I took a step back, a sudden flame of anger churning in my mouth. “Do not coddle me.”
“I’m not,” he said. “There’s no way through, Leihani. It snows year-round at the top of these mountains. Even if the Rivean army digs the pass out, it could easily become blocked again—but it hardly matters. I’m not smuggling you past an entire Rivean Army. And on top of that, you were stabbed and flayed two days ago.”
“I’m healed,” I spat, though my words didn’t burn with venom the way I’d meant them to. They’d evaporated instead, smoke and ash and empty air pulled from my lungs, and suddenly I was back inside, fighting for breath. Wooden walls fully erected around me, closing, closing, closing. Squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. Somewhere beyond the inn, the sea banged its fist against a ship’s stern, throttling my thoughts.
“I cant—I haven’t come all this way for you to die in the mountains.” Kye sighed. “If I have to tie you up to haul you onto a ship, I will.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “You wouldnot.”
His eyes darted to the length of rope that hung over Sero’s side, wound in a loose coil.
He would.
My fingertips itched. I flicked them, feeling liquid drip from the tips.
He stepped toward me, and I opened my mouth on instinct, readying a song. But I couldn’t—not with him. I couldn’t steal life from his eyes, couldn’t turn him into a mindless husk, even if he threatened me with a length of rope. Even if he dragged me to the smallest cabin in the deepest corner of the bowels of a ship.
“Breathe,” he said, the stupidMihauna-damned idiot. Didn’t he realize that was all I was trying to do? That if there was a reason I couldn’t, it stood only a few feet away, tall as a tree and just as brainlessly thick? He took another step toward me, and I felt my body shift in the opposite direction.
My thoughts remained standing there, vapid and breathless at the garden’s entrance, the quilt fluttering to the ground.
But my feet shot away.
Through the line of trees, into swaying leaves and crunchy moss, the shadows of the forest swallowing every panicked step.
36
Maren
Somewhere behind me, Kye swore.
He called my name as I turned and fled through dry shrubs and parched wildflowers. Up a small hill and through a thatch of birch and ash wood, over roots and rock. My lungs burned with the chill of the evening, my breath a fog that swept translucent and white over my face.
It took less time than I expected for him to catch up, but suddenly I heard him, crashing through the forest hills behind me. His steps came quick and hard, pounding the cold ground, and I knew that while in the sea I could outstrip him ten times over, I’d never beat him on land.
“Stop,” he shouted, his voice radiating with surprise.
I took a sharp curve and heard him scramble as he changed direction to follow. Under a green limb and over a log, I was forced to slow and felt him draw close. Instinct warned me not to glance back, but he’d come close enough that his boots crunched leaves in my ears. Fingers swiped across my back, knotting in the folds of the loose shirt I wore, and I was yanked to the side.
Trajectory impeded, my feet lost their grip over a bed of half-rotten bark, and I went down hard enough to snap my teeth together. Kye swore again. His weight dropped beside me, hands reaching for my own. My body became a tangle of legs and kicking feet, shoving him off and away, and he wrapped one leg over my pelvis, immobilizing my bucking hips, his hands fixing mine to solid ground. I gazed up at him through disheveled hair, cast wildly over my eyes and mouth, bark and leaf caught throughout the strands.
He panted into my face, his diaphragm expanding and constricting against mine. His heart pounded, a beat off from my own. His pulse throbbed through the grip of his hands.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I’m sorry. The rope was the wrong thing to mention—”
I wriggled violently under his weight. “Get off.”
“I would never actually—”
Pinned to the forest floor, struggling to fill my lungs, I somehow dug deep enough within myself to muster enough air to scream in his face.
His jaw clenched, chest slowing as he caught his breath more elegantly than I. But he waited, patient for me to run out of steam, golden eyes calm and stoic. The world around us bloomed with the scent of melded iron ore, though from which one of us, I didn’t know. My body emptied the last of its reserves, energy and volume alike, and he unmasked his teeth in something between danger and a smile. “Promise me you won’t run like that again.”
I glared up at him. “No.”
Fingers twitched against mine. “Promise me.”
“No.”
