Bound (Bound Trilogy) (40 page)

Or maybe he knows all of mine, after all,
I thought. He’d been prepared for my eagle form. I cursed myself for underestimating him again. No, he would be back sooner or later, and I didn’t have the strength to protect us. I couldn’t stand, let alone carry or even drag Rowan anywhere. Some connection between my mind and my body had been broken when they were separated. All I could do was try to keep her warm and hope that both of our conditions were temporary—and that she’d done enough damage to Severn to keep him away for a while.

I tried to imagine all of the magic I had ever used coming out of me at once, and thought it might have looked something like what had just happened. I didn’t doubt that the binding had been broken, but there was no magic in her that I could feel, and when I tried to reach out to her mind there was nothing. It wasn’t like before, when she’d been there but inaccessible. Now she was completely absent, her body an empty shell. She wasn’t sleeping, not dreaming, not drifting nearby. As long as her body was alive, though, it was possible that she could be brought back.

I’d exhausted my own supply of magic in finishing my transformation, and anything that came to me went straight to healing my body. But that didn’t leave me completely helpless. I curled my body around hers, laid my mending arm over her waist, and wrapped my cloak around both of us. Still the cold night air pressed in around us, greedy, stealing every bit of warmth.

My people know a number of deities, the great unnamed Goddess and a seemingly limitless pantheon of lesser gods. They’d shown little concern for me over the course of my life, and for the most part I’d done them the same courtesy. Now, though, I closed my eyes, and I begged.

Get us through this night. Let me get her to safety. Keep Severn away, and I’ll do anything. I’ll change. If you demand it, I’ll go back and face whatever I now owe to my family. Just let her come back, let her live.
I didn’t even know who I was praying to, only that I needed to hold onto those thoughts to keep me from going mad.

No sense of peace or assurance washed over me, only exhaustion that threatened to pull me away. I would have to rest, and try to get Rowan away in the morning. I dozed a few times, but my sleep was fitful and interrupted by noises and disturbing dreams. By the time the sky began to fade to gray, and the stars disappeared, I could control my body better, but still lacked the strength to carry Rowan.

As I saw it, there were three options. One was to change again, fly as quickly as I could, and try to bring someone back to the clearing to help. That was no good. It would be too much of a risk to try another transformation before my magic and my body recovered fully. Or I could try to get Rowan back to the caves. But the fairies would be gone, and we’d be lost.

The last option was to follow through on my original plan to take her to Belleisle, and leave her there in the hopes that Ernis Albion and his wife would take care of her.

My chest tightened. The thought of leaving her there had been wrenching enough before, when she would have been able to take care of herself. She’d have hated me for lying to get her there, but she was resilient and clever. She would have moved on. She was far stronger than she realized.

Was.

Now she was helpless, at least until she woke, and leaving her with strangers seemed unthinkable. But there was nothing else I could do, and the longer I waited the more likely it was I would lose her completely. It was time to go.

As I searched the clearing for anything that might be of use to us, I found that the destruction was more shocking than it had seemed in the dark. Not only were there piles of clothing scattered about (from which I picked the warmest and cleanest items I could find, as well as a few weapons), but branches had fallen from trees, and in a space just outside of the fire circle I found bridles, saddles, and assorted horse gear in jumbled piles. It would break Rowan’s heart if she ever found out she’d done that.

Something crashed in the trees behind me, and I lurched back toward Rowan. A black horse appeared, wide eyed and snorting. His reins had become tangled in a branch, and it dragged behind, frightening him.

“Shh, it’s all right,” I murmured. He shuffled sideways, and I followed. He pulled back, and I stayed close. We continued the dance for a few minutes, until he allowed me to remove the branch.

I scratched behind one of his ears. He had thick legs, a wide face, ridiculous mule-ears, and his left flank was covered in ugly scars. In that moment, though, he was the finest horse I’d ever seen.

“Never in my life have I been so happy to see an animal,” I told him.

