But my body knew. I felt sick as I crouched beside him. I wanted to be sick.
My training was the only thing left to me.Assess the damage, Mara.The rain and mud plastered his shirt to his skin. His hair was soaked and red. He was very pale: blood loss. His arms were broken in several places, and probably his legs as well, but they were covered in stones and cold mud, and I didn’t dare move him. That was what I kept thinking. My speed, my strength—none of it mattered. If I moved him, I might kill him.
Unless he was already dead. But I couldn’t hear the signals of his body that would tell me whether he was alive. Everything was so loud and roaring, even though the storms had stopped and the skies were clearing. Then I realized the roaring was my own blood, my own hard breathing.
“Gareth,” I said. His name felt like tar in my mouth. I touched his cold face. “Gareth, can you hear me? I need you to open your eyes. Can you please look at me?”
It was foolish to just sit there and talk to him without checking all the things I knew I should check, and I still couldn’t hear the sounds of his body—the drum of his heartbeat, the in-and-out rhythm of his lungs. There was nothing. Maybe, though, this was simply because I couldn’t seem to calm my breathing. It was soloud.
I touched his neck, then his wrist. I placed my ear against his chest and listened. Some kind of bird was calling out far above us. Maybe Alastrina or Ryder had told it to search for survivors.
“Gareth. Please.” I could hardly breathe for crying. A pressure bore down on my chest like someone was trying to smother me. “No, Gareth. You have to come back. You must come back to me. I know it hurts, and I’m sorry.”
I wiped my face, but all that did was drag mud across my eyes. “I’m going to count to three,” I told him, “and on three, you’ll open your eyes, and we’ll call for help. My mother—she’ll be able to heal you like she did in Wardwell. Remember? Gareth.Gareth.”
I kept coming back to his name, as if saying it enough times would do something extraordinary. But still he lay there, and still he didn’t move. I dragged the curves of my talons carefully down his body. Maybe this was an illusion. Maybe a figment was toying with me.
Suddenly I wanted to make a fist and bring it down on his shattered chest.
“You idiot,” I whispered, crying harder. “Why did you run afterher, this woman you didn’t even love? This woman who didn’t love you?Ilove you. Didn’t you see the mud, how close you were to the cliffs? Didn’t you understand the danger? I love you. I will always love you. Come back to me.”
I could no longer hold myself up. I lay down in the mud beside him and covered him with one of my wings. If I hid him well enough, maybe no one would ever know, and that not knowing would have the power to undo everything. Maybe I would fall asleep here and wake to find this was a dream, some horror wrought by Kilraith’s cruelty.
I watched Gareth’s throat for a pulse that never came. And then I started to hear noises from above—the faint sounds of battle, someone shouting commands, another person calling for help. A falcon’s familiar cry pierced the air. Freyda. I knew that call; she was searching for me.
But I didn’t want her or anyone else. If someone came to find me, they would see Gareth, and if they saw him, somehow I’d have to bear the pity on their faces, the sounds of their grief, and their pity was useless, and their grief was nothing compared to mine. If even my sisters dared to tell me they were sorry, I’d lose my mind with rage.
Unsteadily, I stood and turned away from him, blood pounding in my ears. I wouldn’t look at him again. I couldn’t look at him. That wasn’t my Gareth, there on the ground. Not my Gareth, with his smile and his sparkling eyes and his brilliant mind and all his patient love for me. I pushed myself up into the air without really understanding that I was flying or where I would go. I only knew that I needed to be far away from anyone who would be able to look at my face and see my broken heart.
A wave of shock crashed into me with each rapid beat of my wings. Lightning flashed all around me, illuminating the Mist with garish light, but all I could see was a vast encroaching darkness, a tide coming to drag me out to sea. Gods, I wished it would.Drown me. Crush me.I sobbed his name. Gareth, Gareth,Gareth.
The idea came to me as I sucked in a desperate gasp of air.
I would go to the lake.
Thinking of it brought me a wild kind of peace, the kind of peace only known by a desperate mind. On the shores of Lake Voroth, twelve years ago, I had made my first kill.
And now I would make my last.
Chapter 44
By the time I arrived at the lake, I was so cold I could barely feel my toes. The numbness was nice; I didn’t particularly want to feel anything anyway.
My flight north from Big Deep was already a blur. I had no sense of how long I’d been in the air or if anyone was coming after me, but that hardly mattered. Soon there wouldn’t be anything for them to find. They would have chased me all this way for nothing.
The question remained of how I would do it. I hadn’t given this much thought while in the air. All I’d been able to do was keep myself moving north and try not to think about Gareth. Now I was circling the lake and thinking of him anyway, my eyes swollen from crying and my chest hurting as if something was determined to squeeze me to death. No matter how hard I tried to imagine Gareth as he had once been, the only image I seemed able to recall was that of his dead body buried in mud.
For a moment I considered just pulling my wings in and letting myself drop into the water. But that wouldn’t work. My instincts would kick in, and I’d start swimming. To drown, I would need someone to hold me under the water. And who was strong enough for that?I could hunt down a chimaera, and stand there and let it disembowel me. But I feared my training wouldn’t allow me to simply not fight something that was attacking me.
A sad knot of laughter lodged in my throat. I’d sought out danger all those times, not caring if I lived—hoping I wouldn’t—and still I couldn’t figure out how to kill myself properly.
Then the moonlight gleaming on my smooth black talons caught my eye.
There was an idea.
I held my hands out in front of me, turning them over and over and considering my talons’ sharpness, their beautiful crescent-moon shapes. If I used them on myself, death would come quietly. The pain of slashing open my own throat would be fleeting, and it would all happen too quickly for my power to start healing me. I could do it right there on the shore and let the lake feed on me. My blood in the water would attract all kinds of creatures, and by the time anyone found me, I’d be nothing but bones.
The thought brought me a warm sense of peace, like there had been a hole somewhere deep inside me in this exact shape and now I’d finally found the thing that fit inside it. Gareth, and everything he had been, and everything I’d lost still dug between my ribs like a knife, but soon that knife wouldn’t matter.
