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)
And also maybe it has something to do with what I saw in him as he stared over that field this morning.
By virtue of our circumstance, I’m too close to him, too.
Perhaps, at the moment we separate, if I were to look into his eyes, I’d see what awaits him for his last breath. Until then? His mortal destiny is so inextricably intertwined with my own that the time and circumstance of his grave is not something I’m going to know.
It’s such a relief.
“All right, then,” Merc says. “That’s your fill whether you like it or not.”
He flaps his surcoat, water drops flicking around, while the horse lets out a satisfied groan and shakes its head with a rattle of tack.
“I’ve got a cloth to wrap up your arm.”
I’m so deeply in my own thoughts, I can’t figure out what he’s saying. But then he takes a clean stretch of red fabric from out of an inside pocket and begins to wind it around my forearm. When he’s finished, he tucks the end into the top and sits on his heels.
“We have to get moving. Do you think you can get back in the saddle?”
I meet his eyes yet again, and cease my flinching.
Instead of answering him, I hold out both my arms. With a nod, he brings his chest down to my own to pick me up—
That’s not what I’m after.
Winding a hold around his massive shoulders, I close my lids and burrow into his neck, smelling the leather and clean sweat and the cedar spice that is him and him alone.
“Let’s get you—oh, we’re not … all right. This is what we’re doing.”
He’s so awkward in retuning the embrace, it’s actually charming. Or would have been, if I hadn’t started to well up with emotion.
“It’s okay,” he says softly as he wraps his arms around me. “That was a big one. Let yourself go for a moment.”
With a shudder, I give in to a good weeping, and I feel myself getting repositioned in his lap. As he holds me to his steady, beating heart, his sword hand makes a slow circle on my back, soothing me.
“We made it,” he says in a deep rumble. “You’re foolhardy and far too brave for your own good. But we’re both okay, and it’s all down to you—and don’t ever do something as stupid as that again. Are we clear.”
He thinks my emotions are about what we both survived. They’re not, but I can’t tell him my truth.
Never before in my life have I met someone I’m willing to die for, and who knew there would be such a liberation in that potential sacrifice—or such a relief from the loneliness that has defined my pitiful existence.
Also …
Well, he happens to have the most beautiful eyes.
Thirty-Seven
The Quenching of Thirst.
Merc insists on walking to give our horse a break from his weight.
The chestnut seems to prefer him up ahead, rather than at our sides, so he’s out in front, the reins a graceful curve running between his left hand and the bit in our steed’s mouth. Astride, I am drowsy from the mosey, the back-and-forth rocking like the rhythm of my own breath, something that happens to me, rather than anything I control. And like the regular contraction and expansion of my lungs, the ho-hum hooving over the gray ground is nothing I notice anymore.
In the back of my mind, I recognize that I’m in pain in many places, but either from exhaustion or new habit, I don’t notice the signals anymore.
“How we doing back there, Sorrel?”
Three … two … one—
As Merc looks over his shoulder, our eyes meet. I’ve learned not to answer his inquiries quickly so he’s forced to visually check in. I can’t get enough of his face, and though those black and white eyes will always be my true north, I also enjoy the sight of his mouth, his cheeks, and those almost-always-furrowed brows. The vista of his visage has yet to grow old on me, and I feel like this is permanent.
“Fine, yes. Thank you—”
He does this thing where his left brow arches while the other stays down, and I find it endearing. “Your color’s bad.”
“Is it?”
“Too pale with cheeks too red.” He reorients back around. “But it’s not much farther.”
I’m not sure I trust the “not much farther.”
Things have changed around us. The mountain range off to the west has come closer and closer, and we’ve mounted a gradual rise that I think might be, finally, the far end of the lakebed. I have no idea how far the Outpost is from us, though, and I’m not asking.
At least the sun is lower and there are clouds coming in. I tell myself the temperature is dropping. It’s a lie. The rocks have been warmed all day long, so they’re taking the balance of the heat’s graft over from the declining strength of the rays overhead, a hearth still warm even after the fire has dwindled. I have some faint hope, as we crest the incline, that whatever’s on the other side—