She didn’t answer. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Zev bursting through the mists and hurrying to Laurent’s side. Laurent didn’t seem to be moving. The airs of this place were more poisonous—more potent— than they’d realized, apparently. Zev quickly lifted Laurent’s lifeless body into his arms, and Cas forgot about trying to get back to Laurent herself; she just needed to distract this man in front of her so that her friends could get away.
She charged, sword sweeping through the air as she came.
Her target whipped his own blade up and parried hers at the last instant, knocking her away, and then he instantly drew the sword up and sliced for her side. She was faster, bouncing away and then twirling back to swing—
Only for him to parry again.
Again and again, they danced away and then back together, and the sound of steel striking steel echoed strangely in the foggy air. Soon, sweat dripped from Cas’s forehead and down into her already-burning eyes, blinding her further. The man became little more than a blur of shadow and speed that she nearly lost track of several times.
She saw the silver streak of his sword breaking through the blurriness and hurtling toward her. She got her own sword into a guard position just in time, but the force of his blow threatened to buckle her knees. And he didn’t stop once their weapons had locked onto each other; he kept shoving, kept trying to break her stance and push her to the ground.
Gods, he was strong.
He wasn’t going to put her on the ground—she wouldn’t allow it—but he was backing her deeper and deeper into the poisonous mists. And though she was clearly more resistant to it than her friends, as she’d predicted she might be, she was still beginning to feel the effects; her arms shivered with a deep, dark cold that had plunged into her veins. It was traveling through her body and numbing her, slowly but surely, until she felt buried in that cold, as if she’d tripped and sunk into a snowbank.
Her wrists ached. Threatened to cramp up on her. The ground she had been driven to was not the smooth stone she’d first touched down on; it was slick mud that made keeping her balance even more difficult. She tried to brace her boot against what looked like a more solid patch of that mud, but it soon gave way and she nearly slipped, and her enemy’s sword managed to push a bit closer. She got a clear look at the hilt of that sword, and she noticed something… odd.
A symbol of one of the Marr—of the wild middle-goddess of Ice and Winter—was engraved on the pommel.
This sword was a contraband weapon, then, and apparently infused with Ice-kind magic. And that was what was making her feel so suddenly, desperately cold.
A strange weapon for him to be carrying, she thought, if he’s in the service of the king-emperor….
Finally, he stopped pushing her down. He yanked the blade away, scraping it over hers and causing a cringe-inducing metallic shriek. The cold swirling through her evaporated almost instantly.
“How are you still standing in the mist?” he demanded. “That mask of yours is not even properly sealed.”
Seeing another opportunity to distract him, she grabbed the hood of her coat and yanked it down, letting the waves of her grey hair tumble free. That hair had once been a brilliant shade of dark copper—like autumn leaves aglow in the late afternoon sun—but now the sight of it, along with her equally colorless eyes, made the man before her stumble back in surprise.
“Fade-Marked,” he breathed. “You…stay where you are!”
She arched an eyebrow. And then she grinned, even though she knew he couldn’t see it beneath her mask. “Sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve got other places to be.”
He lunged.
She sidestepped the attack and then swept a kick at his ankles, ripping him off his feet.
He landed in a crouch with catlike grace. But before he could spring back upright, she pinned that fluttering cloak of his into the muddy ground by way of her own blade. That stolen sword wasn’t a particularly decent one; she didn’t care about leaving it behind.
And she could run faster without it.
It was incredibly satisfying to hear the incredulity in the man’s tone as he yelled after her to stop.
Or at least it was incredibly satisfying, until the silhouette of the Oblivion Gate materialized in the mists ahead, and she realized…
Her team had failed their mission.
At some point during her battle, she had dropped that Air crystal. She had no idea where it had ended up, and she wasn’t hanging around to search for it. And Laurent…there was no sign of him anywhere. Was he okay? Had Zev managed to haul him out of this hell and hoist him up over its walls by himself?
She prepared to vault herself over a low point in that stone wall once more. And as her hands pressed against the stone and sprang her body over it, she would have sworn she saw shadowy figures closing in on her steps. That they were watching her go, preparing to chase her out if need be…
She didn’t look back once she landed on the other side.
Lord Merric had asked for proof of the king-emperor’s meddling. And all she had was that brooch in her bag, and enough mental images to haunt her for months—which might not have been enough for him.
But it was enough for her.
Enough for her to believe that something very disturbing was happening in these mountains, and she never wanted to set foot in them again.
Chapter Four
“Cheer up, Cas.” Zev tipped his tankard of ale back with gusto, finishing it off in a single, long sip before clanking it back down on the rough wooden table between them. “It could have gone worse.”
“Laurent almost died.”
“He would disagree with that assessment,” Rhea said.
The half-elf in question had stayed at their hideaway to nurse his wounds. And also his pride, Cas suspected. Before they’d left him there, he’d insisted that he needed to do neither of those things, and claimed that the alarming rattling of his breaths and the pallor of his skin were nothing that a bit of rest— and perhaps a touch of magic— couldn’t fix.
Cas had her doubts about that, but she hadn’t argued.
“Of course he would disagree,” she said. “But it’s the truth. And it shouldn’t have happened; I should have gone over that wall instead of him in the first place. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“Maybe because nobody in their right mind readily volunteers to run into a terrifying abyss of darkness and death?” Zev suggested.
Cas shook her head. “I’ve already been touched by the Fading Sickness, and I survived it. And I’ve survived every ailment that I’ve come in contact with since. Remember the poisons they used on us at Castle Grove? And the monsters we exterminated at Westlore, and their terrible breath?”
“I try not to remember either of those things in great detail,” Rhea said with an exaggerated shudder.
“Neither of them gave me so much as a headache,” Cas reminded them.
“No, but we still don’t know the extent of your, ah…” Zev searched for a word, and with a slightly drunken grin he decided on: “Weirdness.”
“I never get sick,” she insisted. She also rarely got hungry or tired like a normal person did. She had suffered in other, stranger ways since that Fading Sickness had taken hold of her as a child, and she was always waiting for the day that it fully woke up and consumed her as it had so many others.