Page 75 of A Dark and Drowning Tide

“Are you all right?” Sylvia hopped down beside her. She landed soundlessly, with the grace of someone who’d indeed done it a thousand times before.

“Fine,” Lorelei snapped. “Hold on to that thing.”

The mara looked quite offended, until Sylvia scratched its withers. In the darkness, its eyes glowed like embers.

Swearing under her breath, Lorelei ducked under the tarp of the lean-to. The air within had thickened with the sweet, autumnal smell of decay. Ludwig was propped up against his backpack. Hiseyes—nowa verdantgreen—rovedover her face. Burning within them was a familiar, terrible awe. He looked as though he were staring at the face of someone longdead—ormaybe at Death himself. Rahel had often looked at her like that in the throes of her fevers.

“Ludwig? Can you hear me?”

He groaned in reply.

Guilt soured her stomach. She never should have agreed to Sylvia’s ridiculous antics. She never should have let herself grow so weak that a smile was all it took to make her abandon all sense. But with night falling like a blade and the exhaustion settling into her bones, the mara might very well save their lives.

Damn you, von Wolff.

Lorelei crouched beside him. The bark had clawed its way to his chin, and a fine layer of moss had grown on his shoulders. She did not know if she had the stomach to check the roots that had begun pushing through his skin like soil. She racked her brain for something that would pass for comfort, but there was little she could offer that wasn’t a lie. “Can you stand?”

He hummed noncommittally, which Lorelei decided to take as a no. Which meant they’d have to haul him down this godforsaken mountain. Just her luck. They’d have to abandon his tarp; it was too cumbersome to bother with. It could stand as a grim memorial to this disastrous expedition, for all she cared. His backpack, however, might have something worth salvaging.

Lorelei rifled through its contents, tossing aside empty vials and ones filled with mysterious, half-rotted specimens. The shard of ash tree she removed and carefully set aside. She couldn’t be sure if it was a catching curse, and she didn’t care to find out.

After pocketing a few medical supplies and rations, she slipped the vasculum from around his neck. It couldn’t hurt to see what he’d gathered so far. It was lighter than she expected, a large, sleek cylinder made of iron and painted with ivy. Inside were plants pressed flat between delicate sheets of cloth, gorgeously arranged and painstakingly preserved. As she thumbed through them, she paused over one sheet, which seemed more brittle than the others. When she pulled it out and lifted it to the light, she could do little but stare at it with a hazy sort of disbelief.

It was covered in Ziegler’s handwriting.

There was no mistaking it. Ziegler often wrote like a woman possessed, with her tidy scrawl going every which way. You’d need a magnifying glass to fully appreciate its organized chaos: how she would write in both Javenish and Brunnisch, sometimes in the same sentence; how she would cut out and paste passages from other books into her own notes or press leaves into its pages. It was both intimate and staggeringly violent to see a stray page from her journal like this.

All the papers in Ziegler’s room and the war room had been destroyed on the night of hermurder—orso Lorelei had thought. She’d been certain to check the pages of every book and rummage through every drawer.

“Where did you get this?”

“Found it,” he said blearily.

She was not in the mood to play this game. With Ludwig, it was impossible to tell what was a result of delirium and what was him being deliberately obtuse. Grabbing him by the collar, she gave him a shake. “Where?”

Sylvia’s face appeared beneath the lean-to’s opening. “Is everything all right?”

With a growl of frustration, Lorelei thrust the scrap of parchment out to Sylvia. Although she looked bewildered, she took it without question and scanned it. There was nothing especially noteworthy about its contents, but its existence vexed her. Either Ludwig had kept a document from whenhe’ddisposed of her papers, or he’d found a cache of her writings the killer had not. She sorely hoped it was the latter.

“Where did he get this?” Sylvia asked.

“He says he found it.”

Sylvia hummed pensively. “I suppose he must have.”

Lorelei’s life had spiraled entirely out of her control. Her temper spiked impotently in response. “Obviously!”

Sylvia primly folded the page in half. “Yelling isn’t going to help anything.”

“He deserves to be yelled at,” she said spitefully. “I wish he could understand how unimpressed I am with him. Perhaps we should leave him here to die.”

“Lorelei!” Sylvia gave a look of pure reproach as she ducked beneath the tarp. Kicking aside the mess Lorelei had made of Ludwig’s belongings, she grabbed his arms and pulled. “Get out of the way, please.”

Her voice was pinched, and her features were twisted in a grimace. Her wound clearly was bothering her. After everything Lorelei had done to ensure it’d heal properly, her carelessness was an insult. “Put him down before you rip your stitches out, you clod. I’ll carry him.”

“I’d rather not watch you snap in half. I’m not so fragile that I can’t bear half his weight.”

Lorelei glared but did not protest. Although she was taller than the both of them, she doubted she could get very far under Ludwig’s full dead weight.