23. Fell

23

Fell

S HE WAS GONE.

Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

Gone gone gone gone gone gone gone gone gone gone gone gone gone.

I had failed her. Assumed, arrogantly, that Tamsyn would always be there, just like time: days, hours, moments winding into forever. Something as solid and lasting as an old oak that would stand years from now, well into old age. That she would always be there, the wrong wife, the wife I had never set out to claim.

I should have nourished the seed I felt growing between us, strengthened the roots. Instead, I had left her alone, vulnerable, easy prey for a monster that was not supposed to exist. And for Arkin... another monster.

I was not blind to the fact that he had been with her. He had been alone in the woods with Tamsyn when he ought not to have been, after expressing his fucked-up desire to get rid of her. I shouldn't have trusted him. Clearly, he had ignored my command and taken matters into his own hands. Pigheaded bastard. All things considered, I didn't feel a great amount of grief over his loss. The world had a way of setting things to rights, balancing the weights. Evening scores. Arkin had tried to hurt Tamsyn, and he'd got what was coming to him.

I'd owed her safety. My protection. It was the most fundamental thing I could do for her. Perhaps the only thing anyone believed I could adequately provide given who I was. No one would believe anything soft or tender pulsed within me. I was the Beast of the Borderlands. An expert killer. A ruthless warrior. Feared. Revered. Unbreakable. A liege lord who could be counted upon to protect all those around him... especially his wife.

She was mine, and I had not held on to her tightly enough. Not closely enough. Not enough.

The loss of her burrowed deep inside me, teeth clamping down and sinking, clanging against bone. The guilt and misery of it vibrated through me, smarting, stinging, fueling my hate. My desperate thirst for revenge.

Dragon.

It was out there. Still taking from me. Stealing away the things that made up my life. My parents. Tamsyn. Its existence blew open the doors to the old hatred I'd thought long buried. Buried with the dragons—as they were supposed to be. Dust littering the earth.

"Fell." Mari emphasized my name in such a way that I suspected she had been saying it for quite some time.

Blinking, I focused on her face.

"We need to stop and rest the horses." She glanced behind her to where our party was working hard to catch up.

We'd been riding since yesterday. Without stopping. Without rest. Without sleep. The cold cut deep, like knives on skin. Our breaths clouded in front of our lips. And yet the horses were lathered with sweat, muscles quivering beneath their gleaming coats as we made our way through the skog.

There were only four of us. My three best warriors: Mari, Magnus, and Vidar. The rest I had tasked with finding the nearest falconer and sending a message both north and south. North, to the Borg. My people there needed to be warned. Needed to prepare and brace themselves. And south, to the City, to Hamlin. He deserved to know, too. Or rather the people did. He had citizens to protect.

An alarm needed to be raised. A warning. A single word heavy enough to strike terror into the heart of every man, woman, and child. Dragon.

Only the one word was necessary, but I had included more. I'd sent additional information. To the south, I instructed my warriors to enclose a message informing them that Tamsyn was missing. Lost. Taken.

They were her family, even if they were a wretched lot who had used her as their whipping girl. She was devoted to them, and they seemed fond of her. That had not been pretense. Their eyes had softened whenever they looked at her, when they bid her farewell.

And there was the captain of the guard. That bastard wanted her for himself. I could see it in the way his eyes tracked her, his pupils dilating, his mouth parting as though he was preparing to take a bite out of a juicy bit of fruit.

Even now my hands tightened inside my gloves into bloodless fists at the memory... that he would look at her as his when we were just wed, when she was mine.

Fuck. This was not the time to feel jealous, an emotion I had assuredly never once felt in my life. It was beneath me. Right now she was out there all alone, belonging to no one and needing help in the most desperate way. If not from me, then from someone else. Anyone else. Even those I did not like. If her shit family could help get her back and keep her safe, I wasn't too proud to call on them to do so.

A flash of tattered clothing filled my mind. Shards of blue fabric scattered on the ground and in bone-thick talons. I rubbed hard knuckles against my eyes as though that might erase the memory swirling thick and viscous through my head, unrelenting since yesterday.

I didn't want to believe the worst. I couldn't accept she was dead. Devoured before I got there. Not yet. No. After all, a dragon had stolen me away and I'd survived. Tamsyn was far sturdier than a child. And cleverer. As much as I had scolded her, she had resolved our encounter with the brigands in an efficient manner, taking her necklace right off her own neck to pay them.

Maybe she was alive in a dragon's lair somewhere, just as I had been as a child. I only needed to find her.

Desperate thinking. Grasping. Hopeful. Pleading. But it was not impossible.

I could not bring myself to think her dead. Even though everything pointed to it, I could not. Could not imagine it.

