Page 38 of Heart of Winter
The trees crowded in closer and closer, branches snagging at her cloak and hair.
But the voice grew louder. “…anyone?”
“Rune!” she gasped, and heeled Sigurd into a quicker walk, his head bowing and knees lifting high against the deepening drifts.
She ducked under a pair of low, interlaced branches, and a great spread of indigo velvet opened before her. A cloud scudded away from the moon, and she realized she was looking at the sky – at a long, sheer drop over an edge, and beyond, kissed now with moonlight, the glimmer of a frozen lake, and the dark folds of mountains. A figure stood at the precipice, long hair blowing and snow-flaked, cloak concealing him like a shroud, all save the long, gleaming blade of the sword he held at his side, its edge splashed with black.
Tessa pulled Sigurd to a halt. “Rune?” she asked.
He lifted his head – slowly, too slowly – and there was just enough light to see the blank hollowness of his expression. Black splotches flecked his jaw and cheeks, beneath his stubble. “Tessa?” he asked and sounded confused.
She glanced over both her shoulders, searching for threats, for the gleam of eyes waiting in the tree shadows, and when she found nothing, she slid down off Sigurd’s back and walked to Rune. The wind was behind him, blowing toward her, and just as she reached him, she recognized the hot, copper scent that clung to him: blood.
It was blood on his face. On his sword.
“Rune.” She laid a hand on his chest, gently, and tried to keep calm. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?”
He dragged a breath in through his mouth, and when he swallowed it was with a rough, choked sound. “I’m fine. I’m…but Ris…” He gestured behind him with the sword, a small gesture that looked like it taxed him greatly. His shoulders were slumped beneath the wet fur of his cloak. His muscles, she could feel through their layers of leather glove and tunic, shivered – with cold, with effort, with exhaustion, with emotion, or some combination of all.
“Ris?” she asked, and then remembered that was his horse’s name. “Is he…?” With a sinking dread opening up in her belly, she moved to stand beside him, and glanced down the slope at his back.
The drop was steep, studded with rocks large enough to rear up through the snow cover, and long. It went down, and down, and down, the snow marred now with deep gouges where something large had tumbled down it – down to the crumpled, but unmistakable form that lay at the base of the hill. Unmoving, head flung back, the snow black with spilled blood around it: Rune’s mount. Dead.
“Oh, Rune,” she murmured. She touched his arm, and he flinched away a fraction. “I’m so sorry.”
“He broke…all of his legs, when we hit. I had to…” His wrist turned a fraction, so the blood on the blade winked in the moonlight.
She laid her hand on his arm again, and though she felt the tension in his biceps, he didn’t try to move from under her touch again. “You did the right thing. He was suffering.”
He let out a shuddering breath, and shook his head.
“Areyouokay? Were you hurt?” When he didn’t respond, she slid her hand up to his shoulder, fingers carding through wet fur. “Rune?”
Slowly, he twisted toward her. The wind blew the hair off his face, and just before the light dimmed, a fresh batch of snow clouds hiding the moon, she saw the nasty gash at his eyebrow, the bruise already forming at his temple. His strange silence and disconnect made new, frightening sense, then.
“Rune.” She reached up, and ghosted her gloved fingertips against the mark. “Does it hurt? Are you…?” She wasn’t sure what questions to ask someone with a potentially-serious head wound. Oliver would have known. Oliver would have done all the right things.
Her eyes started to burn again, and she couldn’t hold the tears this time; a few slipped down her cheeks, scalding hot against cold skin. She was soverycold, shaking, and trembling, and scared, and sad for this boy who’d just had to kill his own horse, both of them lost in the forest.
His glassy stare tracked sluggishly back and forth across her face a moment, and then he blinked – squeezed his eyes shut tight, grimacing from the effort. When he opened them, his eyes were clearer, if filled with pain. A moment later, his pupils expanded, gaze going out of focus again.
But his expression became concerned, and he gripped her arm, suddenly, with his free hand, tight enough to hurt, a little. “Tessa. Are you alright? You’re crying.”
“I’m…” What was the sense in lying, now? “I think we’re going to freeze to death if we don’t find our way back.”
He nodded, and stepped back; sheathed his dirty sword. “Right. Sigurd can carry us both.” He took a step that wavered. “But maybe you better steer.”
~*~
The torches offered enough light to reveal four sets of deep hoofprints leading out away from the palace grounds, already beginning to fill with the fresh snowfall. When the flames began to sputter, Bjorn and Magnus used them to light fresh torches from their saddlebags. The tracks followed a narrow, twisting stream, up a gentle slope, and, finally, into a patch of dense pine forest, the trees tall enough to blot out the sky. When the clouds gave it a chance, moonlight fell in small puddles on the glistening snow cover.
The cold was vicious against Oliver’s face, and the temperature seemed to be dropping. He tugged on his hood, trying to wriggle back even deeper inside it. He was glad of the borrowed cloak, but wished that he’d thought to ask for boots, too. The wind bit right through the thin kidskin of his own.
The snow was deeper here, and the going slower, the horses lifting their feathered legs high as they stepped their way carefully through it. Erik’s horse slowed enough that he rode only a half-stride ahead of Oliver.
Looking for a distraction from his frozen toes – and his fear for Tessa – he said, “Do they normally stay out past dark?”
A half-halt, a quiet flexing of one gloved hand on the reins, brought Erik back so they rode abreast. Though their horses were of a height, Erik was still taller; his profile was stern and forbidding in the flicker of torchlight. “No,” he ground out, his jaw clenched tight. “Only once, years ago, and the tongue-lashing they earned for it was enough to have them home before sunset ever since.”
