The impact of feet against stone jarred less, she realized. There was less stonetojar. Even as the ceiling fell in behind them, the floor was growing softer.
Beyond shame, Toinette would have sobbed with terror, save that she had no breath to manage it. They were going to die. They’d come far, they’d won against all odds, and now, even in victory, they’d be buried alive, never to know air or light again.
Her mind gibbered. Her body, wiser or at least less complicated, bolted down passageways through rock that became gravel and then dirt. She had enough mind left to know that Erik was with her, and to keep making sure of it, glancing to her side every so often. Otherwise, she put her head down and ran like a spooked horse.
The great doors lay fallen from their frame, the metal twisted and molten. Some shapes lingered. Others didn’t. Toinette didn’t know why and didn’t care. She hurdled the wreckage and landed on the other side, almost stumbling in the loose dirt. It was falling down into the earth, filling the cavern from whence it had come. Like the tide, it tried to carry all before it.
Toinette’s vision went red halfway across the courtyard. Her face was wet; she wouldn’t have known sweat from tears then, or either from blood, and didn’t bother wiping the moisture away. She didn’t need to see. The edge of the steps was a few feet away, a few feet that felt as though she were treading water against the waves.
Dimly she thought of wings, but she had no strength to transform, and none to take off if she had. More weight would only have sealed their doom.
They made it to the edge of the steps and threw themselves over, running headlong downward. Halfway to the bottom, the dirt was soft and sucking as quicksand, and Toinette’s legs worked no longer.
She turned and grabbed Erik’s shoulders. “Jump,” she managed.
They clung to each other and leapt, not down but outward as far as their collected strength could manage.
Toinette felt her feet leave the sand. Through a red mist she saw the distance between them and the steps grow, and the steps themselves collapse in on themselves, buckling and bending in a way that no stone had ever done. She felt Erik’s arms tight about her, and buried her face against his neck, shielding the back of his head with her own arms.
She closed her eyes.
They landed hard, with a solidcrunchand a stab of pain through Toinette’s wounded leg, not to mention a blunt impact that jarred her whole body. Her teeth clicked together with enough force to chip one; her shoulder hit a good-sized rock, which tore through the cloth of her gown and half the skin of her upper arm.
But theydidland, on firm, solid ground that moved not at all. They landed, and lay for a while as the temple’s final collapse roared behind them.
Forty-Two
Having come to a stop, Erik couldn’t rise again. He told himself that he should, that they’d do well to keep walking, but the earth was too nice and flat, his bones too heavy, and Toinette’s head too welcome against his chest. All he could do was roll onto his back, pulling Toinette with him, and stare up at the sky.
For a change, therewasa sky, one the mundane gray of low clouds and lit by the faint sun of midafternoon.Whatmidafternoon was a mystery. Based on when they’d eaten, they’d spent only half a day in the temple, but Erik had heard many tales. Time worked differently in such places. They could have emerged weeks or years later than they’d gone in—there was no way to know.
He hadn’t the strength to worry.
Small things occupied his mind instead. Air, for instance: real, clean air, smelling vaguely of the sea beyond the island and vaguely of pine. There were no trees around them—the ring around the temple was a wasteland yet, if not so sinister as it had been when Erik and Toinette had entered—but after so long with nothing but the un-ark’s smell, Erik thought he could have caught the scent of a plant in England.
Toinette breathed as deeply as he did, the motion steady against him. It reassured him where her closed eyes might have otherwise given alarm, as did the slowing beat of her heart. Her hair fell across his face, and tickled, but he made no move to brush it away.
In time, though Erik couldn’t have said in howmuchtime save that the sun hadn’t set, Toinette groaned and sat up. “Praise the saints,” she said and licked cracked lips. “And we’re…mostly…each in one piece.”
The whites of her eyes were as red as Erik suspected his own were, and her voice as hoarse as his throat felt. The cut on her leg was a raw-looking line of red, but it had mostly stopped bleeding from what he could tell. “Aye,” he said, “and glad to hear it from you. Though I fear we left the wine behind us when we changed, and the food as well.”
“Bah,” said Toinette, but good-humoredly. “And we’re quite lacking in mead and fowl as well. Inhospitable, I call it.”
Erik laughed, though it hurt his throat and his ribs alike. They’d both gone without for longer. Survival was food and wine enough.
“We should walk,” he said, though. “Get to the stream, clean your wounds.”
“Clean everything we can, after that run,” Toinette replied, getting to her feet with another groan. “Just poke me in the ribs if I fall over on the way. You’ll never carry me in your condition.”
He might have protested, but knew it for the truth, and was in no shape to speak very much. Instead, when he stood, he wrapped an arm around Toinette’s shoulders and, careful of her burns, leaned his weight a little on the one she offered.
Thus supporting each other, staggering sore-footed like a pair of drunks in the small hours of the morning, they retraced the paths they’d taken.
Dead trees stayed dead, and nothing moved among them. Time and nature might reclaim the woods around the temple, or the blight might remain. Not all scars healed. It was enough for Erik to know that the dead forestwasa scar, to look through the trees and see the red light of the setting sun, and to breathe in nothing sinister as he walked.
Likewise, though the trees and wildlife in the livelier part of the forest were yet deformed, no phantom shapes appeared among them. The wind was chilly, more so as the evening approached, but the bone-deep cold was gone. A malignity had made its home nearby, and the land yet bore the marks, but It dwelt there no longer. The forest Toinette and Erik walked through was empty, and then twisted, but it wasfree.
They walked wearily enough that night fell when they were hours from the stream. Erik glanced down at Toinette as the sky darkened, and she shrugged beneath his arm. “I’d rather keep going. You?”
