SEED
CHAPTERONE
This is a stupid way to die.
My final thought as I plunged to my death.
A split-second later, my arm nearly dislocated. Hard fingers grasped my hand and held, stopping my descent with a bone-rattling yank. I yelped.
Or, not.At least, not yet.
“You’re all right,” Lorcan called down from directly above me. My body twisted as I clutched his forearm. The torque broke my weakened grip. Sweat sent me slipping out of Lorcan’s grasp with a panicked screech.
Another hard stop, this one marked by the bite of rope into my hips and thighs. Right. The makeshift harness Lorcan insisted I wear. He grunted and shifted as he took my weight. I landed hard against the steeply sloped Plateau and bounced off rock and dirt. Blood dripped from scratches on my forehead, shoulder, and knee, but I wasn’t dead. I’ll take it.
“I said, you’re all right,” he called out.
“How?” I demanded, plaintively.
How did he stay on that narrow path, with my weight falling upon him?
How are we not both dead?
Gravel rained down on my head. I squeezed my eyes closed, the better not to see the steep slope of the Plateau descending dizzily hundreds of meters below my dangling boots.
“Use your feet to brace yourself.”
I detected a note of strain beneath his deliberate calm. Lorcan has a level head. My heart cracked, remembering the night we lay together in my study and Bashir tried the door, presumably to search for information about Auralia’s war preparations.
It took me several tries, with my body failing to cooperate, until I got my boot soles planted, knees bent. There’s a long, nearly vertical slope down with nothing but roots from long-dead trees and odd boulders embedded in the sheer face, to catch us if we fall.
“Can you climb?” he asked.
I tried, with an inelegant grunt. Arms burning, my hands claws of desperate strength, I kicked and scrambled up the surface. Lorcan had managed to loop the rope holding me around a protruding rock, and he used it to haul me up, centimeter by hard-won centimeter. His entire body leaned out almost perpendicular to the Plateau.
What did I notice? Was it the breeze kicking dust into my face? The terrifying splendor of dangling from a thread between earth and sky? The way my heart hammered as though to break right through my ribcage?
No. It was Lorcan’s straining muscles, crisscrossed with the evidence of a life lived in violence. It was the intensity in his blue eyes and the way the wind ruffled his light brown, sun-bleached hair. The precise slant of his nose between sharp cheekbones.
The familiar thin white scar was still there, barely visible beneath a smudge of dirt. One small thing remains unchanged. Familiar.Hello, my friend.
Our gazes clashed and locked for the briefest moment. Then I grasped the rock and found my footing on the trail again, panting against the dirt.
“Are you okay?” he asked, breathing hard. Sweat gathered in the hollow of his throat, that place I liked to run my fingers over for comfort. Touching him there used to make me feel so safe. If he could relax, so could I.
Never again. Not knowing what I know now.
“I think so,” I gasped, almost burying my face in the sun-warmed earth, shaking from head to toe. I clutched a root and held on, trembling.
“Pivot your feet like this.” Lorcan brought himself back to a normal standing position and demonstrated, placing one boot before the other. “That way you won’t be on your toes all the time. Use the inset stepping stones and avoid the dirt sections in between. It’s unstable.”
He’s told me this several times already, but I keep forgetting. It’s hard to walk sideways. It’s hard to creep uphill on the balls of your feet. It would be hard for a woman who wasn’t half-dead from starvation, like I am.
“We’re close, Princess. Can you make it?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t entirely sure. I had no other choice but to press on. Having started this mission of dubious importance, there was no way but forward now.
By the time we reached the top of the Plateau, I ached from neck to ankle and had a headache to boot. We made it, rolling over the top onto the grass. In a final indignity, my pack slapped the back of my head.