Getting Rowan onto the horse was awkward. I nearly dropped her once, and something fell from one of the big pockets on her pants. I set her gently on the ground again and picked it up. It was the dragon scale she’d taken from Ruby and kept with her all this time, nearly unrecognizable now that its hard surface was cracked in a dozen places. A few pieces snapped off when I touched it. I gathered up the pieces and tucked them back in Rowan’s pocket.

It was a strange way to ride, trying to hold Rowan, wondering if she could feel anything and whether I should be worried for her comfort, stopping occasionally to make sure she was still breathing.

The air grew misty as dawn approached. We reached a place where the river moved more quickly, gaining momentum as it neared its end. It plunged over a cliff and into the ocean in a great waterfall.

We followed the coast along the edge of the cliff until an island emerged from the fog, and then a bridge. I’d never seen the bridge before, and now understood why Belleisle was so often described as being nearly inaccessible. Sheer gray cliffs defined the strait on both sides. A long, arching bridge seemed to grow directly from the land, tapering toward the middle into an invisible junction. The curve was high and steep, the wind and waves hard. I turned the horse back toward the forest and kept riding south.

The rest of the ride seemed impossibly long when I thought about the need to get Rowan to safety, and terribly short when I thought about what would happen when we arrived. In truth, it took perhaps twenty minutes to reach the bridge that had seemed so distant in the haze. It looked even more treacherous from where we stood at the point where the solid stone structure melded into the mainland. There were no hand-holds or railings to offer support or protect from the elements, and the smooth stone arch seemed to narrow toward the middle, making every step more dangerous than the one before.

I left the black gelding at the edge of the forest and carried Rowan onto the bridge, holding her close, supporting her with my arms under her knees and shoulders. She felt so much heavier than she had when she was awake and aware and full of life. My muscles began to ache as we started across the bridge, and the place where my left arm had broken the night before felt the strain in a sharp line of pain. But I kept walking. The wind whipped our hair and clothing, and high waves crashed far below.

No more hesitation
, I told myself.
You owe her this
.

A man started toward us from the island side of the bridge, an unburdened mirror of my own journey. We would meet in the middle, and I supposed that was the closest I’d ever come to seeing the mysterious land of Belleisle.

Apprehension clawed at my stomach, and I wanted to turn back. Crossing the bridge might have been the best thing for Rowan, but it felt like I was abandoning her to an unknown fate, and each step I took was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. I reminded myself that part of the reason we so despised the people of Belleisle was that they were weak—kind and compassionate. That could only help Rowan now.

The man who met us wasn’t Albion. He was my age or slightly younger, blond and strong and capable-looking. I hated him immediately.

We met in the middle. He slowly removed his gloves and folded his arms across his chest while mine shook with the weight I carried.

“You know why we’re here?” I asked, my voice not nearly as strong as I’d have liked it.

“We do,” the stranger said, sounding as though “we” encompassed all of the people who really mattered. “My father received a letter from the merfolk yesterday, and we’ve been expecting you. Expecting her, I should say. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that you won’t be going any farther.”

My jaw tightened. “I thought as much.”

The man held out his arms, and after a moment’s hesitation in which I almost dropped her, I let him take Rowan. By then my muscles were so tight that I could barely straighten them, but I’d have taken her back in a second if he’d offered her. He didn’t.

“How convenient for you,” he observed as he studied Rowan’s face. “You get to leave her here and forget about her, and no one would think poorly of you for it, because you can’t come anyway.” He gave me a cold look. “That is, if they were inclined to think of you at all. She’ll be well cared-for here. Not that it matters to you, I’m sure.”

If he hadn’t been holding the only thing in the world that mattered to me, I’d have pushed him off of the bridge right then. Instead I held my tongue, took a step back, and asked, “Will he be able to help her?”

He shrugged, causing Rowan’s head to rock to the side. Her hair danced in the sea air, appearing bright red in the hazy sunrise light. “I don’t know. Perhaps if you’d brought her here sooner it would have been easier. Still, my father is a powerful man.”

