Your work is not yet done.
It sounded in her head, but it came from the fog, from nowhere and everywhere. It chilled her to her marrow, though not because it was scary; it was deep and well modulated, with an abundance of that formal, faintly stiff tone that crept into Dayns
No. She wasnt going there. Not when it made her eyes well and her stomach heave, and filled her mind with the squish-crack of a broken neck, the howl of a vicious beast that was part predator, part murderer.
Aware that the voice seemed to be waiting for something, she said softly, Please let me be done. This isnt my work. Its not my fight.
Are you so certain?
Her mind filled suddenly with horrifying images of stone walls destroyed by dozens of club-wielding ettins, armored guards cut to pieces by giant scorpions with razor-tipped tails and claws, a woman carrying a baby, racing across a flagstone floor only to be snatched up from above by a giant spider.
You are a guardswoman of the blood. You would let this happen?
What blood? Who are you? When there was no answer, her voice sharpened. For Gods sake, what do you want from me? I got him to the arch. She tried to spin in place, but failed. Her heart was hammered with a mix of fear and frustration. Will you answer a direct question already, damn it! What do you want me to do?
Help him reach the castle by tomorrow night. And help him remember his true self or all is lost.
Her stomach twisted at the dread and dismay that came with the thought of following Dayn to Elden. And then what?
Go home.
She flashed on the image of a rounded hill very like the one near Dayns cottage, though without the stones. The spires of a castle were visible in the near distance beyond some trees, and there was a small shrine off to one side. And damned if it wasnt carved with a simplified version of the cover of Rutakoppchen: a girl traipsing through the woods while eyes watched from the darkness.
Do I have a choice? Her voice cracked miserably and she didnt care. She was crashing off the wolfsbene, beat-up, brokenhearted, and didnt want to have to do this.
There is always a choice, even when there seems not to be.
Great. A frigging fortune cookie, she said.
Then she stopped, hearing her own words echo in the fog, realizing that she was snarking off at a spirit voice she strongly suspected was at least the essence of Dayns father, the vampire king. More, she was thinking, planning, reacting, having an opinion. She wasnt paralyzed, wasnt leaning back into Dayns reassuring presence as she had done too many times over the past few days when the going got tough.
She wasnt freezing. She was dealing. New strength flowed into her at the realization and, with it, came a fierce sort of joy.
You are stronger than you know, Alfreda.
A shiver ran through her. How did you know my real name?
Will you help him?
A few days ago, it would have seemed ludicrous for her to think she could help a man like Dayn. Even a few hours ago, blinded by her enthrallment, she wouldnt have thought he needed her help with anything save for mutual pleasure. Now, though, she was seeing things more clearly. She supposed shock could do thateither numb her out or wake her up. And now she was awake.
With clearer eyes, she realized that Dayn wasnt as evolved as he wanted to think. He had spent two decades beating himself up for having been distracted by a woman when he should have been focused on his duties the morning of the Blood Sorcerers attack, only to fall right back into the same pattern with her. Theirrelationship? flameout?she wasnt sure what to call ithad been a distraction, a way to keep himself from focusing on the harder things. She didnt think he had been entirely dishonest with her, eithermore that he had lied to himself.
She saw herself differently, too. In the rainbow fog, she suddenly saw a woman who too often waited for other people to take care of things. Granted, her childhood had shaped that, as her father and the therapists hadwell meaning or notblocked off her imagination, her initiative. But that was then and this was now, and she needed to quit being afraid, not just of danger, but of making a mistake, making a choice. Back home, she had stopped moving forward, and her soul had begun to wither. In the wolfyn realm, however, she had started doing, thinking, moving, deciding.
Maybe she had made a huge mistake falling for Dayn, had almost made an even bigger one by blindly following him to Elden as his lover. But the first mistake had burned her but not killed her, and the second one wasnt going to happen. If she followed him to Elden, it would be by her own choice, and not as his lover. And if that brought a stab to fresh wounds, heartbreak wasnt fatal, after all.
Okay, she said to the waiting voice. Ill do it.
Good.
The fog rose up around her, curled toward her and touched her here and there, tingling where it landed. And then it started moving with more purpose, sluggishly at first and then faster and faster, she found herself hoping to hell that this wasnt going to go into the mistake column. She drew breath, but before she could say anythingor even really decide what she wanted to saythe world lurched around her, the fog turned dark and ominous, and whoomp! She suddenly found herself standing on a grass-covered hill in the middle of a dense, ominous forest.
