Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
The disorientation is real and total.
This makes sense on another level. I’m still down on the flats, even as my physical body is up here. I picture Merc getting caught again, and he and his horse dragged back to become one of those pods that rest as coffins among the ruins.
Maybe some of the salt is from tears.
How could I leave him like that?
Anger curls in my gut as I want to go back and make another choice. I should have stayed in the Outpost in the first place. Then Merc wouldn’t have been able to get through the Crystal Gate and none of this would have happened. And while I’m at it, why couldn’t someone else have the destiny to bring this army to the fight with demons, why couldn’t they be the one to have to pick a journey they don’t want over the man they l—
I squeeze my eyes shut.
Love.
The man I … love—
Another branch wheels through the thick mist and slaps me in the face.
My eyes whip open. And I yell. At nothing, at everything.
And that’s when I hear my name.
I snatch the noise I’m making back from the mist, and hold my breath. When what I thought I heard doesn’t repeat, I feel like it was something I made up—
“Sorrel…”
“Merc!” I pull up on the reins and spin Lavante around. “Over here! Merc!”
My heart gallops in my chest and I put a hand over my mouth so I can hear better over my harsh breathing.
“… Sorrel.”
The ghostly sound weaves through the fog, and I turn Lavante around again. “I’m here!”
When nothing more comes back to me, I panic, thinking that those are his last words, traveling up from below, a condemnation of my selfishness and cowardly—
“I’m here.”
Merc comes through the wafting cloud right in front of me, nothing but a big shape astride his horse. At least … I think this is really him. My visions were so vivid down below, I can’t tell whether I’ve conjured him or he’s actually found me.
I shove my hand out into the void. “Are you real?”
His strong arm penetrates the mist between us, and I grab on to his scarred palm, squeezing as hard as I can, feeling the calluses and the vital warmth and the unyielding bones.
“Yes, woman.” He laughs a little. “Very real. You don’t think I’d let that bunch of uglies keep us apart, do you.”
“Fates, how did you get away?”
Merc leans forward, his face emerging, the specter made real. His black and white eyes search for mine, and as they lock on, his half smile is arrogant as always.
And like the ocean, so beautiful, I will not forget it.
“I just told myself your friend Thale was up here for the killing. The motivation was more than sufficient.”
I’m shaking my head as I too tilt out of the saddle. He meets me more than halfway, our lips brushing before our horses fidget and the contact is broken.
“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” I breathe.
“The spiders or the admission,” he replies dryly.
The way he looks off into the fog shuts the door on all that. But my heart is singing for so many reasons, I don’t even care.
“I think your compass should be helpful,” he says. “We’re all turned around—and if we so much as poke our heads out of this cover, those spiders are waiting for us.”
Before he finishes, I’m already taking off my pack and going in for the instrument. As my hand closes on its satchel, a piercing sadness has me turning and looking back—not that I necessarily find the direction we came from.
It dawns on me that I lost Mare’s coins. I had to drop them to get the crystal knife.
It’s not really the intrinsic value—it’s all they represented: Her last request, her attempt to take care of me, her kindness in return for my own. I feel as though I’ve left her behind in those ruins with those eight-legged predators, even though she’s already died.
“What’s wrong, then?” Merc demands.
“Nothing, sorry.”
Once in my palm, the compass top flips open on its own and the map jumps out at me as it does. It’s wheeled around once again, the landmarks that I now readily recognize oriented at a different position. Immediately, the arrow and the directional headers start on their counter-spins.
Spin, spin … spin …
As the turning continues, I worry that my disorientation has been transmitted into the instrument. Or maybe the fog is enough to do that on its own.
“No reading?” Merc says. When I don’t reply, he curses.
I’m feeling the same frustration—
The halting comes not with the definitive stop of before, but more a sliding halt with the arrow pointing to our rear.
As I twist around and look over Lavante’s rump, every instinct in me tells me it’s the wrong way. That that is going to take us back to the ruins and to our deaths.