“Well, and part of Sammael,” she corrected. She looked very serious, an expression that sat naturally on her solemn face, suiting her haunted eyes and the downward turn of her mouth. A flicker in her cheek stood out, however, hinting at amusement. Jadren focused his eyes on that shadowy divot. Surely that wasn’t a dimple? Because that would mean she was laughing at him.
“It will take days to walk all the way to House Phel,” he pointed out.
Selly nodded, poked with her stick. “If we make it at all.”
“Excuse me?”
“There are a lot of hazards between here and there,” she explained, sounding as if she were discussing planning a party. “And those are of the natural variety. There also could be more hunters after us or other members of House Sammael chasing behind. They’ll catch you and me before they reach Nic and Gabriel. I thought that’s part of what it meant to be rear guard. You know—Nic and Gabriel don’t have to be faster than their pursuers, just faster than we are.”
“I thought it only meant for that one battle,” Jadren griped, hating that she was right. He didn’t really fancy sacrificing himself. It would ruin his image. Of course, it would also thwart his mother, which was a nice perk right there. “Phel will come looking for us, though—or send people to rescue us. Otherwise he’ll be answering to my maman, which won’t be pretty.” That’s all he needed: his maman to drag him back by the ear to the nightmare of life in House El-Adrel. “Plus, he cares about you.”
She smiled, thin and mirthlessly. “That’s assuming they make it back safely, and that House Sammael doesn’t succeed in destroying them.”
“You’re a regular ray of fucking sunshine, aren’t you?” he growled.
“You don’t strike me as the kind of person who engages in self-deception,” she observed, watching him. “Would you prefer I kiss your pristine high-house ass and promise you all will turn up raspberries?”
“Roses,” he said, after staring at her for a long moment of sheer consternation. “Everything turning up roses is the optimistic metaphor you’re looking for there, you half-feral swamp creature. Raspberries is something else entirely.”
“I like raspberries,” she replied. “They’re juicy and just the right balance between tart and sweet. They also grow in thick clusters, so when I was living in the wild, coming across laden raspberry bushes was one of the best things I could hope for.”
“The charm of having very low expectations.” It rankled at him that she’d celebrated something as trivial as finding wild fruit. If Selly had been born to a proper house, she’d have been dressed in Ophiel silk gowns and feted for her powerful magic. At least, she would’ve been until she manifested as familiar instead of wizard, at which point she’d likely have been slated for the Betrothal Trials. But even that life would have been better than what she’d suffered in this backwater realm.
Or would it? a sly voice whispered in the back of his mind. You suffered enough that a few simple joys might have been precious to you, too.
Maybe, he snapped at himself, but I never had any to know, did I?
“Since we’re giving up on making the barge departure,” he said loudly enough to drown out further comments from that insidious voice, “let’s have something to eat and lighten these packs. I need to rest my feet anyway.” He reached for his boot.
“Jadren.” An intent expression darkened Selly’s already solemn face. “Don’t move.”
“I’m not planning to. I’m going to take a good long rest. These boots were not made for walking,” he noted grumpily.
“I mean it,” her voice whipped out. “Freeze.”
He wasn’t in the habit of taking orders, particularly not from familiars from lesser houses, but something made him obey. Perhaps it was the sharpness of her gaze, none of that bleary insanity in it. Only the focused intensity of a predator. The back of his neck prickled. “What?”
“Do you trust me?” she asked very softly, moving with slow smoothness to pull an arrow from her quiver and raise her bow.
He snorted with emphatic derision, long discipline allowing him to do so without moving. “Absolutely not.”
A slight smile twitched her pressed lips. “Wise.” Before he could retort, she’d drawn and released the bow. The arrow thudded into the tree behind him so close it grazed his cheek. A bright sting and a trickle of blood indicated it had more than grazed him. “Got it,” Selly said in quiet satisfaction.
Arrested, both by her unexpected ferocity and sheer terror at whatever had prompted her to do such a thing, he stared at her, unwilling to twitch even to wipe the blood away. “Can I move now?”
Her gaze fixed on that point just past his cheek, then roved over the tree. After what felt like an excruciatingly long period of evaluation, she finally nodded. Good thing, too, as something both heavy and oddly sleek fell onto his shoulder, continuing to drape in boneless folds down his arm. He risked a look at it, then shrieked, rolling himself away from the thing. A loop of the shining coils clung to his arm and he shoved at it in atavistic revulsion, wanting only to get it off of him.
“What is that thing?” he demanded, his voice entirely too high-pitched still, but he was almost too panicked to care.
Selly raised one brow, entirely too calm. “Snake.”
“I know it’s a snake,” he ground out, staring in horror at the yards of coils draped over the ground, an arrow pinning the head of the thing to the tree he’d been sitting against, blood trickling down the bark in a thick stream. Remembering, he swiped at his own cheek, the laceration—though it would heal quickly—in the exact spot where his mother had implanted one of her devices, far more painfully. His fingers came away bloody, the sight of it turning his stomach and evoking memories best left buried in the depths of the tortured past.
It was too late, however, to suppress all of them. He hurled himself at the shrubs bordering the road, vomiting up bitter bile.
The gut-deep wrenching held him prisoner for several more minutes, insisting with cruel thoroughness on emptying everything possible from an already vacant stomach. Finally, when it seemed as if he’d retch up his hated boots next, the spasms relented. Shaking with the viciousness of the attack and the humiliation of having to face Selly, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, remembering too late about the blood on it.
Just charming.
