'Herald Jors, when I give you the word, have your Companion pull gently but firmly on the rope until I tell you to stop. I can't move the rest of this off of you so I'm going to have to move you out from under it.'
Jors nodded, realized how stupid that was, and said, 'I understand.'
Ari pushed her thumbs under the edge of a rock and took a deep breath. 'Now.'
The rock shifted, but so did the Herald.
'Stop.' She changed her grip. 'Now.' A stone fell. She blocked it with her shoulder. 'Stop.'
Inch by inch, teeth clenched against the pain of returning circulation, Jors moved up the slope, clinging desperately to the rope.
'Stop.'
'I'm out.'
'I know. Now, listen carefully because this is important. On my way in, I tried to lay the rope so it wouldn't snag, but your Companion will have to drag you clear without stopping — one long smooth motion, no matter what.'
'No matter what?' Jors repeated, twisting to peer over his shoulder, the instinctive desire to see her face winning out over the reality. The loose slope he was lying on shifted.
'Hold still!' Ari snapped. 'Do you want to bury yourself again?'
Jors froze. 'What's going to happen, Ari?'
Behind him, in the darkness, he heard her sigh. 'Do you know what a keystone is, Herald?'
'It's the stone that takes the weight of the other stones and holds up the arch.'
'Essentially. The rock that fell on your legs fell in such a way as to make it the keystone for this cavern we're in.'
'But you didn't move the rock.'
'No, but I did move your legs, and they were part of it.'
'Then what's supporting the keystone?' He knew before she answered.
'I am.'
'No.'
'No
'No. I won't let you sacrifice your life for mine.'
'Yet Heralds are often called upon to give then- lives for others.'
'That's different.'
'Why?' Her voice cracked out of the darkness like a whip. 'You're allowed to be noble, but the rest of us aren't? You're so good and pure and perfect and Chosen and the rest of us don't even have lives worth throwing away? Don't you see how stupid that is? Your life is worth infinitely more than mine!' She stopped and caught her breath on the edge of a sob. 'There should never have been a mine here. Do you know why I dug it? To prove I was as good as all those others who were Chosen when I wasn't. I was smarter. I wanted it as much. Why not me? And do you know what my pride did, Herald? It killed seventeen people when the mine collapsed. And then my cowardice killed my brother and an uncle and a woman barely out of girlhood because I was afraid to die. My life wasn't worth all those lives. Let my death be worth your life at least.'
He braced himself against her pain. 'I can't let you die for me.'
'And yet if our positions were reversed, you'd expect me to let you die for me.' She ground the words out through the shards of broken bones, of broken dreams. 'Heralds die for what they believe in all the time. Why can't I?'
'You've got it wrong, Ari,' he told her quietly. 'Heralds die, I won't deny that. And we all know we may have to sacrifice ourselves someday for the greater good. But we don't
