I should have seen it coming. Not the kick, per se, and certainly not Khanaarre’s attempted intervention, but my death-sentence. We had resisted the will of the Prince of the White Steppes, used his honor and pride against him. He could not retaliate against Elana, who he had acknowledged as his equal, or against Rennin, her consort, or against Khanaarre, to whom he had acknowledged an unpayable debt. But I was just an exiled priestess, and I had no standing or recourse to resist him.
Inladat’s kick should have thrown me far, far into the open air, beyond any hope of catching an outcrop or a landing that a mortal could survive. With Khanaarre clinging to my back, we merely tumbled over the edge. Even so, panic overtook me. I was only half-conscious of the shouting behind us, fading quickly into obscurity as we fell. The ground rushed toward us at an astounding rate. I was going to die. And, for no damn good reason, Khanaarre was going to die with me.
Then, somehow, Khanaare’s voice penetrated my panic and the rushing wind in my ears.
What started as a string of polyglot obscenities so vile that they would have made even poor Sir Orland blush turned swiftly into a raw scream, followed by a long string of words of power. Something about air and water and leaves and feathers and falling and flying.
Our fall began to slow.
Was it going to be enough?
I didn’t know.
My cloak was tangled around my arms and legs. I couldn’t reach my knife or my claw. Instead, I did what I had done only a handful of times before, each with astounding but exhausting success: I reached inside myself and found the golden light of the Holy Lands, trickling into my body and pumping through my veins where there had once been red mortal blood.
I had no ready spells for an occasion such as this, but I had so many languages to make one up from. It’s not like we would be any more dead if I fucked this up than if I didn’t even try. The words I spoke were the first ones to come to mind. A poem about angels falling to earth and rising triumphant from the fires of their landing, a few verbs shifted crudely from poetic meter to magically operative grammatical moods.
Impact came maybe a whole minute after Inladat’s foot hit my back. I hit first. Khanaarre landed on top of me. A void swallowed me, and I wasn’t at all certain that it wasn’t death.
===
When consciousness returned, it was to a world of hot, smokey darkness. The smell of burnt rock filled the air, with a surprising undercurrent of cold water. Every part of me hurt. To my immense surprise, though, no part of me seemed to be broken.
“Fuck,” I croaked. “Khanaarre?”
“Here,” the answer came from nearby. “Getting water.”
“Thank the gods,” I sighed. “Do you know what happened? Where we are?”
“The shitstain prince’s dickbag xian g`ul kicked you off the top of the Great Ice Wall,” she said, her voice dark. “I tried to catch you, but fell off with you.”
She paused.
“I think I remember that part,” I said. It was a little vague, but in a way that felt more like head trauma than magical backlash.
“I cast a Black Mask spell that we use for escaping falling towers … or guards who’ve chased us to the tops of towers.” She laughed a little. I laughed with her. “I thought my master was silly for teaching me that spell. I’ll have to thank him if we make it back to my tower.”
For a moment I was confused. Hadn’t she said her master was dead? But I realized that she’d probably buried him there, and that elves spoke to their dead in ways that Vencari and rhu xian didn’t.
“That fall was ten, maybe twenty times the height my spell has been tested at,” she went on. “I think we would have lived, but regretted it. Your spell … well, either there were some interactions between our spells, or yours needs some work. We lived, nothing broken, but we are fifty or a hundred feet beneath the surface.”
I tried to sit up, but quickly regretted the attempt.
“I just made it up,” I admitted, “so maybe both, but definitely the latter.”
She laughed quietly.
“Well, we live,” she said, “so that’s what matters.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what matters.”
I spared a thought for Elana and Rennin, almost certainly still at the top of the Great Ice Wall. It had been too late in the day to begin the descent, even if they had any reason to hope we lived. Would they have attacked Inladat, retribution for killing us? Would the xian g`ul have fought, or would he and his guards have simply left? I would check the poppets I’d made in the morning. I was too tired, now, and there was nothing I could do from here.
“Thank you,” I said after a too-long pause. “For saving me.”
Her hand found mine in the dark.
“There was some self-interest involved,” she said. “I was falling, too.”
“Only because you tried to keep me from falling in the first place.”
The hand on mine tightened.
“You still owe me a library’s worth of secrets,” she said. The words were light, but her voice was thick.
I squeezed back.
