Page 122 of A Frozen Pyre
Ophir looked at Dwyn with disgust. “Where would it end, Dwyn? You wipe my mind clean every time someonesays something you don’t like? You manipulate me and push me around the board like you’re a game maker and I’m a pawn? You do this while calling it love?”
“Firi, I’m in love with you.”
Ophir laughed a dark, teary laugh. “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met. Caris loved me. She loved her people. She loved Ceneth. Love is self-sacrifice. It’s putting the good of someone and something else above yourself. You may want me. You may want whatever you think it is I can give you. But you, Dwyn, have never loved anyone or anything.”
“That’s not true,” she whispered as tears began to fall in earnest. “I do love you. I may have done selfish things before, but I had to. Most of it was before I knew you. And—”
“What about Tyr?” Harland asked.
Dwyn stilled. She was as motionless as a deer who’d caught a predator’s scent.
“Did you make Ophir believe that Tyr had left her for Sulgrave before you knew her? Or was it recently that you made her think she’d been abandoned by everyone but you?”
Dwyn twitched. Ophir watched her gaze flit from Harland, to the sword, to Ophir.
Her face twitched again, and Ophir began to realize that they may have made a mistake. Knowledge was power. In sharing their final card, they’d handed over too much. They had to be smart if she had any hope of getting Harland out and finding him help. They wouldn’t succeed if Dwyn felt she had nothing left to lose.
“Tyr did leave,” Ophir said tersely. She looked at Harland with an almost imperceptible shift, but she knew he saw the strategy in the way her eyes flared. “You’re the only one who’s fought to stay by my side time and time again.” She looked up at Dwyn and said, “He just wants to protect me, Dwyn. Let him do what he was put on this earth to do. He can stay.”
Dwyn stared back, as if not quite believing the danger had passed. She watched Ophir’s face in the firelight for a longtime before she began to nod. “He can stay,” she repeated slowly. “As your guard.”
Ophir watched the cogs in Dwyn’s mind whirl as she struggled to unravel fact from fiction. She’d woven a tangled mess of powers and lies. Perhaps she’d made it impossible to discern what could or could not be true, given who she’d brainwashed and how she’d done it.
Three heartbeats. Then five. Then seven. Ophir realized she’d been holding her breath, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to relax. They were caught in a stalemate of false promises, each hoping the other believed them, if only for a moment.
“What can I do to prove that I’m on your side?” Dwyn asked, the fight falling from her words. She looked pathetic in the cold gray light.
Ophir saw her opening and took it. “There are no more healing tonics. I can’t lose Harland. Please, help.”
She wrung her hands as her eyes continued to bounce between them, little more than a fretful hummingbird unsure as to which flower had what she needed. Dwyn’s concern grew as she finally absorbed just how much blood Harland had already lost, presumably connecting what that blood loss meant for her.
“You can make some,” she said hopefully to Ophir.
“No, I can’t,” Ophir replied, pain thick in her voice. And she saw in Dwyn’s eyes that they both knew she was right. Nothing Ophir manifested would be reliable for consumption—not on her first try, at least. She’d never crafted anything that had turned out the way she’d intended, and a healing tonic was not the place to start.
“Snowberry,” Harland said weakly.
“What?” Dwyn demanded.
“Snowberries are used in healing tonics. They’re nowhere near as effective when they haven’t been distilled with a healer, but they’re the soul of every tonic.”
“It’s winter…” Dwyn said skeptically as she looked over her shoulder.
“Snow is in its name, for the goddess’s sake. It’s a winter berry. It’s white, so it may be hard to spot against the ground, but the bush will be barren. They look like little clusters of snowflakes. The plant may be no taller than your knee, or up to your hip.”
Dwyn nodded along as she listened. “And they’ll be here? In this forest?”
Ophir snapped with irritation. “How is he supposed to know! We’re in the Unclaimed Wilds, Dwyn. Please, for the love of the goddess, help him.”
Dwyn’s head continued bobbing uncertainly as she slowly got to her feet. Her eyes remained glued to the ever-expanding lake of blood. She looked at Sedit, who was calmly grooming himself like a cat, licking the evidence of his crimes from where it had splattered against him.
“Go,” Ophir begged.
“Okay, yes,” Dwyn agreed. “I’ll be back before dark, with or without the snowberries. I can’t leave you alone overnight with a dead body. But… It won’t come to that. I’ll find them.” She shut the door behind her as she disappeared into the winter day beyond where their eyes might follow.
Quiet stretched between them for so long that Ophir was almost certain she could hear the sound of Harland’s blood leaching from his body.
“Is it true?” Ophir asked. “The thing about the berries?”