You’re not though, are you?
I thought. There was no magic in him.
I hope that hurts. I hope it burns you.

“There may still be hope,” he added. Not to encourage me, certainly, only to remind me that Albion would do what I obviously couldn’t.

I decided that when I died I’d come back and haunt this man’s nightmares until the end of his life, and I’d enjoy every moment of it. He turned and walked confidently back over the narrow bridge as though it spanned a garden stream instead of a wild and windy stretch of ocean. I could barely see Rowan, save for the top of her head and her boots. I realized I hadn’t said goodbye to her.

I considered falling off of the bridge then and letting the waves consume me, but a lifetime of fighting for self-preservation had left me with an aversion to suicide.

Severn and his people will be here soon enough,
I thought.
Maybe I’ll even welcome them.

I turned and made my way back to the forest, and turned the horse in the direction we’d just come from, back to the place where it had all ended.

#

We passed by the clearing without stopping. There was nothing there for me. We followed the path Rowan had left through the snow back to our campsite, and I gathered the things I’d left scattered when I went after her. I changed into my own clothes when I found them behind a tree, and packed up bedding that was now damp and frozen.

“What now?” I asked the horse.

He flicked a massive ear at me and went back to excavating a hole under a tree.

There was nowhere for me to go, and nothing to do. For the first time in my life I was completely without purpose or direction. True, I’d thought I was lost when I first betrayed Severn and took Rowan away from him, but then I’d decided to help her find the answer to her problem. It had been difficult and only somewhat successful, and had led me far from the course I’d expected, but it had been a direction.

Now what did I have? I couldn’t go home to Luid, to my rooms in the palace, to the university libraries that were my second home, or to any of the places I was familiar with. Mariana and Arnav weren’t going to take me in again, and I had no way of finding Kel and Cassia, wherever they’d gone. I could try to leave the country, but Severn would have people watching for that. Even if I could have slipped away somehow, the thought of being that far from Rowan made me feel ill.

No, there was only one place I wanted to be. I had to at least try to see her again, to make sure she was with the right people.

And what if I could help, and I’d given up too easily?

But I couldn’t just cross over the way I was. I’d have to fly again.

The horse carried me back to the cave entrance, and I left my things there. We wandered westward for the rest of the day, and in the evening I found a farm where a young family agreed to let me spend the night in their barn in exchange for the horse. They seemed suspicious of my generosity. In fact, I was just glad to have found a good home for him. Rowan would have been pleased.

I slept in the hay loft on an itchy blanket that kept me alert, but I didn’t use magic to protect myself. Instead, I let my reserves recover in anticipation of what was to come.

The next morning, the thought of transforming again made my stomach churn, and memories of nearly losing myself crowded my mind.

This is Tyrea,
I reminded myself.
There’s more than enough magic here. I’ve done this a hundred times before, this is no different.
  I laughed at myself. Hadn’t I just been thinking that I had nothing left to live for, no purpose to speak of? If I truly didn’t care whether I lived or died, I wouldn’t have been so nervous.

So stop whining and live
.

A moment later I had done it, and was climbing toward the sky on wings that felt as weak as my human arms had.

The clarity and detachment that always came with my eagle’s body were missing. My thoughts stayed with Rowan, and my concern for her and the need to see her again only grew as I flew closer to the island.

By the time the island came into view, I felt as though the turmoil within would tear me apart. In my desperation I ignored my mind’s warnings that there would be protections around the island. I flew on, not caring what happened to me. If I went to her, I could be killed. If I didn’t, I’d surely go mad. For the first time I truly understood why my father was so afraid of love.

There was nothing, not even a whisper of protective magic as I passed over the water to the forested lands beyond. The road from the bridge ran through a tiny community, but no one so much as looked up as I passed over. I soared high, hidden in the clouds, descending occasionally to check my course, gliding as often as I could to save my strength. I had seen a few old maps of Belleisle, and thought I could find the capital city if I followed the road.