Page 48 of In Darkness Forged
But Tal had been running for only a few short minutes when he saw Cuan up ahead, sniffing the ground and going in circles, his ears flattened in confusion. When he spotted Tal, the dreadwolf whined and sat down as if to say, “Your turn.”
Had she come this far only for something to drag her off?
Tal studiously ignored the fear that mounted as he searched the ground for any sign of a struggle. Nothing was disturbed, and there was no blood…
Except for a few dark smears on a rock. They were small, as if from a minor injury—something she could easily have sustained just by climbing the hill. It didn’t mean she was mortally wounded.
Cuan yelped, a sharp, worried sound, but Tal refused to acknowledge it. The human was here somewhere. He would have heard her screams if something had hurt her.
But in spite of his resolve not to believe the worst, his breath still caught in his lungs. His pulse began to race, and a half-remembered pain seemed to cut him from the inside out.
No. He would not allow himself to suffer that way again. He did not care enough about what happened to the human to feel that kind of pain, so he would look until he found her, and then they would go on their way.
But she simply wasn’t there. Tal made a circle around where Cuan stopped, and there was no indication she’d gone further up the mountain, either willingly or unwillingly. If something had taken her, Cuan would have been able to follow its trail.
As he surveyed the mountainside yet again, worry took root in Tal’s chest, a sickening ache that he could not seem to quell with mere reason or by telling it he didn’t care.
Suddenly Cuan’s ears pricked, and his head turned to the side. He leaped up and buried his nose in the dirt behind a rocky outcropping, whining frantically and scrabbling with his paws.
Tal raced to his side and looked down, finally spotting a narrow crack in the ground that gave way to dark, empty air.
It was a fissure leading deep beneath the mountain. An entrance to the Darkspring, perhaps? Had Aislin entered it in an attempt to hide? Or worse, had she fallen?
There was no way to know just how deep that fissure ran.
Tal looked around until he found a gnarled bush, hacked off a stout limb, and trimmed the leaves. His magic was depleted, but not so much that he couldn’t set the branch on fire with a moment’s thought. When it burned bright and hot, Tal leaned over the opening and dropped it in, tracing the light as it fell, bounced off something in the dark, and then rolled. So far down. The bright spark of light grew tinier and tinier until it finally rolled out of sight or went out.
If she had fallen in…
Cuan seemed convinced that Aislin was down there somewhere. He barked, and the sound reverberated into the crevice, echoing back without an answer. She would have heard him if she were conscious. If she’d survived the fall.
Tal couldn’t afford to involve himself any further. He’d warned her of the danger, and she’d chosen to accompany him anyway. He still had a goal—a prize that would not wait—and the human had been nothing but a distraction.
And yet… and yet…
Just as it had with the renders, the wall around his heart cracked and taunted him with a reminder that it was not yet fully extinguished. Not yet composed solely of ice and stone. Lani’s ghost still haunted him, and she refused to let him walk away.
Except this time, it wasn’t Lani’s torn and broken form his mind showed him. Instead of white hair and silver skin, the hair was dark, and the torn flesh was lightly tanned. The shreds of clothing were of human make, and a hatchet lay beside her limp hand…
Cursing his weakness, Tal straightened and took his bearings. He needed to find another way into that cave. If Aislin had fallen, she would likely be unable to move. Unable to protect herself. Tal could not fit through that crack, and even if he could, the unpredictable drop might leave him in no better shape than she was.
Of the entrances he was familiar with, only one was unlikely to be used by anyone else seeking the aranthas’ nest. It was farther away from his eventual goal, but it might leave him closer to where Aislin had fallen. And afterward…
He would deal with the consequences of his own foolishness after he’d found her. After he knew she was safe.
Cuan seemed just as anxious as Tal, and once he was mounted, they raced across the mountainside at a pace that should probably have terrified him. Their path took them over a ridge and back beneath the trees, which slowed their pace to a trot. Tal’s heart pounded insistently with every delay, reminding him that the human might already be dead.
But if she was not, she would be injured and alone in the dark, with no food, no water, and no way of knowing which way to go. She probably believed he would leave her and go on. It was what heshouldhave done. But one thought of her in terror and pain left him almost breathless, and then annoyed with himself for his own weakness.
It was nearly day when they reached the hole in the mountain—a small patch of darkness at the base of a cliff. It was shaded by trees that grew all the way up to the foot of the overhanging stone, and the air that came out of it was slightly warm compared to the morning chill.
Tal dismounted and paused only to take Cuan’s face between his hands, pressing his forehead to the spot between the dreadwolf’s eyes. “I will do everything in my power to come back,” he said softly. “Never doubt that, my friend. But if I do not, you must go. Live. Return home if you can.”
Cuan growled and pressed closer. His lupine way of saying, “No.” Dreadwolves did not break bonds easily, and after he’d already waited so long, Tal knew it would take a great deal for him to abandon his post now.
No, Cuan would likely stay until he died. For all that he was a wolf, his heart did not acknowledge the boundaries of time, and it was a weight Tal knew he would carry with him into the cave.
But Cuan could care for himself for now, and Aislin…