“You’ll have them,” I said.
Navigating the darkness by touch or by the keenness of elf-sight, Khanaarre helped me to sit up against the wall. It was a struggle: all of me hurt to lay still, and moving hurt more. I was weak with mundane and magical exhaustion, and faint with hunger and thirst after however many meals I’d missed in my unconsciousness. Then she put her hands on the collar of my cloak.
“Our clothes are still wet from the gully up there,” she said. “We need to get you out of them, and a little away from this hot rock.”
“Shit,” I said. “Yeah.”
The rock fumes must be affecting me. Even as tired as I was, I should have thought of that. It was a struggle, in the dark, and with me barely able to help. Even so, she managed to help me out of my damp gear, and to wrap me – as she had, it seemed, wrapped herself – in a heavy blanket from our packs.
My wits and my senses returned slowly while we worked. We were, as she’d said, below the surface of the earth. I could see the tunnel of still-hot rock rising above us like a chimney, and I could just barely discern a patch of sky beyond it. She settled us to one side of that chimney, in a small, naturally occurring cavern with a stream running through it. Except for the chimney, a circle perhaps ten feet across, the cavern was only tall enough for us to sit in and crawl through, and despite the icy water that ran through it, retained the heat of our molten entry very, very well.
From the facts that she had not gotten herself real clothes, or conjured light or warmth for us, I guessed that she was not feeling strong enough even to manage her wizard’s chest – I certainly wasn’t in any shape to manage mine. Unfortunately, all of our stores were also in our wizard’s chests, so we had only our hip flasks and the stream for water.
Khanaarre’s hands were shaking by the time she’d settled us into a corner of the cavern, dry and snug, close to the warmth of the hot rock chimney but where the air was cleaner.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am very tired.”
“Then rest,” I said. “We’re not going anywhere until morning at the soonest.”
She chuckled, then sat down close beside me.
“No,” she agreed. “We are not going anywhere.”
We fell asleep like that, side by side against the warm stone wall, wrapped in blankets and little else.
===
When I woke, the light of morning had begun to filter down through the chimney of now-nearly-cooled rock. Khanaarre had curled herself into a fetal ball beside me, her head nestled into the curve of my shoulder and her hand resting on my chest. The chimney had cleared the air, and my eyes and throat no longer burned from the fumes of the melted rock. Most of the heat of our entry had been drawn away, along with the fumes, but – for now – our blankets conserved enough warmth to keep us safe from harm.
There were things that needed to be done – most of them soon – but I tried to ignore the growing list in my head in favor of the woman tucked under my arm. Somewhere in the night we had shifted from each of us being wrapped in our own blankets to one blanket below the both of us and another atop. It was not the embrace I’d hoped to enjoy again, but it was as close as I was likely to get, and I wanted to savor every moment of it.
A part of me felt guilty for that. Last night’s charged conversation and our long winter of working together closely notwithstanding, Khanaarre had never explicitly forgiven me for being raised as a rhu xian priestess. I had no reason to believe that she entertained any thoughts of future intimacy. Her braids spread out over my face and neck and shoulder didn’t mean anything. The hand curled softly over my heart didn’t mean any more than the knees gouging sharply into my side.
My breath caught in my throat. My eyes stung. I tried to enjoy the warmth, and to let go of the hope.
Inevitably, I turned my thoughts to the list. It was less painful.
We needed to dress before we got cold. We needed food, and possibly fire. Both of those would probably require our wizard’s chests – would there be room to open them, here?
My poppets of Elana and Rennin were also in my wizard’s chest, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to extract them and attempt that divination until we were on the surface. So, then, we would need to figure out if we could climb up the chimney. Did one of us have a grappling hook, or would we need to try to shape the stone walls into handholds or stairs? Out from underground and poppets in hand, were Elana and Rennin still alive? Had they begun their descent? How far away from us were they? Would I be able to detect them if they were still on the Great Ice Wall, not yet fully in this world?
Had Aemillian sensed that I had returned to the mortal world? I was supposed to contact him as soon as possible upon my return. I didn’t want to. I felt like an open wound. He would sense it, and whatever he might guess would be both annoyingly wrong and dangerously close to the truth.
Khanaarre’s breath shifted. Her hand stirred against my chest. A soft murmur escaped her lips.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning.”
“You’re very warm.”
