“No?” she repeated, a hiss through her teeth, barely a word.
Her eyes glinted; the joy was gone.
If he said no…
With a swiftness that explained how she had caught those creatures with her bare hands, she took his littlest finger within her own, and with a sudden crack, broke it and released him.
No one said no to Enyo.
As quickly as she had dealt him the punishment he deserved, she was heading back to the stream, back to her clothes.
Somewhere along the line, her thoughts got muddy and…
Blinking, Alphonse looked around.
How had she gotten here? Oh no.
Oh no! It had happened again.
A little shriek of dismay consumed her as she realized she was utterly nude. Completely bare for the world to see, in some field, her bare feet covered in dirt and bugs and… and… Alphonse spotted her clothes, dropped by the stream, and lunged for them, gasping and sobbing, desperate to redress. To hide her shame.
“Alphonse!”
With her underthings on and her shift as well, Alphonse paused in her dressing to look around. Someone was calling her name? Someone had seen her?
Recognizing the voice and holding her skirts and bodice to hide her modesty, Alphonse turned, looking for Etienne.
He was kneeling where the meadow met the forest, holding his arm to his chest, pain shrieking over his handsome features.
The healer gasped and started to run towards him. Towards safety.
Mother, she was so tired of weeping.
Still, tears streaked down her face as she came to his side, flinging one arm about him, crumbling to her knees. She didn’t have to ask to know that whatever she had done, it was bad. For him to look at her that way. For her to be naked in a field like some… someheathen.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!” She wept into his shirt, sobs wracking her body as she clung to his neck with a strength that was all her own.
“My finger,” he gasped, shoving her away and leaving her flabbergasted. All she wanted to do was cry into his shoulder and have him make it all better, and instead, he was treating her like a monster. “The shadow—she… It hurts, Alphonse. Fix it, please.”
Hurt coiled in her breast as she looked at the bent and malformed digit. He said the shadow had done that. It was folded in half, knucklesnearly touching the back of his hand, bone sticking through skin.
She had done that. No wonder he thought she was a monster.
Hastily Alphonse held out her hands. Gentle hands that had never, not once, been raised in violence. To think they had done something so gruesome to her friend. Her eyes overfilled with tears once more.
“I’m sorry.”
✶
Etienne sighed with relief, the tremors in his body slowly easing. He held up his hand. Turned it over. Moved his smallest finger.
He was whole again.
In front of him, Alphonse was weeping, apologies dripping from her lips like tears. Etienne didn’t answer. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
Instead, he leaned forward and wrapped an arm around her to pull her into his shoulder.
“I hate her,” he said, his words laced with venom. He didn’t think he’d ever said that about anyone before, but he meant it now. She was awful. Strange and cruel. “I will bind her back to wherever she came from even if I have to die doing it.”
“You promise?”
He nodded into her hair, suddenly exhausted, and murmured his answer just loud enough to be heard through her sobbing. “I promise.”
Chapter V
Fifth Moon, Full: Thloegr
Calamity was a constant pressing weight between Delyth’s wings. It was too long to be worn at the waist and so had to be strapped atop her leather jerkin and the grey wolf’s pelt she wore across her shoulders. She couldn’t feel the horrible hunger of the thing, protected as she was by a simple scabbard and the layers of fabric over her skin, but she knew it was there. It was as if the sword was heavy with malice, pulling her thoughts towards it again and again.
It’s call was heady and thrilling, but she’d proven already that she didn’t have to listen.
Instead, the halfbreed filled up her lungs with bright, mountain air and watched the landscape beneath her grow more flat and green with each passing hour. She had never flown so long, had never been so far from the village.
And it was rapturous.
The whole of Thloegr was spread out beneath her. There were no sounds but the rush of wind in her ears as she coasted on thermals, no people to crowd her, no small spaces to fit herself into. She could stretch and stretch, and there was no direction denied to her except homeward.
The first night, Delyth slept in a hollow at the base of an ancient pine, a blood rune inked in it’s bark to wake her if anything larger than a hare approached. Despite the chill of a spring night in the Brig’ian mountains, she slept easily, one flight-sore wing draped over her curled body.
But then, she had always been well suited to the cold.
Early the seventh morning, Delyth left the mountains behind, their forms no longer visible on the horizon. On the ground, it was a breezy spring day, perhaps windy enough to shake the trees and send hair whipping about her face, but in the air, she fought tooth and nail for every mile, the headwind batting her around as easily as a cat playing with its prey. It tore at her wings, sending her spiraling or spinning back, head over heels. She was nothing in its path, her strength minuscule.
The sword was another nuisance. She touched the hilt every few hours to check her direction, allowing its desire to be reunited with its mistress to guide her. The regular shots of its feral thirst for blood left her feeling drained and angry. She found herself doubting her own ability to complete this quest. If already the thing was such a burden, how long
