It was a truth too terrible to bear.
What was she doing here, in this mine, ready to kill monsters who were now more a part of her than the humans she wished to save?
“Whatareyou doing?” she whispered aloud, feeling small and broken, damaged beyond repair.
You’re spiraling, Greer. Your mind is running wild. An echo of Ailie’s voice rushed over her.Ground yourself in truths.
“I don’t want any of this to be true,” she admitted, running her tongue along the sharp edges of her new teeth. Ailie’s powers tugged at her limbs, trying to seize hold of her hands, turn her fingers to claws, ball them to fists. She could feel her mother’s power pulling at her, eager to make her move to its accord, as if she were a marionette on a string.
“You’re in the mines, north of Laird,” Greer mouthed to herself, fighting for control.
One truth.
“You put on Mama’s cloak.”
Another, even though she wished it weren’t.
“You’re doing this to save Ellis.” She paused, acknowledging the veracity of her words, but they weren’t enough. She needed something more, a truth bigger than just her and the man she loved. “You’re doing this to save Mistaken, to save the world, even if you’ve never seen it. Even if you don’t make it out of this alive, the world needs to.”
Greer breathed deeply, centering herself in the utter rightness of those words, of that love. She’d wrested herself away from the dark currents writhing beneath her skin, from the doubts, from the fears, from the horrors of what she’d become. She’d found the last true piece of herself and was going to hold on to it with all her might, for however long she lived.
She opened her eyes and ventured deeper into the mine.
44
The smell wasso much worse than Greer could have ever imagined.
The Gathered apparently dragged their kills into their roost to feast upon, letting the bloodless corpses remain wherever they fell. The shaft was littered with bones and body parts in a wild range of decomposition. The air did not stir here, not even with the smallest draft, and every smell was left to sit and fester.
Greer covered her nose with the back of her hand, breathing through her mouth, but that only left a dank film across her tongue that no amount of saliva could fix.
How could they live this way?
She tried picturing Finn here, tucked in a dark niche, teeth deep in the neck of a nearly lifeless buck, but couldn’t do it. He seemed part of the forest, belonging to the tree line and the airstreams. She wasn’t forgetting the creature beneath his human shell, but he didn’t seem likethiskind of monster.
“What do you mean, you lost her?”
Elowen’s voice ripped from the darkness, echoing off the walls and sounding closer than Greer had guessed. It was raspy and strained. Though Ellis’s attack hadn’t killed her, she was still gravely hurt. Her note of pain gave Greer hope.
Farther down the tunnel, she had to skirt around a hulking lump that looked too much like Hessel. His wrists were ragged with puncture marks and Greer looked away before she could catch sight of anything else. There would be time to mourn him later.
If she had a later.
The corridor was so steeply sloped that Greer had to run one hand along the chiseled wall for balance. The stone had been softened by dripping rainwater and snowmelt, and she wondered uneasily at the thousands of tons of it above her.
At the next junction, she stopped, smelling at the air to determine which split to take. Though carcasses littered both sides of the tunnels, the ones on the right seemed older, more bone than body. The left, then.
But before she could venture down it, Greer startled, pulling her hand back as if something had bitten her. She clutched the wounded palm to her chest, tears stinging at her eyes. She expected to feel blood, certain she’d torn open skin, but when she flexed her hand, there was nothing.
Studying the wall, she could find no obvious barb to have nicked her, no sharp jut of granite or toothy shale. But when she ran an experimental fingertip lightly over the stone, she jerked away, hissing as her skin burned.
Greer narrowed her eyes. A thin vein cut through the stone, running up the wall. It was a rich umber, far darker than the rest of the tunnel. Curiously, she pressed her finger directly onto the vein, then instantly withdrew it, bewildered at what could cause such pain.
When the answer came to her, Greer wanted to laugh.
It was a line of iron.
Sandry had been a mine for iron ore. Most of it must have been cleared out long before Ailie arrived and—exhausted from her travels and ill-prepared for the harsh winters of the new world—she’d settled her small court there, never realizing they were roosting on a spot so dangerous to them.
