Page 30 of Ties of Legacy

But she had only taken two running steps through the flowers when she stopped. Her hands tightened around the satchel as she glanced back at the almost invisible gap in the ground.

From their experiments, she knew the cart was too far away for her to take the lamp without causing him to suffer. She could leave it there among the flowers, but what if that was his plan? What if he had faked not being able to climb out, and?—

She shook her head at her paranoid thoughts. He hadn’t even mentioned her leaving the satchel. Surely if this was all some scheme of his, he wouldn’t have left it to chance and her good nature.

She slipped the satchel off and laid it on the ground. She would just have to return as quickly as she could.

She ran full speed back through the flowers, past the sunbathing lizard, and between the trees that shaded the road.

Nutmeg whinnied, prancing in place as Avery appeared beside her, panting.

“Don’t worry, girl,” Avery said between gasping breaths. “We’ll be back soon.”

She rummaged through the back of the cart to find a rope, her organized storage making it easy to locate. Almost no time had passed before she was racing back toward Elliot.

Her breathing was still ragged, but her heart began to slow as soon as she saw the satchel untouched where she had left it. Elliot might still prove untrustworthy, but his fall hadn’t been a ruse.

As she stopped a safe number of steps back from the small cliff, Elliot must have heard her because he called out cheerfully.

“That was quick!”

She didn’t respond, concentrating on securing the rope around her own waist and getting a firm grip on it before she tossed the end down to him. He called a thank you and then she felt several tugs on the rope as he presumably prepared to haul himself out.

After a moment, the rope went still, the pressure against it growing firm and steady. He called up again.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she called back. “I’ll start moving backward, if I can, but you’ll have to pull yourself up mostly.”

“No problem,” he replied, and it occurred to her to be doubly glad he wasn’t injured. She would have had a difficult time pulling him up on her own with an injury to consider.

As it was, she staggered and almost fell when the pressure on the rope suddenly increased to the full weight of a person. She leaned backward to try to counterbalance it, managing one staggering step backward.

It probably did little to help, but thankfully Elliot’s hands appeared over the lip of the crevice, and within moments he was hauling himself all the way over. When he finally dropped the rope, he looked at her with concern.

“Are you all right? That didn’t hurt you?”

Avery immediately stopped rubbing at her waist where the rope sat.

“I’m fine,” she said quickly, untying it and winding the rope up, pulling the end from out of the crevice as she did.

“Thank you for coming to my rescue.” Elliot ran an embarrassed hand over the back of his neck. “I can’t believe I was such a chucklehead.”

He glanced toward the sunning lizard, and she caught his shudder.

“You do know dragons don’t actually exist, right?” she asked him with a grin as she looped the coils of rope over one arm, resettling her satchel into its place.

“Of course I do,” he said with dignity, but he still gave the lizard a wide berth on their way back. “I just don’t know which part of Sovar’s history made their Legacy decide to start producing cliffs everywhere. None of the histories I studied included anyone falling off a cliff.”

“A metaphorical one, perhaps?” Avery said lightly. “But there’s still debate on that one. At least the lizards don’t do any harm—unless you’re a fish or a small animal. I’ve never heard of them harming a human.”

“I’m sure they’re perfectly lovely,” he said stiffly. “But lizards have no business being that large.”

“Neither do mice,” she pointed out. “But that’s Sovar for you. Maybe you should pick somewhere else to settle.”

“They don’t have the giant mice—or lizards—in the capital,” he said. “Or at least not as many of them. The people have driven them away.”

She conceded the point, refraining from teasing him further as they neared Nutmeg. Although he seemed unharmed, his body must have been surging with nervous energy after the scare. Hers was, and she hadn’t been the one to go over the cliff backward.

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