Page 156 of The Duke and the Disciple

Rahn squeezed the guard’s arm with what he hoped was a polite smile. “Any accidents are my own fault, and I’ll tell the steward you tried to stop me. Death couldn’t keep me from the gates of Fanghelm tonight. Dobranok.”

Their fearful chorus of “dobranoks” faded into the night, into the past. Shivering, Rahn tightened the stays on his hood, lowered his face to protect it from the punishing ice, and pushed on through the abandoned village. Storm shutters had been drawn on most of the shops, darkness swallowing the main road like an eclipse. He’d picked the worst night of the year to make his stand, but Aesylt had used challenging situations to test herself, to prove she was capable, and it gave him the burst of energy he needed to make it to the base of the winding mountain road that led to the great keep of Fanghelm.

Rahn peered upward once more, but the keep was still wrapped in fog.

The hill was deceptively steep. He’d walked it before, returning from the village when the weather had been fair enough, but he hadn’t been contending with trails of black ice threading through the road. Every step was a gamble, every breath a burden on his lungs. Sometime along the ride, he’d lost feeling in two of his toes. He wondered if he’d miss them.

He conquered the first switchback, but on the climb to the next, his boots failed to gain traction, and he went sliding toward the perilous ravine, so deep he couldn’t see the bottom. He grabbed hold of a dense bush, but the snap in his arm was the price he paid for avoiding a bigger crisis. Pain shot to his head like a bolt of lightning. His ankle screamed from the twist he’d put in it trying to right himself.

Rahn used his good arm and foot to slide himself back up onto the road. He stumbled forward, catching another bush, but after a wobble, he was back on his feet.

He’d given no consideration to what he would say if—when—he made it to the keep. Overthinking was the connective thread between his greatest failures. Nothing could drive him away except her.

The exhaustion he’d held off for hours crept through his bones and veins with a vengeance. He hobbled, transferring as much of his weight as he could to his uninjured foot, which was burning from overexertion. His arm begged for something to rest on, but if he removed his cloak—if he tried to find something to fashion into a sling—he’d open himself up to more problems.

Time blurred. Sleet changed to snow and back to sleet. He blinked and realized he didn’t remember the past quarter mile at all and then it happened again, and he wondered if he was dying.

First it was a tingle, but then it was like fire, spreading through his good hand. He flexed, but the response was hardly a twitch. Of all the foolish things he’d done in his life, climbing a mountain road in the middle of an ice storm topped them all, but if she wasn’t worth such a daunting risk, then why had he come? If he turned back now, turned away from the one perfect thing he’d ever known, then he was as good as dead anyway.

The world winked in.

Winked out.

He was there and then he was not.

When he came to, a dozen men were standing over him with blankets.

“Get him up,” Drazhan commanded. “Quickly!”

“Aesylt,” Rahn croaked.

“Not much use to her dead,” Drazhan said as Rahn was swallowed in a suffocating swaddle of coverings.

When he next regained consciousness, he was startlingly warm. He turned his face, and it landed in a pile of soft fur. He moaned into a restricted stretch, but his arm was no longer broken. Sore, but un-fractured. He worked up the courage to wiggle his ankle, to the same result. Tender, but not like it had been. All ten toes responded.

Drazhan’s shadow appeared first, followed by the man, perched on a stool. “Another half tick out there, I’d have been breaking some unfortunate news to Aesylt.”

“Where is she?”

“You and I are going to talk first.”

Rahn pulled himself up, sending his head into a dizzying vortex. He closed his eyes. Without sight, his other senses were pushed into dominance. The smell of old, cracked leather. The feel of rare fur of an arctic yak. The taste of a fire that hadn’t died to embers. Drazhan’s office. “We do have a matter of business to discuss.”

Drazhan folded his elbows over his knees and waited.

Rahn couldn’t have the conversation huddled on the floor of a man’s office. He hobbled to a nearby chair. “You have my gratitude for not leaving me out there to die. Would have been a simple solution to the problem for you.”

“But an unfortunate one for the women I love.”

“I love them too, Drazhan.” Rahn fought a wash of pain as he pulled himself higher in the chair. “Imryll is family. And Aesylt is... She’s...” He had no reason to hold back anymore. “Everything.”

“She was everything before you left her, Adrahn. She always was.”

“Some plants survive better in the shadows.” Rahn squinted through a stream of consciousness. “Over thousands of years, they’ve adapted to that preference, enough that sunlight can damage or even kill them. They can outlast their sunnier counterparts because this sacrifice leads them to being hardier for it, almost stubbornly so. There are even those who have developed tougher barks or leaves, like armor.”

Drazhan scoffed. “And?”

“I should think even you would see the familiarity. We all do what we think we must to endure. We stand beyond the reach of the light, we put on our armor, and we tell ourselves we have no other choice.”

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