Aldora rubbed her chest while half-stumbling under Vedikus’s weight.
He leaned into her every now and then, head bowed and weakened. She wrapped her arm under his shoulder and tried to lend him some of her strength.I’ve been using yours for too long.
Before long, the lights expanded into a cluster in the distance, and she could see the outlines of huts. They grew in size with each step forward to reveal crude symbols painted with a brown sludge over rotting wood. Beings moved within their haphazard wooden logs.
“Are you sure it’s safe here?” she asked under her breath.
“No.”
Aldora tensed under his arm. No one came out to greet them, but she knew they were there. Whatever they were. She could sense them and wasn’t surewhy,but they were nothing more than an obstacle in her mind. As long as they stayed away, she could pretend they weren’t there.
The mud turned to dirt under her boots and after a short time of walking through the outskirts of the haven, she and Vedikus were trudging over rotten pallets risen slightly above the ground. They creaked and groaned with each step, some giving way under the minotaur’s bulk.
They had made it to the center of the settlement, and she stopped before a stone building that looked more like a temple in Savadon than it did a structure set in the middle of a swamp. Vedikus breathed heavily at her side and she worried that he’d toppled against her at the building’s steps. As they continued, she was unable to hold him upright, and he went down at her feet into a kneeling position with his horns pointed toward the dirt, his breaths growing heavier with each inhale.
Aldora grasped his shoulders and moved her hands up to cup his face, lifting it. “Vedikus,” she strained before her voice went hard. “Get up.” He was cold under her touch and had gone deathly pale. “You need to get up now. We made it after everything you’ve put me through—us through—if you leave me now...”
His beady black eyes stared back at her through a wet glare. Old and new blood coated him, and when she let go of his face, her hands came away coated with it.
“Get up,” she snapped, feeling faint herself. A slow smirk spread across his lips, and she couldn’t help but smile back with relief.
“You’ve brought me a gift.”
Aldora tensed, her eyes trailing away from Vedikus as she turned to see who spoke at her back. She moved to shield him from whatever adversary might strike next. She felt him stand, shakily, using her shoulder as leverage behind her. She reached for her weapon when a young childlike woman covered in brown rags stepped from the shadows of the temple.
Her hand stilled at her side. The girl moved toward her, stopping a short distance away, just out of reach. She wore a sullen expression that bordered indifference and looked far too old to belong to her face. Aldora was at a loss to the girl’s real age, and despite her appearance, she didn’t seem entirely human.
But there’s a girl, standing before me, alive, in the middle of this horrid place.Her mouth watered with questions.
“Do not trust her appearance,” Vedikus breathed in her ear before she felt him lean slightly against her back.
“A gift?” the girl asked, glancing from her to Vedikus and back again.
Aldora shook her head. “We need your help.”
“You need a cure.”
“Yes. And sanctuary,” Aldora amended.
“You brought a group of warrior centaur studs to my border, then a pack of barghests to sow chaos for your escape. I do not like chaos so close to Prayer, human,” the girl spat. Aldora opened her mouth to ask her how she knew, but the girl continued. “Bring your human breeder inside, Minotaur, and make it quick before I decide that the price of your inconvenience is your lives.” Without waiting, the girl walked back into the chilly recesses of the temple and disappeared within.
Aldora bristled, feeling her hope waver, but slid her arm around Vedikus, shaking under his weight.
***
Her gaze had adjustedto the darkness right as the stone walls glowed with the same pale green light from outside. She followed them to a nearly empty room with shriveled, long-dead vines hanging from the stone ceiling, and a sunken pool that took up half the floor. The water within was the same as the water from outside: murky with algae around the random thick stalks of grass that shot up from below. The only difference was it appeared deep and undisturbed.
There was a folded cloth next to it, and a charred pile of wood.
The girl was nowhere to be seen.
Aldora staggered to the edge of the bath, uncaring where the hag was and helped Vedikus sit. His hooves scraped across the floor. She took the offered towel and dipped it into the water, using it to clean both of them. The dirt sloshed off their bodies in rivulets to seep back into the pool.
She brought her still-bleeding hand to his lips and he licked at it without speaking. A ticklish shiver shot through her. Her body reacted more for him than it ever had for a human man. She was beginning to like the power it lent her.
“Thank you,” he grunted, strength and life returning to his voice.
She frowned. “You’re not a thankful being.”
