“Yes, but…” Hedda scrunched her eyes, rubbing her fingers into them. “On the ground? I didn’t get it out. I… had my watch after Brand, woke up Magnus… and then…”
Alarm bells rang when Hedda trailed off and sent him a confused look. “Then?”
She dug a fist into her chest. “I?—”
Shouts sounded from the trees, crashing footfalls behind them. Mag and Thad burst into the camp a second later.
“Come quick,” his brother said, chest heaving.
Hedda pushed to wobbly feet, barely keeping hold of her axe as she searched the woods beyond him. “Where is Faldir?”
An eternity passed while Mag stared back at her. “Lass…”
Hedda turned on Brand, that same hand rubbing the spot over her heart. “He’s not… I can’t… Fuck.”
She leapt over the fire pit and stumbled, nearly hitting the dirt before she scrambled away screaming her brother’s name.
Shite. Something was very,verywrong with his Second.
Brand reached down and gripped Lunara’s arm, hauling her from the ground. “Are you well?”
There was a sheen on her pale brow, but she nodded.
He pulled her after Hedda, trying to be mindful of the pain she was clearly in. “What did you find?”
“Only made it to the tree line,” Mag answered, jogging alongside, “and turned right back around. Something’s trashed the fields, and Faldir was nowhere to be seen.”
“It was like this when I came through earlier,” Thad said. “I never got close enough to see that it was wrong, else I’d have said something.”
They followed broken branches and skidding foot prints, almost crashing into Hedda’s rooted, listing body when they emerged from the wood.
Brand followed her look and froze right with her. “What the fuck?”
“Aye.” Mag’s voice was hushed. “That wasn’t there when my watch ended, I swear it.”
Fields that had been mostly pristine the night before were rutted and ruined, the land raised in jagged, overturned clumps taller than he was. Huge gouges ran like twisted scars from the spot where they’d all sat to keep watch, through the meadow, all the way to?—
“The chasm,” he said, feet already moving.
Magnus ran ahead of him, throwing his robe off and shifting mid-air. Pet put his enormous snout to the ground, sniffing at the divots, pawing around. He loosed a whimper and turned golden eyes on Brand.
There, mixed in with the mud and roots… No. Not mud.Ooze, inky and shining, even in the low light. It dripped from sundered petals and broken stems. Seeped into the dirt. And it wasmoving.
He reached down?—
Lunara’s hand wrapped around his wrist, her nails digging into his skin. “Don’ttouch that.”
Her breaths were coming in pants, a haunted look in her eyes.
“What is it?”
She slowly unlocked her fingers, head shaking.
“All I can smell is burning death and rot. Nothing else.” Mag had shifted back, already retying his robe. “There’s blood, but the rest is too fucking foul to know whose.”
That’s what caught Brand’s eye in the first place—crimson mixed in with the black, too much of it for comfort.
They followed the streaks and splashes of red right up to the chasm’s edge, where Hedda was standing in the center of a colossal groove, swaying as she peered down into the darkness.
