It could be any of them. Hurt. Swallowed by spirits. Made a witch’s plaything. Because of her. Because she stole their axles. She had been certain they would all return to Äbender after the night they’d had, after their last refuge was taken away.
She should have been more certain the Lichtenwald wouldn’t let them to go easy.
The cry rang out again, frantic, making them both flinch. “It’s close,” she said again, forcing herself to calmly explain. “Within a mile. I need to see what we’re dealing with, help if I’m able. I’ll be back as quick as I can. Five minutes, a quarter hour at the most.”
He gestured at his pen. “If I came with you–”
“You’re too slow.” He flinched – at her tone, or her words.Good. “If someone’s in danger, I can’t be worried about you, too.”
“And what about you?”
He sounded genuinely concerned. For her. For his lifeline. His prize ticket. She froze, torn.
Then turned away. “Wait here.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The pines swallowed Anya in seconds. Sy started to call after her but lost his nerve and his breath all at once. He pressed his back against the trunk of a pine tree, counted the minutes as they passed, imagining instead he counted the time between spells in a sitting room. A Sangfeder mandated safety practice, as if a minute’s restored blood would make the slightest difference. He supposed it would, if he could ever afford more than a single minute’s rest. But who would mandate that?
After five had gone, the sound stopped completely, or grew too faint for him to hear. Five more minutes passed. Anya did not return. And five more. And five more.
She had been quite adamant that he wait here. Instead of count minutes, he counted the many reasons he should obey. The many reasons he shouldn’t.
The indignity of being unable to hold up his end of their agreement. The lie that agreement truly was. The ever-compounding cruelty of betraying her when he took the phoenix and every cent of the prize money for himself. The strangeness of her behavior, of the illness plaguing her she insisted he couldn’t cure and wouldn’t describe. When it came to the Lichtenwald, Anya kept very little close. So why this? What secret was she keeping on the forest’s behalf?
Or was it the forest’s secret at all? Just before she slipped into the mess of green, when she’d pulled an arrow from her quiver, he’d noticed one of her arrows was marked with a small, deep X. Only one.
She had obscured her family’s heritage. She may still have connections. She may have intended all along to take the phoenix to the king without him, to use it as leverage to regain her lost holdings. She had no reason to remain loyal to him, and every reason to use him – until he was no longer useful.
For what of his secrets? She knew now that he needed the prize for his debt, but not that he meant to take the entire thing, leaving her penniless. And despite what she thought, what he’d let her think, he wasn’t entirely useless. He knew his body, and he still had enough blood for a spell or two in him. Perhaps, in desperation, three.
So he was onlymostlyuseless.
And slow.
The honorable thing to do would be to go after her, spend his scant blood to help whoever was hurt, whether it was one of the others or a stranger. Make himself useful. No – to part from her, from all of them, to fend for himself and free her from his burden, a burden he should, must, carry alone.
But he had foregone the path of honor when he had placed that ad.
Anya hadn’t. She meant to honor their bargain, she’d said after he’d wrecked himself saving Sabina’s friend. After she’d rushed to defend a camp full of competitors, people she despised, from a hungry bear, a creature whose ire she thought they had earned and deserved. After she’d gripped his hand while he bled like she thought he might die. Like his death would stain her.
Even now, rather than run from the danger, she rushed into the unknown on the mere prospect of a stranger in distress.
Now, why would someone like that agree to catch one of the Lichtenwald’s most mythic and magnificent creatures, the only one of its kind, for a cruel, covetous king?
He’d seen the way she’d manipulated the others at dinner. Why had he assumed she treated him any differently? He had obviously misread her quite remarkably, sitting beside her on that mossy stone. Understandable, mired as he was, body and soul, in fear and blood loss and stress, in the strain of staving all of it off with every ounce of determination he possessed.
But in that moment, he had not been afraid or stressed – or particularly conscious of anything, really, except the way her eyes, honest and open and green as new beginnings, had found his. The way her breath had hitched. The way he found himself moved as if by instinct, as if by compulsion, toward her.
The way she had turned from him. Withalacrity.
He shut his eyes and thumped the back of his head against the tree in abject mortification, then again to clear his head. He couldn’t puzzle her out. Too many pieces, and none of them matched. It was obvious she needed the money. For all her actions spelled honor, for all her words spelled a fierce and fearsome pride in her profession and in the forest, it simply didn’t fit that she would willingly provide Edgard, a man she despised almost as much as Sy did, with such a miraculous boon. An ever-lingering life, spreading foulness.
Not for a new roof. Not for a fence.
But for the cure to a debilitating illness? A skilled spellscribe’s magic could not cure it. What about a phoenix’s?
What if it was simple, so stunningly simple he had overlooked it? The sound they heard – it could have been anything. A person, a fox.