I chuckled.
“Am I?”
She paused.
“Yes,” she said. “Like when we met at the river. Are you overdrawn?”
I hesitated, drawing a deep breath and taking stock of myself and my body. Without question, I was an emotional wreck. Certainly, I was somewhat worse for wear after the hike and the fall, but …
“No,” I said slowly. “I don’t think so.”
The light inside me was steady and bright. It moved through me in time with my heartbeat. There was none of the dizziness or nausea or tremors that I had felt after the fight with the dragon, or after parting the Eastern Veil.
“But,” I went on, “I will be very careful today, just in case.”
“Good,” she said.
At no point in the conversation had she made any move to climb off of me. I was content with that.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Not my best,” she said. “Yesterday’s fallcatcher took more out of me than it should have. The wind made it impossible to do a tidy palm-cut, so I just … stabbed myself in the thigh. Sloppiest bloodletting I’ve ever done.”
“My sympathies,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said.
She sighed then.
“We should get out of here,” she said.
I sighed, too.
“We should.”
She had left our bags within easy reach, but our fresh clothes were in our wizards’ chests. It took some juggling and maneuvering and a great deal of close contact that would have been more enticing if it were not so awkward, but we were able to take turns extracting and expanding our chests to retrieve what we needed, then wriggling into our new clothes, all without ever quite getting all the way out from under the blankets.
We ate a hasty and cold breakfast, and then set about figuring out how to escape the hole I had put us in. Most of our climbing gear was with Elana and Rennin at the top of the Great Ice Wall, but Khanaarre, it seemed, did have a grapple and some rope. Unfortunately, we were neither of us able to throw it to the rim, some eighty feet above. We tried our hands at magically raising and setting the grapple, but it seemed that neither of us could maintain sufficient control of the hook after it left our sight.
Next, we spent hours wracking our brains for stone-shaping spells. Neither of us had studied the subject closely, but it had come up in my studies of magical metallurgy and in Khanaarre’s work with gemstones, and in conversations with the spirit of Liddarn’s mines. Unfortunately, possibly as a result of my sloppy spellwork yesterday, the stone of the chimney resisted our attempts at magical shaping.
“Well,” I said, when we stopped to make lunch. “I’ve long had some thoughts on magical flight, but I had hoped to test them under less dire circumstance.”
Khanaarre laughed.
“Let’s save that for tomorrow,” she said.
I agreed.
We could have pushed ourselves harder, of course, but there was no point. We were both still tired from yesterday’s exertions, and there was no chance of Elana and Rennin making the descent in less than a whole day. We had most of the food, but not to the same degree that they had most of the climbing gear: there had always been a risk that one of us might fall, even without Inladat’s intervention, and we had planned against the risk of losing those stores.
So we ate, and we rested. We sat in the sun for as long as we could. When the height of the day passed, though, and shadow fell on our little cavern, we moved back into the more confined space, where the heat from the fire we conjured would be more efficiently retained. We sat close together, and spoke little, spending the balance of the day in companionable silence.
“I have been struggling all day,” Khanaarre said as we began preparing dinner. “You haven’t said anything, but I know you must be hurting. To be cast out, and then … this…”
My banishment, she meant. And my execution. We had spoken of exile before – had it been on the road to the Wolfwood? Or had we not yet reached Liddarn? I was embarrassed to realize that I could not remember.
“It does hurt,” I said. “To know that I can never return. To know the pain and shame my mothers must feel. I …”
I took a moment to look inward. Khanaarre waited patiently.
“I don’t know that I have really taken the time to wrestle with it. One more home I can’t return to. One more wound to tend when this quest is complete.” I sighed. “As for what you were probably actually asking about … I suppose I should be angrier that they tried to kill me, but mostly I’m mad at myself for not anticipating it.”
Once we’d eaten, we chose a corner of the cavern and closed it off as best we could, insulating ourselves against the cold that would come when true night fell, without thousands of pounds of superheated rock to fend it off. We made a nest of bedrolls and blankets, and huddled close together to share and conserve warmth. The space was too amorphous, too open, for the spell that I had used to warm our rooms in the palace of Ingmatmar. The spell I’d used to keep Khanaarre warm between the desert wall and the bath house would do while I remained awake, but I made a mental note to perfect a spell to conjure lasting warmth without fire in the wild.
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