Dayn wasnt there. In fact, she was completely and utterly alone. And in realizing that, she became aware that it was the first time she had been alone in days.
She stood for a moment, testing for signs of panic. But while she was tense and most certainly on alert, she wasnt terrified, didnt want to stand still and wait for something to happen.
Lets get moving, her instincts said. Daylights wasting.
Overhead, she glimpsed a sky that was a far deeper blue than that in the wolfyn realm, making her blink at the difference. The trees, too, were strange; they were twisted and stunted-looking, though they stretched high overhead to knit their branches into a high canopy of dull brown leaves. The sunlight that filtered through those leaves was a dingy brown color, making her feel oddly dirty.
Welcome to Elden, she said under her breath. Doesnt look much like I expected. Both her mother and Dayn had made the kingdoms sound like lush and fertile paradises, like something out of a fantasy movie. But maybe it would get better once she was out of these woods.
Given that realm travel wasnt known in the kingdoms, it stood to reason that the access points would be hidden away, forgotten.
Thinking shed do best with a good defense, she unslung her bow. And stared.
What before had been a plain but serviceable hand-carved bow was now a slick, high-tech compound bow of the type she had favored in the human realm, but made of a springy, unfamiliar wood and strung with a natural-looking fiber of the proper tensile strength. Her arrows, too, had transformed; she was wearing a sleek quiver that contained a dozen perfectly balanced shafts and offered hooks where she could secure the bow fully strung.
Upgrades, she said to herself. Nice. Better yet was the small purse of gold she found in her pocket.
Feeling more optimistic than she had moments before, she struck out in the direction where the light seemed brightest up ahead. She would find herself a village, get her bearings and go from there. If nothing else, she knew where Dayn would be tomorrow night: Castle Island.
DAYN AWOKE IN A DARKNESS so complete that he might have thought he was still unconscious except for the ammoniac smell of guano. It burned his eyes and sinuses and had him holding his breath as he pawed in his rucksack for one of the small wolfyn hand lamps.
It lit, but only partway, emitting a bare and fitful glow even after he dialed it to full power. Too much science and not enough magic in the gadget, he thought, not daring to say the words and risk inhaling.
A quick scan showed that the vortex had dumped him in the dead end of a cave. He thought there might have been paintings on the walls, but the smears of guano and the tears blurring his vision made it tough to tell for sure. With only one way out, he didnt have to debate his escape route; shouldering his rucksack, he beat it for thinner air.
The cave curved and curved again before he saw reflected daylight up ahead. He paused short of the last bend and tucked the light away. And then he stood a moment longer, because after twenty years, the next step was a big one.
Elden, he said softly.
He was finally home. He could finally make things right. And if there was a deep ache within him because he was stepping out of the cave alone, there was nothing he could do about that now. He had made his bargain and his sacrifice. The spirit realm had let him save Reda and send her to safety, and in exchange he had given up any chance for them to have a future. And maybe, probably, that was the way it was supposed to have worked all along.
He took a deep breath and borrowed a particularly fitting human idiom: Here goes nothing. If he was lucky and the spell had his back, he would find himself relatively near Castle Island. Better yet would be to find Nicolai, Breena and Micah camped out waiting for him. Gods, Micah would be grown now.
Trying not to lock too hard on that hope, tempting though it might be, Dayn shrugged the rucksack higher on his shoulder and set out, rounding the corner and striding out of the cave into the daylight. And stopped dead.
Damnation. Another fitting human saying, and one that was unfortunately all too apt.
The sight that greeted him wasnt anything like what hed been expecting, and was nothing hed been prepared for. The forest that stretched out before him wasnt green and lush, wasnt chockful of hiding places for the forest creatures. It was brown and thin, with no groundcover and only sparse, yellowed leafy patches that hardly seemed sufficient to sustain life.
Worse, he couldnt even pretend he was at the edge of one of the southern kingdoms, near a stretch of badlands or desert. Because as his eyes adjusted to the painful sight, he recognized the downslope in front of him, the rise of rocky hill behind him. He even knew the cave now, though he had never before been all the way to its end due to the foulness of the air.
He was in Elden, less than a days march to the castle. But gods and the Abyss, what had happened to his land? His forest?