Page 187 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

I still can’t wrap my head around that.

But whatever it does, with it suddenly blocked, all that’s left in its wake is my own aching heart and a sudden heaviness in my bones. As if, without it, a part of me is as good as dead. Just like this swamp.

I don’t know why all that darkness I saw in his mind affects me so much either. Why it makes breathing difficult. And all those things he said to me before.Do you think I liked it? Being torn from sleep by witnessing your panic and diffuse fear night after night? Wading through this… necropolis of your feelings day after day, year after year. When I wasn’t able to distinguish your recalled pain from a real threat, or whether it was just your nightmares again.

How could he know? How is that possible? How could hefeelme, even in a different world? For years?

As we go on, my body grows heavier and heavier, my steps slower. Sluggish. Sweat runs down my body in rivulets, and my clothes are drenched from the unrelenting heat and humidity so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Caryan’s set an unforgiving pace. Ronin and Kyrith seem to have no trouble matching it. And I try to keep up as well as I can, yet I become tired, my half-human body exhausted. Drained. My throat aches from thirst and my head is dizzy.

In the early afternoon, the swamp suddenly ends, the dead trees reaching up like a rampart, pieces of bones thrown in between, their peaks sharp like teeth, forming a kind of fence. In its middle, a gate appears rippling out of nothing.

We step through.

Before me, a rough meadow stretches out towards roiling, grassless hills, a thin path cutting through them like a scar, leading up to the mountains.

“We should pause here,” Ronin says. It’s the first time I’ve heard him speak since we left the Fortress.

Caryan shakes his head. “No. We will go on and set up camp further up.”

“But… we need rest,” Ronin says with a significant glance toward me.

Suddenly, I know the witcher’s asking Caryan on my behalf, as if he can sense the exhaustion in me. There is no denying that I’m tired to my very core. Over the last two hours, Caryan has set an even more brutal pace, and after we crossed that bog I more or less stumbled along rather than walked. It touches me… that Ronin cares.

“We don’t,” Caryan cuts him off.

“But—”

Caryan whips to him, fangs bared. “You heard me.”

Ronin nods once, clenching his teeth. Kyrith snarls quietly but doesn’t say anything either.

The hike up takes forever. I drag myself along, up and up until my feet hurt and I’m so tired that I feel like I’m sleepwalking. A dense, strange fog has come up, cold and eerie, as if it wants to suffocate us. Voices and laughter cut through it like ghosts. I stagger a few times, my steps becoming heavier and heavier the further we climb. On one occasion, Ronin catches me before I can hit the hard ground. Caryan only turns once before he walks on.

The next time I stumble, I barely manage to get back up, my legs and arms are feeling that weak. The cold fog feels like it’s creeping under my skin, draining the life out of me. Deep down, I know it’s not natural. It makes me slow, so slow and dizzy.

Death. This is the death the flute warned me about. Not Caryan’s but—

My death.

I stumble one more time and then darkness envelops me.

57

Blair

Blair has summoned her phantom wyvern, holding on to its barbed skin and glimmering rainbow scales while she circles the landscape at the border to Caryan’s lands, where the wall of his wards is thinnest. The only downside of wards—they can only span over so much distance before they weaken. Blair could risk flying through the curtain of his magic and probably come away more or less unharmed.

But she doesn’t want to.

He would instantly know about it.

She sighs and banks left as she, Aurora, and Sofya keep patrolling along the edges of the Emerald Forest. But its canopy is so thick they can sense nothing. This damn forest is like a shield, impossible to tell who prowls through it.

But Caryan isn’t what Blair’s looking for, even if her mothers believe it is what they are doing day in and day out. Why they have traveled these circles for the whole of last week—flying over and over above the trees until Blair’s limbs were so stiff from cold and exhaustion she could barely move when they finally returned to the inn at the crossroads. The inn is the only place you can get a bed and decent food, that connects the harbor—the doorway to the elven kingdom of Palisandre in the east; Avandal, the city of the healers in the north; and Niavara in the south. A strange patch of land thatCalianthe, the queen of the Emerald Forest, granted Caryan back then to make it possible to travel by foot or horse from his kingdom to Avandal.

Before, you could only reach Avandal by ship, or you had to cross Calianthe’s forest, full of her murderous dryads, monstrous flesh-eating trees, and other creatures Blair isn’t sure anyone has ever seen and left the forest alive to talk about.

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