No... do not... leave.My good hand tries to reach for her, but it weighs a thousand pounds. The panic is absolute.Alone.
Then she is back. Her small, cool hands are on my face, a shocking relief against the fire. She is panting, her breath smelling sharp, bitter, and earthy.
Meqixste.
My fog-filled brain recognizes the scent. The antidote.How?How does she know? There is no time. She has been chewing it. Her lips are bruised.
The last thing I see is her face, a pale, terrified moon in the darkness. She leans over me.
Then, her mouth is on mine. It is not a kiss. It is a desperate, frantic,hotpress of her lips as she forces the bitter, chewed pulp of the root past my tusks. Thetasteis vile, an explosion of acrid, earthy bitterness that cuts through the fever. I try to recoil, but she holds my head, her small hands firm.
I swallow.
The world dissolves. I am not a warrior. I am not a monster. I am just... fire. And then, blackness.
12
AURORA
He is an enormous mountain of dead weight.
Othic slumps against me, his body an unconscious, immovable mass. I am still tangled in the thorns of the ledge, the mist from the waterfall soaking my tunic, and he isout. The roar of the water is a deafening, terrifying sound. We are free, but he is dying.
"Othic?" I shake his good arm, my voice a pathetic, high-pitched squeak lost in the spray. "Othic, get up! Please!"
His head lolls, his amber eyes rolling back. His skin is already burning. The fever from the numiscu poison is setting in, a raging furnace I can feel even through his thick leathers.
I look at the cliff face, at the distant, dark shape of the abandoned farmstead he spotted. It is fifty yards. It might as well be fifty miles.
No. I will not let him die here.
I am not the girl in the alcove. I am not a 'Lady Doll'.
"You will not die," I hiss, my voice raw.
I brace myself under his good arm, looping it over my shoulders. I take his entire, massive weight onto my small frame andheave. My knees buckle. A pained cry rips from my throat,but I do not stop. I get my feet under me. He is a dead weight, his boots dragging through the mud, but we are moving.
One step. His body slides, almost pulling me down. I cry out, digging my heels in.
Another step.
The fifty yards to the barn is the worst hell of my life. I am not walking; I am a beast of burden, a tiny suru trying to drag a mountain. The smell of his blood is thick in the air. The howls of the worgs Othic heard are closer now, a chorus of hungry predators that smell our weakness. They are on their way.
"Please, Othic, help me," I sob, my shoulder screaming, my lungs on fire. I stumble, and we both fall to our knees in the mud, just shy of the barn door.
His breathing is a shallow, wet rasp. The fever is winning. He is dying.
My eyes scan the dark, swampy ground at the edge of the farmstead, my mind racing.What can I do?
The moonlight glints on a patch of dark, tri-leafed weeds near a rotten stump.
My heart stops.It cannot be.
My mother's voice, a memory from a life I thought was gone forever, whispers in my ear.“This is poison, Aurora. But this...” her hand brushing a different, ugly root,“...this is the cure. Meqixste. Bitter as a curse, but it will pull the elven-sickness from a man's blood. You chew it. You never swallow.”
It is a one-in-a-million chance. It is the only chance I have.
I leave Othic, just for a second, and scramble to the stump. I rip the root from the ground, the sharp, earthy, bitter smell filling my nostrils. I shove it into my tunic and run back to him.
