End over end the knife travels, each alternating cycle of handle and blade a mini-variation of what Merc had been doing, the rhythmic flaring what I hope, what I pray, will be enough. It isn’t. Once again, the black wingspan eclipses all my vision, and the black-feathered scourge comes upon me. There’s no time to roll in a ball and protect my inner organs. I’m laid out, about to be flayed out—
At the last possible moment, the bird veers away.
And follows the brilliant rippling light.
I roll on my side, just in time to see the knife skittle into a fissure between two boulders. The bird doesn’t lead with its talons this time. The head extendsforward and its neck thins out as the wings duck in against the body and its speed redoubles.
So it’s nearly at the velocity of a free fall—
As the winged predator slams into the rocks.
The cracking impact is as loud as its call, the snapping of its spine so violent, the bird’s death knocks the formation out of alignment, and rocks bounce down and travel. Landing in a heap, the beast’s half-hearted flap of one wing is followed by a series of twitches.
And then… the kind of stillness that only a life lost brings.
Panting, dizzy, and in pain everywhere, I think of thebalasmeat, and know that we’ll have a meal, if we choose—yet I’m saddened at the death, even though it was him or me.
Her or me?
“Sorrel!”
The sound of Merc’s baritone voice is so sweet, I shudder with relief. And I intend on getting up—or at the very least, sitting up—to greet him. I don’t have the energy. I flop over onto my back once more and continue to pant as I look toward him.
He’s running faster than I did, nearly as fast as the gelding, the broadsword sheathed on his back, his arms pumping like he’s punching the air. With his black hair streaming out in his wake, and his leather-clad body propelling him forward, Merc is the very study of a powerful man in his prime—and not unlike the predator who nearly killed us both. And it’s good that weapon of his is put away, I think numbly, in case there are more of those birds around. We need to keep all flashes of light to an absolute minimum.
I try once again to sit up, and fail. So I lie where I am, in this field of gray rocks, that could well have been my grave. Overhead, the sun is so intense it hurts my eyes, yet I can still see that odd and worrisome star—
Merc skids to a halt beside me, gray pebbles kicking up and skipping across my dead-weight legs. As he falls to his knees and takes my hand, I start to smile.
“You didn’t leave me,” I say hoarsely while I search his body for injuries.
“And youshouldhave left me.” Leaning over, he brushes the hair out of my face. “Are you all right, woman?”
As my lungs get tight with emotion, I open my mouth to answer him. Except then, caught up in the moment, I do the one thing I must never, ever do.
I meet his eyes with my own.
Thirty-SixA Man to Die For.
My gasp seems as loud as the bird of prey’s call, and I grab on to the front of Merc’s surcoat, prepared for an assault that, though it will not kill my body, I know without a doubt will kill my soul. Bracing myself, moaning, kicking my feet into the pebbles, I prepare my weak body for what he’ll feel as he dies—
His one uninjured eye is dark. So dark that, with the sunlight streaming in behind him, I can’t tell where his pupil ends and his iris takes over. The other side is the opposite, so white that there is only the faintest hint of a ring around the faded center.
The slashing scar is nasty and jagged, and surely what would have killed a lesser man.
“Sorrel.” He says my name roughly. “I need to get you out of the sun—”
As I reach for his face, he falls silent and I know now is the time. It’s coming, the flash and the agony, the knowledge I don’t want, shouldn’t have, can’t change. My curse, showing up here to spoil—
The world recedes as I become lost in his gaze, that midnight darkness enveloping me as the white expanse pushes me away… but instead of driving cold, or creeping terror, or crushing suffocation, I feel cocooned. Safe. At home with this stranger who knows only violence and solitude.
After he was a humble farmer who loved the land.
It’s as all this occurs to me that I realize: Time is passing. And still I hold his eyes with my own. I see nothing, other than the two universes that stare back at me. I feel nothing, outside of warmth and reassurance. I know nothing, apart from him leaning over me while I lie on the hard pebbled ground, the blue sky stretching over us, a cloudless blanket of daylight that will usher in danger when it fades into the very color of half his gaze.
A sense of utter disbelief causes me to recede from him, and that means the death vision is finally coming. Any moment. Yes, right… now…
The death vision, the moment of his demise—and all the physical and emotional sensations that go along with it—is going to take me over, and make me writhe, and cause me to know that which I can never, ever share—
