Page 51 of Light Locked
Her elbows buckled and she fell onto the muscles of Ryson’s chest. Her entire body felt numb and feverish.
He would live. Would she?
Why hadn’t she stopped sooner?
No. She couldn’t have let him die.
Her arms and face were wet against the blood on his chest, vision blurred as she saw him breathing restfully again.
Wake up.She urged, feeling sick as she heard the voices of the Venennin.
Wake up.She urged as their footfalls approached, dragging them up where they lay.
Myken’s voice sang in her ear as he hoisted her up. “You’re so ignorant as to the reality that awaits you in these forests. I will personally give you a tour of the world that your people so deeply fear. Pain like none you have ever felt awaits you.”
Her dread spun deeper and she ached to move, but her body had become her own cage, numb to everything else around it. She could only focus on breathing.
Ralth came through the woods with the carriage, led by ahorse, or the broken, dried corpse of one, still animated by what she imagined to be curses.
They chained their hands and threw Ryson inside first. They prepared to throw her in, Clea’s dizzied gaze catching a figure sitting up in a tree not far from where they stood.
It sat with one leg hanging from the limb. Thick shackles with broken chains adorned its wrists and ankles. Another large shackle hung around its neck. Broken bandages and ripped cloth covered its body, and a broken mask hid all but a single silver eye.
It tossed Althala’s talisman up in the air and caught it.
She craned her head to hold the figure’s gaze when she landed in the carriage. The carriage door sealed her off in the early morning darkness.
“What was she looking at?” Clea heard one of the Venennin say outside.
“I didn’t see anything,” another replied.
A chill crept up her spine.
Chapter 15
Parallels
CLEA FELL ASLEEP sprawled out onto the bumbling carriage floor, but that was not how she found herself now. She awoke in a strange cradle of warmth, shifting in the chains that bound her hands as she blinked a few times to clear the grogginess from her mind.
The carriage lifted and dropped abruptly, drawing her toward attentiveness. Noon light filtered in from between the boards, bobbing with the movement of the wheels on uncharted paths.
She attempted to sit upright, stirring against the bicep that cushioned her head and the shoulders that covered hers. The unfamiliar warmth of a firm body radiated at her back, her legs curled up between frayed gray pants and scuffed black boots. Ryson was sitting behind her against the thick carriage boards, and she was nestled in the cradle of his body.
The realization didn’t carry any meaning in her exhaustion, only awareness. Loose chains rattled with each bump, her consciousness opening more with every sound.
“Clea,” she heard Ryson whisper, and felt the words through his chest. She sensed his head against hers as he said the words with a strange mixture of disbelief and warning, “you healed me.”
The words reminded her of the events that preceded thisstrange circumstance, and there was a mixture of emotion in them she couldn’t place. She stirred against him. His body protected her from the coolness of the air and the hardness of the carriage, and yet there was something uncomfortable in sleeping in the shell of his arms.
She was reminded of sleeping in late, so comfortable and safe in bed, and yet urged out of it as the morning crept on, urged out by the truth that reality waited just outside of the covers.
“You healed an Insendian.” He continued. “A Venennin.”
“Only half,” she corrected, too tired to lift her head from his arm. She closed her eyes again before the image of the Insednian in the tree flashed to her mind and she winced against it. “You were right about the Insednian talisman,” she said dryly, swallowing again against excessive thirst. She looked for her bag but it was gone. How many hours had she been asleep?
“If this was the talisman’s fault, it could have drawn in much worse,” he replied.
“I saw an Insednian,” she whispered, her mind now retracing the events of the fight, the words, the threats, the outcome, the budding humiliation and the dark foreboding. “The Venennin didn’t see it. I did. It had the talisman. It was watching them take us away.”
