Page 32 of The Arrow and the Alder

“Please, don’t leave me here!” Seph called out.

No answer.

Darkness swallowed her completely, and bitter cold sank sharp teeth into her bones.

“You can have the damned coat!” she yelled, then—remembering her earlier oversight—hastily added, “In exchange for the coat, you will help me out of this pit…safely. Right now.” She added each word as insurance, hoping she’d covered all her bases—she knew how tricky the kith could be with their bargains, and she was beginning to think he was going to leave her anyway when the kith’s light reappeared. A moment later, the end of a rope flew over the edge and into the pit. Seph reached up?—

The rope lifted out of her grasp, taunting her a few feet above her hands as Marks bent over the ledge. “Coat first, or I do not accept your terms.”

Seph fumed. “How do I know you’re not going to take the coat and leave?”

“My first plan was to leave and come back when you were dead.”

Seph scowled. “Scoundrel!”

“Oh, you have no idea.” His voice was dark and dripping with sarcasm. “So do you accept my terms or not, my little eristic?”

Seph could have throttled him. “I will give you my coat, and you will thenimmediatelyhelp me out of this pit, safely, in one piece, and totally unharmed.”

His eyes gleamed like polished steel. “You know something of my kin, I see.”

“Oh, you have no idea.”

Seph suspected he was grinning, though she couldn’t see it through his massive beard.

“I accept,” he said at last, and he lowered the rope a second time.

Seph begrudgingly tied the rope’s end around the coat and secured it with trembling hands. She’d just finished tying a knot when he pulled the rope up and out of the pit. Seph thought she heard him hiss, and then silence followed. She waited.

And waited.

“Hello? Marks? Are you still there? I agreed to your terms, so?—”

The rope’s end nearly whacked her in the face. “You did that on purpose.”

“Definitely.”

Seph ground her teeth but grabbed the end, struggling to clench her frigid fingers around it, and when Marks pulled, the rope slipped right through her stiff and frozen hands.

His face appeared over the edge again. “You’re supposed to hold on to it.”

Seph gave him an annoyed look. “It’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You are on the inside.”

This time he did laugh—sort of, though it might have been a cough—and glanced promptly at the mist.

Seph breathed hot air on her hands and rubbed them together. “I’m ready.”

He lowered the rope, and this time, she wrapped the end around her wrists first. When he pulled, she clenched the rope in her underarm and used the pit’s wall to prop her feet. Her shoulder protested and her ribs ached, and she was about to lose her grip again when the kith grabbed a fistful of her drenched coat and pulled her up and over the ledge.

Seph clambered onto the ground and collapsed, heaving. At least a dozen depraved lay dead all around her.

Saints, there were so many. She hadn’t realized.

“You…where did you learn to shoot like that?” she asked, but Marks didn’t answer. He focused only on the rope he was currently winding. She noticed he was not wearing her grandfather’s coat but must have stuffed it into the bulging pack that sat on the ground at his feet, directly beside a pair of battered gloves. He shoved the wound rope into the pack—right on top of her grandfather’s coat—slung it all over his shoulder, left the gloves behind, and walked away into the mist.

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