“I know. But I do have those protective, possessive impulses that I’ve just claimed don’t control me, so let me butcher this thing, would you please?”
It was a kethryn, and a large one, larger than any kethryn had business being in a passage this narrow. Eight legs, jointed twice each, scraping the walls as it forced itself toward us.
What followed was a brutish, ugly fight.
And Cara, of course, defied my preferences. She moved to my left, where I had not asked her to be, her shorter blade finding the gap between foreleg and body where a kethryn’s plating thinned. It was an impressive bit of observation for someone who had not studied as I had.
The kethryn screamed, high and thin, as its leg gave out. Focused on carving off its reaching mandibles, I only caught glimpses of her in my peripheral vision: the wet of her blade into something soft, a curse under her breath when her boot slipped on slick stone, the sound of her slipping on loose rock and catching herself a split-second before my free hand seized her arm.
It tried to take her head with a swing of its mandibles. She went under the swing without hesitation and came up on the other side. The kethryn slipped my blade, slammed into the wall, and rapidly climbed.
This was the angle I had hoped to deny it. This was the way I had once watched a friend die.
The kethryn hung down from above us, mandibles moving, and a chittering sound filled the air. The Lightless, swarming toward us. It was easier to believe that the monsters were giant insects, that there was no intelligence there, but there was disquieting intelligence in how they cooperated to kill.
She must have read the change in me, because she rotated before I told her to, her back coming flush against mine, her shoulders pressing into my shoulder blades.
Both of us covering what the other couldn’t see.
Her body had made a decision her mind hadn’t caught up to yet.
I read its drop through her half-breath of warning. I waited for my moment, and when its mandibles were dangerously near and its bell was exposed, I drove my blade up into the underside as the thing fell on us, into the thick band of softer flesh between the second and third pair of legs. Into its heart. The blade went in to the hilt. I twisted, moving out from beneath its body the split second before it fell to the ground.
Cara had moved forward, and there was a Lightless speared on her blade. The others were retreating.
The passage was quiet. The fighting elsewhere in the labyrinth felt muffled and distant. The immediate dark held nothing moving.
Cara drew her blade free and turned to me, and suddenly it felt as if we were very close. Her breathing was rough but beginning to even out. Mine was slightly ragged and might have had little to do with the kethryn. I would have to grow more accustomed to close proximity with my wife.
“Tay,” she persisted into the gap, and I almost smiled because I had expected her to name him as soon as it was silent again.
“Soon,” I promised.
“I chose to marry you to protect you. To protect your plans. As a ruse.” She paused on the word longer than she had meant to. “All I want for myself is to keep Tay and Lidi safe.”
“Is that true, Cara?”
Her gaze cut to mine.
“Just Tay and Lidi? Tell me I am wrong about you.”
She scoffed and didn’t answer, which was telling enough. She would refuse to admit to being a hero, despite all the mounting evidence. “You ask me to remake the world when I’ve only seen two corners of it?”
“I ask you to help me remake it. And we will save Tay in the process. I’m asking for your patience.”
“You are asking for a great deal more than mypatience.” She turned to face the passage we’d come from, checked her blade, and moved up to my left without being asked.
Not because she believed everything. She knew better than that. I could see it in the set of her jaw, the way her gaze moved over me.
She had reasoned against trusting me. She had trusted me anyway. She was choosing me anyway. We both knew that to be a failure of judgment, but warmth bloomed in my chest.
“We should keep moving.”
We had nowhere to go, but we would not be freed from the labyrinth until all the monsters had been slain.
We went forward into the dark together.
Five
