’t easy to kill someone,’ I continued, squeezing Rhi’s hand. I couldn’t let them pick over her actions like this when she wasn’t even conscious to defend herself. ‘And it shouldn’t be. Maybe she just found it difficult to take the final blow.’

‘She was ready to kill the scout. Don’t think that’s the problem.’

’You don’t know that she would have gone through with it.’

‘It’s strange you want to talk about death when I’m about to pull an arrow out of your leg,’ Daethie said, her voice mild and singsong, as though she was talking about braiding his hair. ‘It’s very close to an artery. You might be close to death yourself in a minute.’

Goras folded his meaty arms, his brow furrowing deeply as Daethie began gently prodding at the flesh around the arrow, drawing little hisses of pain from him. Elias continued to run his fingers up and down my spine.

‘I know you love her,’ he said softly, ‘but we need to be careful. She’s proving to be unpredictable. She could put us all in danger.’

Hadn’t I put us all in danger? But I didn’t reply, just tucked a blanket around Rhi that Mae handed me and watched her twitching eyelids. She was muttering something in her sleep, something I couldn’t make out. If I leaned closer, perhaps I could have heard it. But I didn’t.

Perhaps I didn’t want to know.

We waited out the remainder of the daylight in the barn, too wary to light a fire to stave off the damp in our clothes, too scared to push on while it was still daylight. Outside, the rain came down harder, thundering against the roof, filling the uneasy silence that had settled over us, broken only by the occasional murmur. No one seemed to want to speak, to talk about what had happened to Kel. Elias had once told me that the Yoxvese didn’t know how to deal with death because they lived such long lives and didn’t encounter it often. I could sense that in them now, so brittle in their shock at having lost someone so quickly. A life stolen, just like that.

The hours stretched out while Rhiandra shivered through her fever. Daethie reminded me frequently that there was nothing I could do, that we would simply have to wait for her body to fight off the magic poisoning, that she had already done so once before so it was likely she would do so again. But I was so scared for her. What if this time she’d used more, used too much? What if she never woke? What if she would be another life lost in this quest to win back my crown? Perhaps I should have listened to the others when they said she would be better off staying in the Living Valley. If I had, she wouldn’t have had to face Draven again.

It was still raining when night fell, and Rhiandra still wasn’t conscious.

‘What do you want to do, Gwin?’ Mae asked from her position leaning against a wall, sometimes dozing and sometimes making little plants sprout from the scattered remnants of chicken feed wedged in cracks in the floor. ‘We could make the border before daybreak if we ride fast.’

‘We can’t until Rhi comes out of her fever,’ I said.

‘We could wrap her up and tie her in, use magic to keep the worst of the chill off her.’

I chewed my lip. They were all waiting for my decision. Mine. My burden to carry if I made the wrong choice and another person wound up dead for it. If we went out into the cold, rainy night while Rhi was still sick, perhaps she would get worse. Perhaps she would die. Perhaps the others would become exhausted trying to use magic to keep her warm and we’d have to find somewhere else to hide while we rested again. But if we stayed, we might be found. Surely there were soldiers combing the land all around us right now, looking for us. The longer we waited, the more likely they were to find us. Though, we might also meet them on the road. If that happened while Rhiandra was strapped to someone else, the person carrying her would be at greater risk than the rest of us. Their horse would be slower and less agile. They’d be easier to catch.

‘Let’s rest,’ I finally said. ‘We all need time to recover. We’ll leave when she wakes.’ Mae accepted my decision without question, and that terrified me. I sent up a silent prayer to Aether that it was the right choice.

We took it in turns on watch, but the only one who seemed to really sleep was Tanathil. He simply curled up in a ball on the floor and was quietly snoring a moment later. Mae dozed for short stretches, her head dropping back against the wall and her eyes closing, but she would always start awake before long. Goras lay down, but shifted his position frequently. I suspected his leg was hurting more than he would let on. I sat upright by Rhiandra’s side, my eyes fixed on the doorway, like I could will it to remain shut if I only stared hard enough.

A hand on my arm gently tugged at me, startling me from my vigil.

‘Come on, you need rest too,’ Elias said, drawing me against him. I went willingly, relieved to thaw a little in the warmth of his arms. He rested his chin on top of my head, breath stirring my hair, and I closed my eyes, releasing a sigh. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘Should I have let Rhi kill that man back in Garlein?’ I asked, so softly only he would hear the words. ‘If I had, could we have avoided that ambush on the bridge? Did Kelvhan die because I couldn’t do what was necessary?’

He didn’t answer immediately, and the rain on the roof continued to fill the silence. ‘I don’t think so. There were others with him who saw us. And he didn’t know we were headed for the bridge. I doubt the ambush was there on his information alone. And even if it was, killing him would have been wrong.’

‘Then was it that family we spoke with on the road?’ I turned so I could look into his face and see his response written in his eyes. ‘I let them know who I was. If I hadn’t done that, maybe no one would have known to be looking for us.’

‘And if you’d stayed in the Living Valley, we wouldn’t have been crossing the bridge, and if you’d never gone to Lee Helse, no one would have known you were alive, and if you’d never taken a chance on the caves when you were stuck in the mountains you never would have made it to the Living Valley in the first place.’ He cupped my face, brushed his thumb across my cheek. ‘Don’t torment yourself like this. You made the best decisions you could with what you knew at the time. And you stuck by your principles. Sometimes, that means hard consequences, but you can hold fast to the fact that you did what you thought was right.’

