Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

On the left

FARAH

The world comes back in pieces.

Cold ground first — the particular cold that belongs to earth rather than stone, pressing through the thin fabric of my dress with the patience of something that has all the time it needs. Then sound: boots on packed dirt, branches catching and releasing, the uneven rhythm of two people carrying a third who isn’t cooperating, though I don’t have enough left in me to make the lack of cooperation meaningful. Then pain, spreading outward from the center of my chest in slow arterial waves, and the magic — or what’s left of it — sitting heavy and wrong behind my sternum like a stone that doesn’t belong to my body.

I know the ritual didn’t complete.

I know this the way I know my own heartbeat, which is to say instinctively and without the need for evidence. Something stopped it. Something came through the tent wall like a natural disaster in human shape, covered in blood, eyes burning that particular shade of blue that I have apparently spent centuries learning to recognize without being aware I was memorizing it. Even half-conscious and unable to hold my own weight, even with Renata’s magic sitting in my blood like sediment, I had felt the bond flare hot the moment he crossed the threshold. Relief so acute it manifested as physical pain, because I had been so certain, in the hours before he came, that I had run out of time.

“She’s waking up,” says the man on my right. Younger voice. Frightened underneath the attempt at hardness that youth produces before it learns better methods of concealment.

“Then make sure she doesn’t,” says the other.

A hand closes over my jaw from the left, tilting my head back, and I feel the cold press of something against my throat. I go still — not out of compliance but out of the sudden absolute necessity of not moving. The knife is real and the hand holding it is steady enough, which tells me the fear hasn’t reached his hands yet.

“Good,” he says. “Keep being smart.”

I catalog what I have. My hands are bound in front of me with rope that has been treated with something — I can smell the ash and salt of a binding mixture even through everything else, and when I flex my fingers the magic in my blood responds sluggishly, like trying to move a limb that has fallen asleep. Not gone. Just impeded. A distinction that might matter eventually.

What I don’t have: the strength to use what I have. The residue of Renata’s ritual has left me hollowed out, a structure with the interior scooped clean, and whatever magical reserves I had walking into that camp were spent trying to resist the circle, trying to slow the working, trying to buy time for something that turned out to be Caspian Thorne moving through armed wolves like they weren’t there. My legs are functional but barely. My vision is doing something unreliable at the edges. The cold is working on me in ways I don’t have the resources to counteract.

Still. Catalog what you have.

The bond.

It’s there even now, even frayed down to something that feels like a single thread held under tension — I can feel him, not as emotion or information but as direction, the same way a compass feels north. He’s behind me and moving, closing distance with the specific quality of something that doesn’t know how to stop. I don’t know what state he’s in. I had felt the explosion through the bond like a fist, followed by a terrifying blankness that was probably unconsciousness, and then nothing for a measured stretch of time that I had spent trying not to understand as finality.

Then: the thread again, unmistakable. Moving.

I catalog this under what I have and hold onto it.

The tree cover thickens around us, the firelight of the camp fading behind, and the men carrying me shift their grip as the terrain starts to slope upward. They’re heading into the mountains — I remember Declan’s voice carrying through the collapsed tent, the single shouted order, fall back, into the mountains, and I understand now that this is not a rescue. I am not being evacuated. I am still the objective. Whatever Renata needs to complete the ritual, it travels with me, because I am apparently the instrument and the destination both.

I think about that for a moment. Then I think about the way Renata had looked at me before it all came apart, not with cruelty, which would have been easier to understand, but with the remote focus of someone solving a problem they have already decided is worth any cost.

The vessel doesn’t need to consent, she had said, at some point in the hours I spent inside the circle. It only needs to be present.

The knife at my throat is real. The ground is rising. The thread of the bond is getting warmer.

I start paying very close attention to the breathing of the man on my left.