Page 25 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“I know what they are. You don’t.”

“Then I’ll learn.” She takes the last step down. “That’s the entire reason I’m going.”

“Goddamn it, Nyxiana.” The words come out harsher than anything I’ve ever said to her. “I’m trying to protect you.”

“I don’t need you to protect me.” She doesn’t raise her voice to meet mine. In fact, it drops, becoming slower, more exact than before. “I’ve never needed that from you. What I need is for you to stop deciding what I can carry before you’ve asked me a single question about it.”

I have an answer for that. I’m not going to give it to her. So, I stop arguing, turn and start walking toward the treeline. I’m most of the way there before anything moves behind me. Then she’s in front of me. No run. No sound of her crossing the ground. The distance is simply gone. Her palm lands on my chest and stops me where I stand. The shock goes through the point of contact. It cracks up under my sternum, then out along both arms to the ends of my fingers, bright and hot. It rocks the two of us back half a step.

Her hand comes away. I look down at the place on my shirt where it was. She turns her own palm over and looks, fingers half curled, like the hand belongs to somebody else. Neither of us fills the quiet. Wind moves through the tops of the pines above us. My pulse goes hard under the spot she touched. She has to tip her head back to hold my eyes.

“Go back inside.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.

She holds her ground on the pine needles and doesn’t answer. The place on my chest where her hand landed stays warm. It should have faded already. It hasn’t. I’ve made worse feelings go away before. Anger at a pack that judged me before I said a word. Standing outside rooms nobody let me into. All of that went when I told it to go. This doesn’t go. It stays with me through the quiet. It’s still there when she speaks again.

“I’m coming,” she says. She closes the last of the ground between us and turns her hand over, palm up, waiting for mine.

I could tell her the real reason I don’t want her coming. I know exactly what it is even if I’ve never let myself think all the way through it, not even alone. I’m not going to start now.

There’s a second reason behind it, that one I could say out loud and lose nothing. Yesterday she came out of the dark hauling me and went down on one knee in the grass at the border. Her legs wouldn’t hold her the first time she tried to stand. She got up because she decided to. Her body had no part in the decision. Asking her to carry me anywhere again is not a small thing. I have every right to say so out loud.

I keep that one back too. Both of them stay unsaid. The argument goes out of me. I put my hand in hers. Her fingers close around mine. Then there’s no light at all. The dark between places has no ground, no air. Pressure closes on me from every side at once. My ears fill with it. My lungs hold what they had when the light cut out. Partway through they start asking for more.

There’s her grip on my hand. There’s nothing else in here. No direction. No up. No sound of her breathing an inch away from me. Somewhere in it I’m dragging. Not moving, not falling. Hanging off her like a stone she’s hauling uphill, the same way I hung off her coming out of Drakoria. I can’t reach her in here to see what it’s taking out of her. I already saw it once. She’ll come out of this the same way she came out of that one: unsteady, barely able to stand.

The pressure holding us in the dark lets go all at once. Ridge rock comes up hard under my boots. Wind cuts straight across it, loud over the stone. It pulls her hair out of its tie and across her face. The air has a cold, smoke-edged scent in it that lifts off the rock itself.

She staggers a step sideways before she catches herself. My hand is under her elbow before her second foot lands. She takes it. Neither of us says a word about it.

“I’m fine,” is the first thing out of her mouth. The color has gone out of her face. There’s a fine tremor running the length of her arm. She straightens up on her own. Her mouth goes tight, then eases, and the diplomatic mask settles back over her face, the same composed look she carries into rooms full of people who want something from her.

I nod once and let her elbow go. My hand stays open at my side, half a foot off her arm, ready for the next stagger. There isn’t one. I stay at her shoulder as we start walking. Then I look out at the ground ahead of us for the first time since we landed.

Long spines of rock running east and west, dropping away steep between them. Water moving fast somewhere below and out of sight, the sound coming up thin through the wind. Two of the spines cross further out. I know which of them takes the light first. That’ s been sitting in me the whole time, unused. The country up here is barer than the range behind us. Barer than it has any business being in high summer. This is the cold end of it, where the ground gives back less every mile you go north. It looks exactly like the place that made me.

I stand there and let it be what it is. Then I walk. I pick out the switchback the second I look up, ahead of any real study of the ground. Sharp eyes. That’s what I’ve always called it. I call it that again and put my hand out toward the second spine, where the rock breaks and lets the switchback through.

“There. That’s the way in.”

She’s looking at me instead of at the ridge.

“How far?” she says.

“An hour.”

“Uphill?”

“Most of it.”

“How many of them are up there?”

“Enough.”

That’s all I give her. The terrain ahead of us is the reason she came. Her eyes have been on me since the wind first hit us anyway. She’s watching me with the same look she gets when a read won’t settle. I’ve caught it on her face before, gone as fast as it comes. I’ve never known what she’s not getting. Whatever it is, she isn’t getting it now either. I hold her eyes longer than I mean to, testing whether she’s going to say what she sees. I don’t like how much it takes out of me to sit through a woman working out I’m wrong somehow without any way to prove it.

“Valen.” She waits until I look at her. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”