I nodded, taking the words in, grasping onto them. The best decisions I could with what I knew at the time. ‘Thank you,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I needed to hear that.’

His eyes hardened a little around the edges, and he seemed to go somewhere else for a moment. ‘It used to weigh on my mother,’ he said. ‘The responsibility for making decisions.’

I sat up a little straighter. He’d never mentioned his mother before. ‘It did?’

He hesitated, and I could feel the heaviness of whatever he was holding back. His fingers absently traced a knot in the wood of the floor. ‘She served as an Elder when I was a child. She was the one who’d talk to the nomads and the other races who roam the mountains. So she heard and saw more of human cruelty than most.’ His eyes flickered, a shadow crossing his face. ‘She became fixated on finding ways to defend the mountains without violence, so she started experimenting with magic, pushing it to extremes.’

I felt a shiver run through me, but I remained silent, letting him go on.

‘She discovered a way to drain life instead of nurturing it. And she taught us all to sing it to blight the land. The mountains… the poisoned land around them… the inability to grow food… that was her doing. Well, the initial idea was hers. The push to keep using it over and over wasn’t.’

I could scarcely breathe as I stared at him, the horror of it trickling through me. For all my life, the lands around the Yawn had been struck with Blight. It had meant starvation for many, waves of country people begging in the streets of Lee Helse, people pleading at my father’s throne for help. ‘The Blight… it comes from the Living Valley?’

He nodded, eyes fixed on that knot on the floor. ‘I should have told you sooner.’

I didn’t know what to do with the information. The Yoxvese had been hunted and bled and killed, but there was something so terrible about the Blight. Something so impersonal in the widespread suffering. Or maybe it just seemed so terrible because it was wreaked by my peaceful, nurturing friends. Something terrible in knowing that even they could be cruel when pushed to it. ‘Where’s your mother now?’

‘Dead,’ he said bluntly, looking up. ‘Started taking amaranth. I watched her get sicker and sicker until she was gone completely. She couldn’t live with her decisions, and she let them crush her. Please don’t let that happen to you, Gwin.’ His face softened again. ‘Just make the best decisions you can. You have to let go of what happens afterwards.’

A gasp nearby yanked my attention back to Rhiandra, whose eyes were open, her chest heaving as she scanned her surroundings in a panic.

‘It’s alright,’ I said, grasping her hand and rubbing it between mine. Mae was instantly awake, sliding closer to take her other hand, and nearby Daethie was stirring. Tanathil merely shuddered and slept on. ‘We’re safe. We’re in a barn perhaps half a day’s ride from the border.’

But she was already pushing herself up, pulling her hands free, staggering to her feet. I scrambled up after her, hands out, ready to catch her.

‘We need to leave. Now.’ Not even her voice was steady when she said this. ‘They’ll be looking for us. Our only chance is to make a run for the border.’

‘Wait, just… wait.’ I let out a breath and stood up straighter. ‘We’re not going anywhere while you can barely stand.’

‘I’ll be fine.’ She waved me off, shrugging off my hand as she did so.

‘Maybe. But if you aren’t, then you’ll be a burden to keep safe and conscious. If we leave before you’re ready, you’ll slow us down. And if we meet soldiers on the road, you’ll be a liability. So sit. Have something to eat. And when you’re steady on your feet, we’ll set out.’

For a moment, it seemed like she was going to argue with me. She raised her hand, as though to emphasise whatever she was about to say, but she must have seen at the same moment I did how badly that hand was trembling. She lowered it.

‘Alright,’ she muttered, sinking back to the ground. I picked up the blanket she’d been under and draped it around her shoulders before sitting across from her and picking through a saddle bag to find her some food.

‘You should have gone on already.’ She said the words so quietly. When I looked up, she was staring at the ground. ‘You don’t owe me anything. You could have left me here and gone on without me.’

It made me sad to know she thought we would ever do that, thought I would ever do that. I wanted to say as much, but I had heard the guilt in her words. Saying so would only make her feel guiltier. ‘It’s raining and awful outside,’ I said instead. ‘You made a great excuse to stay dry and warm a little longer.’

She snorted, shot me a smirk. ‘Missing your feathered palace bed?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I sighed, rubbing at a shoulder. ‘I didn’t realise how much I took being comfortable for granted. And being warm. And clean.’

‘And fed,’ she added ruefully. ‘Do you remember those little pies they’d serve at afternoon tea? The ones dusted with sugar?’

‘And bacon .’ I groaned at the thought. ‘I miss bacon.’

‘Not quite so assimilated into Yoxvese life, then.’

‘The lack of meat mostly doesn’t bother me. But if someone offered me some bacon, I wouldn’t think twice before bolting it down.’

She chuckled. ‘Let’s not talk about bacon. I’m guessing there’ll be no fire so our dinner looks like bread and nuts.’

The reminder that we couldn’t have a fire for risk of the smoke being seen silenced our reminiscing on palace life.

‘I’ll eat. But then we should get out of here,’ Rhi said.

‘As soon as you’ve eaten,’ I agreed. Out into the rain we’d go. And hopefully, by Aether’s mercy, there’d be no one waiting to catch us when we did.