It was time to give her a gift—her freedom.
And with a sob, he pulled his legs free of the harness, he leaned down over her neck.
'Good-bye, beloved, my light, my love,' he murmured to her. He squeezed his eyes tight; he couldn't look at the ground. But this was the only way. Better this, better lose life, than lose everything that made life worth having.
Let me wander as a hungry ghost. Better that, than a slave without her.
He took a long, last, deep breath.
Then he deliberately overbalanced, and let go.
It was horrible.
He screamed in utter terror as he fell, tumbling over and over in a macabre parody of an acrobat. The screaming just burst out of his mouth without any thought. He waited for the scream and the horror to end in a terrible blow, and blackness.
Something hard struck him in the stomach instead, knocking what was left of his breath out of him and ending his scream in a gasp. He slid face-down along something hard and smooth and hot—then impacted a second time, and felt a strong arm grab him around his waist.
And he screamed again, this time in thwarted rage and heartbreak, as he realized that Ari and Kashet had plucked him out of the sky, as they had saved Reaten. Only he didn't want to be saved, and they had rescued him only to haul him back to a wretched existence not worth the living!
He screamed and tried to fight, but he was lying in a difficult position, he could only strike at Kashet. Ari was three times his size and double his strength, and was not about to let him land a blow. He cursed the Jouster in every way he could think of, tears blinding him, as he changed his tactics and tried to squirm out of Ari's grip to resume the plunge to death that they had interrupted.
That was just about as successful as trying to fight them.
He felt Kashet sideslipping and losing height quickly; his stomach lurched with the renewed sense of falling, but he knew that this 'fall' would not end in blessed blackness, but in captivity, and he howled his anguish.
Avatre cried out above him—he'd never heard her cry before, it sounded like a hawk—and she followed them down, floundering wearily through the air, as Ari and Kashet brought him down to the earth. As they spiraled down into a little valley, he just gave up and went limp. He was crying, uncontrollably, sobbing with rage and thwarted hope, and the death of everything he had hoped for. He couldn't see, blinded by the tears as they landed, as Ari slid off first, then pulled him down to the ground—
—and held him while he wept.
He wanted to fight, but all the fight was out of him. There was nothing, literally nothing left but grief and hopelessness. He was all alone, and there was nothing left to him but a bleak future of pain and emptiness.
Or so he thought—until Ari took his shoulders and gave him a good hard shake, stopping his hysterical sobs for just an instant.
And that moment was all that Ari needed. 'Stop it!' the Jouster commanded into the hot silence. 'You don't really think I'm going to take you back, do you?'
For a moment, the words made no sense. Then when he did get the sense of them, he was so shocked that all he could do was stare, eyes still streaming, throat still choked on a sob.
'I have no intention of bringing you back,' Ari repeated, wearily. 'Especially not after seeing you try and kill yourself to keep from being caught. I may be a monster, but at least I'm not that sort of monster.'
He might have said more, but just then Avatre came charging toward them, knocking Ari aside with her head, and clumsily putting herself between the Jouster and Vetch, hissing defiance. Ari put up both his hands, placatingly, but laughing all the same, as Vetch instinctively threw his arms around her neck.
'There. How can I possibly take you back? She'd only come and carry you off again, and probably tear the rest of us to shreds doing it!' he chuckled.
Vetch held his arms tight around her neck, to steady himself as well as to keep her from some clumsy attempt to attack Ari. He still couldn't believe what he'd just heard.
He's not taking us back? How can he not take us back? Isn't it his duty?
