Page 91 of Of Serpents and Ruins
"No. No, just me and one other person," I said, my voice thick with emotion. I hugged myself tighter, resisting the urge to draw close to him and his warmth.
His mouth twitched as he studied me.
"What?" I frowned. A chill pierced me.
"Stella, eight cycles of the curse isn’t even a week. They’re sixteen hours apart now, and if the curse is triggered early again…I don’t think you can make it back in time."
"What?" My mouth fell open. "Of course we can! We will. I know we will! We have to!"
He shook his head. "Three days to get to the Wild Lands on average. One day there to track Arjax and Lorna. One day back if we take the Keening Pass. That passage cannot be rushed, and it can only be entered at set times. Half a day to the Ember Lord’s Crest. If we're lucky, we could shave a day or so off, but we'd have to be very lucky and go straight to the Ember Lord's Crest."
"See? It is possible. We could just make it!"
"Stella, we don’t know what causes the curse to leap forward. It’s been using up time. That means it could happen maybe once and we’d be all right. With how the Gola Resh is interfering, you know I will turn at least once, if not more, especially given her goals."
I pressed my lips into a tight line. "We still have a chance." Turning, I dug my fingers into my scalp. "I have to get out of here! We have to leave tonight."
"Stella, there’s no way that you can leave tonight. The storm is too strong."
I licked my lips then bit them. "You said maybe it could take us two days!"
"If we’re very fortunate."
"And Arjax and Lorna. If we tell them what’s going on and if we get lucky when we get there, they’ll help us in less than a day, right?"
"If it were just up to Arjax and Lorna, then of course, but it’s a matter of winds and tides, and taking the Keening Pass will require that we be at just the right place at just the right time or else everyone could die."
His words struck me hard. There was practically no room for anything to go wrong.
My mouth had gone dry. "It’s still possible."
The way the side of his mouth twitched stabbed me through the heart. Was he giving up?
"Besides!" I spread my arms wide. "Even if it does, if we kill her, her curses lose their hold, right? You’ll be healed."
As soon as I said that, I knew I was wrong. Of course, everything a curse had done couldn’t be pulled back. If the curse completed, then…
I looked up at him, desperate to see some sort of contradiction.
That wasn’t what I saw reflected there.
If I went to the Wild Lands, I might never see him in his right mind again. If we didn’t get the spear and conduct the ritual in time, the man I knew and loved would be gone forever.
How was that possible?
"Brandt…"
My mind flashed back to Auntie Runa’s vision, to what Elias had wanted to tell me he had seen, to my own prophecy. Was it dread or foresight that now spoke into my mind and whispered, "This only ends in death?"
That night in the grotto snapped back into my mind.
That instant when I had told him what I saw.
Death.
STELLA
No. I couldn't accept that there was no hope for our relationship. The quietness in his gaze infuriated me.
