Page 168 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

“I’ve made an utter cock-up of my command.” She rubbed her temples. “We’ve lost an entire day going in the wrong direction.”

I smiled. “Believe me, I will rectify that.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“Indeed.” I stood, stretched, my back muscles flexing and loosening, anticipating what was to come. There would be pain, oh yes.

Not only for Miro, whose skin I would peel away and hang on my wall, but for myself. I required blood, a vast ocean of life’s elixir. I needed every last drop of energy, the better to hunt with.

Visca let out an ear-splitting whistle, and one of the vampires in her latest legion, a young human man, hurried to her, guiding her horse.

“I’ll be right behind you,” she said grimly. “Do nothing foolish, lad. Track them, and if that track brings you to the Forian border, then you mustwaitfor me and Wyn. We’ll get her back, but ancestors forbid we start a new fucking war from putting one toe over the wrong rock at the wrong time.”

“Let them start a war. I’ll be waiting for it.”

She gripped my arm hard, digging her nails into stony flesh as she stared up at me. “They won’t hurt her. Remember that. As long as she’s alive, she’s of great value.”

I was icy, numb. I had no idea what Visca saw in my face that caused her to release me, backing up a step.

“Not even Hakkon is that rash,” she said quietly, mounting up. “Hold onto that thought. She’s alive and well, and we’ll get her back.”

I nodded, and tore into the forest without another word, aiming north like an arrow.

With every footfall, every racing heartbeat, every minute that slipped past like sand in an hourglass, I told myself that Visca was right.

Cirri was in Miro’s hands, but alive. Possibly a prisoner, but well.

I would hunt him by land, by sea, by sky. He thought he could escape me, flee Veladar with my Cirri?

No. There was nowhere in the whole circle of the world that he could hide.

Chapter 41

Cirri

Islid from the horse, palms sweaty, knees shaking, and collapsed to solid ground under the blessed sun.

The darkness in the tunnels… it had been like a living thing, pressing in on my eyes, my ears, filling my nose and mouth and pouring into my cells with every breath, every blink. Not even Miro’s lantern had driven away the worst of the shadows.

Instead, that single bright point of light had felt like a shout in the midst of the silence, a beacon to summon every hungry thing that lived beneath the earth.

But Bane was right. The Fae were dead, not that the knowledge had helped any. I wasn’t the only one trembling; the horse was lathered with fear and frothing at the mouth despite the slow walk under the mountains, and Miro fumbled at the reins, face still ghastly pale.

The route itself had been almost offensively simple, a mineshaft dug straight through from the eastern side of the Rift, to the western mountains of Foria. Miro had counted the junctions under his breath as we rode through. “First, left. Second, right. Third, right. Fourth, left…”

Each junction had taken us onto the next course, well-traversed by warg paws, but it was the ones we didn’t take—deep, dark tunnels shored up by rotting timbers, the mountains exhaling their dry, dusty breath through the shafts—that gave me the screaming terrors in the back of my mind.

At each one, I’d expected something to be waiting, lurking in the shadows. I’d expected the shine of eyes against the guttering lantern flame, or the gleam of skin that wasn’t quite skin as I would expect it to be.

The absolute nothing at every turn was almost worse. A constant anticipation, my muscles growing tighter and harder each time the shaft split, to the degree that I’d almost seen things, heard things, that weren’t there. Once or twice I’d been convinced there was a scratching sound following us, or a distant shriek echoing up from far below.

Even Miro had squirmed at times, jerking his head to the side as though he heard something, a spastic twitch beginning in his left eyelid by the third junction. It was still there now.

But nothing had come for us. As Bane had said, the Below was empty… at least in Veladar.

I’d thought I was hallucinating when the first faint rays of daylight appeared ahead of us, afraid to let myself hope, but Miro had nudged the terrified horse into a trot, bursting out into the salvation of the sun… where we had both released our collective breaths.

He’d allowed me to dismount and stretch my legs, but the second my feet hit the ground, they turned to jelly. On my hands and knees, touching the sweet solidity of sun-warmed dirt, I thanked the Lady, the Mother, even the gods of the Nord pagans that I’d emerged alive.

---