Chapter 62. Nobody Took My Hand, and That Was Exactly How It Should Have Been

Chapter 62: 62. Nobody Took My Hand, and That Was Exactly How It Should Have Been

I looked at the number in the corner of my eye, because I couldn’t help it.

[Lust Energy: 49/100]

[Passive Decay: doubled.]

[Condition: Injured.]

I sat down in the snow. My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t have drawn my sword if I’d tried, and there... I saw Bryn, ten feet away, glance at them and then look quickly away.

When the fighting was over, we opened the cages.

There were nine of them, all villagers from the northern settlements, all Wolfkin except for one small, shivering fox.

They were thin, bruised, and dazed, huddled together on the cold iron floor like a litter of frightened puppies.

When the door swung open, none of them moved.

I stood in front of the first cage for a long time.

I couldn’t help it. All I could see was another cage, in another market, with a small white shape curled in the corner.

I remembered how she’d flinched when I came near and... how long it had taken her to take my hand.

I didn’t say a word. I opened the door, stepped back, and held out my hand, palm up, the way I had a hundred times before.

I didn’t reach for them. And I didn’t tell them it was all right.

I just waited.

A young girl with a bandaged arm was the first to uncurl. She looked at my hand and then at my face, and then, slowly, she pushed him upright without taking it.

A woman followed him, and another.

One by one, they stood and filed out of the cage on their own feet, and not one of them took my hand, and that was exactly how it should have been.

The last one out was a thin girl who might have been sixteen, with big dark eyes. She hesitated at the edge of the cage and looked at the ground.

Then she looked at me and said, very quietly, "Thank you..."

I couldn’t speak. I just nodded.

The crates held what we’d expected, and it was worse than we’d imagined.

Elsbeth pried the lid off the first one with the pommel of her sword.

Inside, nestled in straw, were dozens of small gold shards, each one the size of a thumbnail, glittering in the lantern light.

A second crate held more. And there’s a third that held more still.

And even fucking worse! I counted a hundred, and then I stopped counting.

"Oathglass," Elsbeth said, in a very quiet voice. "Unplanted..."

"So nobody’s wearing these yet...?"

"Not yet." She stood up.

Her expression was frozen. "These are meant for the next raid."

Sylvara arrived from the ridge a few minutes later, her violet robes hitched up and her hat crooked, with Bonette trailing behind her.

She picked up a single fragment between two fingers and held it to the light, and I watched her eyes go sharp and distant.

"I want one box," she said. "For study... The rest should be destroyed."

Elsbeth didn’t argue. She laid her palm against the crate and let the cold pour out of her, and a thick, white frost ran across the golden shards.

Then she raised her sword and brought the pommel down, and the whole chest cracked and crumbled into a glittering powder.

She did it again, and again, until all the other crates were nothing but dust.

It took twenty minutes, and when she finished... she was swaying a little on her feet. I handed her a canteen, and she drank without a word.

"What about Corra?" Bryn asked.

We all looked at the lynxkin lying in the snow. Her chest rose and fell evenly, and her face was peaceful, almost angelic.

The gold crystal at her throat caught the firelight.

"We cannot leave her," Velora said. "She would wake and report our position."

"And we also cannot kill her," I said.

"I am aware of that."

"Then we take her with us."

"What...?" Velora gave me a long, flat look. "A prisoner who may turn on us at any moment?!"

"She’s not a Wolfkin," Bryn said suddenly.

We all turned to Bryn, and she continued. "Her blood does not carry the scent..."

"She cannot open the wardstone, even if she wants to... And she will know things."

"About the Chain... and about the Auctioneer." She hesitated. "I can make a draught to keep her asleep."

Velora’s jaw tightened.

For a moment, I thought she would refuse. Then she exhaled slowly through her nose.

"Fine," she said. "But she is bound hand and foot, and she is your responsibility, got that?"

"Understood, Commander," Bryn said.

While Bryn mixed her draught, Sylvara went through the wagon, and she came out holding a sheaf of papers, grim-faced.

She handed them to Velora without a word. She read them in the firelight, and her face went still.

"They gather beneath the walls of Hearthfang," she said. "All of them..."

"They plan to attack at first light tomorrow."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"It is in the orders." She tapped the paper. "And the prisoner will confirm."

As if on cue, Corra stirred in the snow. Her eyes were closed, but her lips moved, and she spoke in a slurred, dreamy murmur, almost like a woman talking in her sleep.

"Master will see the moon at first light."

A cold wind blew across the ford.

We dealt with the survivors as best we could. About a dozen guards were still alive, tied up with their own ropes and propped against the wheels of the wagons.

They glared at us with a sullen, helpless fury.

Goddammit... I wanted to kill them... I really did.

It would have been the safest option, and Velora’s expression told me she was thinking the same thing.

But they’d surrendered. And I’d promised myself, a long time ago, that I’d never again take a life that was already lowered.

"We’ll tie them and leave them," I said. "And we’ll make it look like we went east."

"They will talk about that," Velora said.

"They’ll say we went east... if we give them something to say."

Elsbeth, who understood faster than anyone, knelt in the snow and began pressing tracks into the frozen ground, a trail of boot prints and hoofprints that led away from the ford toward a distant line of hills.

She worked quickly, laying a thin crust of ice over the real tracks to hide them. When she finished, it looked like a perfectly ordinary trail, and it pointed in exactly the wrong direction.

Velora watched her work, and a slow, reluctant look of approval crossed her face.

"It will buy us half a day," she said.

"It will have to..."

We loaded Corra, tied hand and foot and deeply asleep, onto a spare horse, and we crossed the river in the failing light.

...

The Wolfsbane Gate was a wolf made of stone.

It had taken me a long time to see it, even when Bryn pointed it out.

The cliff face was split by a narrow, vertical crack, and set in the rock behind a fall of boulders was a massive slab, carved into the shape of a seated wolf with its head raised to the sky.

The edges of the carving blended perfectly with the rock around it. If I hadn’t known it was there... I could have walked past it a thousand times.

Elsbeth and Bryn stepped up to it together.

They both drew small knives and made a shallow cut across their palms, and then, without a word, they pressed their bloody hands against the stone wolf’s chest.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then I felt a deep vibration beneath my feet... a long, low groan like a door opening in the bottom of the world.

The slab shuddered, and a seam of darkness opened down the middle of it... wider and wider, until a tunnel gaped in front of us, dark as a throat.

"Welcome home," Bryn said softly, and her voice cracked.

The nine villagers followed us in, along with the rest of our party.

Millie, Bonette, and Sylvara came through last, and I felt a wave of relief wash over me when I saw them.

Millie’s face was pale, but she was walking steadily, and when she saw me, she almost smiled.

"I promised, didn’t I?" I said.

Millie laughed and then gave me a really tight hug.