Those moments had been a blur. I'd been so fixated on the danger. On her shredded clothes. On Arkin's smoking corpse. The stink of charred flesh. The twenty-foot dragon that wasn't supposed to exist hovering midair, wings churning great gusts of wind.

That didn't mean Tamsyn hadn't been there, though, in the fray. Tucked beneath a dragon arm, clutched where I couldn't see her.

Desperate thinking. Grasping. Hopeful. But it was not impossible.

If she was alive and something happened to me, if I failed to find her, if the dragon I hunted got the best of me, I needed to know someone would look for her. Someone else would save her.

I will come for you.

As much as I wanted to break him in that moment for speaking those words to my newly wedded (and bedded) wife, the captain of the guard—Stig, she had called him—had said that. He'd meant those words.

For Tamsyn's sake, I needed to make certain her people knew what had happened to her. Her people. That went down my throat in a bitter swallow. I was supposed to have been her people . Me. As much as I had resisted the notion.

I hated that I might need them, need others . That I might not be enough to save her. And yet I emptied my head of that thought, because the only thing that mattered was Tamsyn.

Tamsyn not dead.

Tamsyn whole and unharmed.

Mari stared at me with frustration creasing her usually smooth brow, and I realized she was waiting for me to respond. "We cannot keep this pace."

I swallowed back the burn of defeat. We had to keep going. A dragon flew faster than we could ever ride. We could not stop.

Given our quarry was airborne, there was no trail to track. Not as I was accustomed. I'd only marked the direction the creature flew. It could be anywhere by now, could have turned in any direction. It was impossible to know. And yet I had a sense. A knowing that I trusted. I couldn't explain it, so I didn't try.

But my warriors were less than trusting. I'd heard them muttering behind me over the last several hours. A first in my life. They gave me their allegiance and obedience and had always followed me unquestioningly, but they had their doubts now.

"Fell... the horses will drop if we don't rest."

I growled, "If they drop, then we get up and keep going."

Mari's eyes widened. It was something I would never have said before. I had now, though. And stubbornly, I kept on. Tamsyn had to be found. The dragon had to be put down like any feral, man-eating creature.

Ahead of us, the narrow path we traveled split into two even narrower paths, nothing more than game trails each, trampled down by the recurring tread of smaller animals.

Because people went no farther than this.

Mari sidled up beside me, the fine lines bracketing her mouth settling into deeper grooves. "Now what?"

I nudged my heels and advanced before stopping hard at the fork, as though I had struck a wall and could go no farther. My destrier neighed and pranced, not having it. He sensed it, too. He wasn't even willing to try. It was as though an invisible hand had reached up to block him.

Just as well. Our mounts would not fit down either path. We would have to leave them behind.

Mari expelled a breath as though it was too big to keep inside herself. "See. We can go no farther."

I motioned with my hand, quieting her... poking around and feeling inside myself for the voice that was not a voice, for the feeling that was more smoke and shadow than substance. Just an instinct. A persistent knowing.

And there it was. It came to me, brushing against my mind like a feather. As I knew it would. As it had ever since that dragon took flight. Ever since I gave pursuit, hunting the dragon, searching for Tamsyn.

It beckoned with gentle hands, a fine, fragile thread pulling me forward. My fingers curled inward, tracing the carved X that pumped like a bleeding wound, a guiding pulse that diminished if I went one way, the wrong way, and then intensified if I went another way, the right way. The way to her. I couldn't fathom it, but it was how I knew she was still alive out there, how I knew which way to go.

"This is the direction." I pointed west, into the densely packed wood. It was a living, breathing, pulsing wall of green. High above the treetops loomed steeper foothills. Beyond those hills, beyond the Borderlands, were hazy mountains, the distant Crags. Fog circled the peaks like gauzy rings of smoke.

The dragon had taken her that way. I wouldn't even try to explain my conviction to Mari. I couldn't. I didn't understand it myself.

The warrior shook her head, her dark braids slapping against the thick leathered armor covering her shoulders. "We can't know that. A dragon flies as the crow... and as fast as wind. We cannot know which way it turned once it left you. It could be across the sea by now."

I didn't think so. Not unless the creature had abandoned Tamsyn somewhere, and I doubted that. My experience echoed within me, a story I'd heard so many times that it felt like my own recollection, an imprint that went beyond memory, another tattoo etched on my skin, there until I was dead and rotting in the ground. I imagined the winged demon had the two of them holed up in a den somewhere.

But whatever the case, I felt her like my own heartbeat.

It was gut deep, this knowledge. A bone-penetrating awareness. I sensed which way to go, compelled forth as though we were connected. Even though I couldn't explain it, I trusted it.

"We go this way," I ordered.

Stopping, I swung down onto the ground. With an idle pat for my taxed destrier, I tied off his reins to a nearby shrub and stepped into the great maw of the forest.