Escape to the Sea (Tangled Hearts #1)

Chapter 12 A Night Adrift

Ephraim

My body still aches from the blows from Sinclair and Finneas. The dull muscle pain that normally I chase away with healing salves from Arlen is an unwanted companion. But I don’t dare show another inch of weakness here. I’ll simply follow and hope my evening stretches are enough to blunt the worst of the pain.

Atrea doesn’t pause like I have to when she forages. She seems to have much more familiarity with this strange flora, snatching up wild onions and berries without a second glance. She moves through this forest as if she was born to it, light-footed and graceful, like a deer bounding through the brush.

A wolf in deer’s skin, I suppose? What a terrible metaphor.

Behind us, Tommy is quiet. It’s unsettling. I didn’t realize how much space his voice took up, between complaining about bugs, or humming, or spinning crude entertaining tales from his time in taverns. I know part of it is the language barrier, but I know it’s not just that. He’s so quick to brush things off, but he looked so hurt when he realized who Lady Emeria was to him.

I realize now, albeit far too late, that Tommy was right. If Atrea had not shown up when she did, neither of us would have made it out alive.

I think about saying that to Tommy, to try and pull him back to himself, or at least the side of him that I’ve seen, but then Atrea may hear.

She stalks forward and my mind spins, thinking of our night together. But that night was a lie. The connection, a lie. The way she kissed me back, with heat and purpose, and—

No, there’s no point in going back down that particular road, is there?

As the suns set to our north, Atrea leads us back to the clearing. In my daze, I lose track of my footing and stumble forward, nearly crashing into Atrea. Sturdy arms pull me back upright, and suddenly Tommy’s so close I can smell his scent, the dark, rich woodsmoke smell.

“You okay?”

“I’m tired,” I mutter back. The healing potion that Atrea gave me earlier has ebbed away, and I’m fatigued in a way I haven’t been in years.

Tommy’s eyebrows furrow and he shakes his head. “You need to clean and sleep,” he says, still fumbling through his Elvish.

“There’s a pond about five minutes’ walk in that direction. Don’t be long—the sun will set sooner than you think,” Atrea says, and keeps walking towards the clearing.

He waits until she is gone before moving ahead. “I have trouble in the woods, but not that much,” he mumbles, as he leads the way.

Once we reach the pond, Tommy sets up a small rock pile and sets out darklights as he did the night under the stars. I ask if he wants any help and he simply shoos me towards the pond. I relent and strip down near the shoreline, carefully taking off the necklace and tucking it away while his back is turned, and then submerge myself in the water, being careful to make sure nothing strange is going to come from the depths and swallow me whole.

Once doused and cleaner than I have been in days, I pull my smallclothes and my tunic back on and sit. I let my body ache, my mind empty, and focus on the tranquility of the pond. It doesn’t know of the death we left behind us in another plane, how we nearly died. It simply exists.

“Feel better?”

Tommy sits next to me, still looking on with concern. I shrug, taking a look back out to the water.

“Can I check your back? You got hit hard, yeah?”

“I suppose.” I lift my tunic so he can check my back without me revealing much skin. He gives a low whistle as he leans in to observe.

“A bad bruise.” Yesterday, his hands on my lower back would have made heat flicker through me. The only emotion I have now is exhaustion. “Don’t know if you should sleep side or back.”

I pull my shirt back down, huffing in irritation. “I’m a grown man, I’ll figure it out.”

“I know. You did good. Beatings from hard fighters. Hard won fight, cutie.”

“ Don’t call me that,” I snap. “Not after you laughed at me.”

There’s a long pause, and then he moves to the water, unable to look at me. I turn away to give him privacy, focusing on the still parts of the water as he splashes the sweat of the day away.

When he returns, still damp from the pond but re-dressed, I try and break the standoff with a peace offering. “You were right. We shouldn’t have rushed in.”

He shrugs. “Important, right? You needed the things.”

“I did, thank you.”

He offers a hand up to help me up. “Sorry for laughing at you. Atrea, Emeria, threw me. Sorry for my slowness. I should have known, said something. Bad with flowers.”

“Oh, no need to apologize. It’s a good thing to be humiliated from time to time, especially by someone with whom I thought I was making a connection. An important lesson for me to learn. I’ll have to thank you both.”

He sighs heavily, his broad shoulders folding in as he turns away again.

I collect my things, setting the necklace back in place. We return to the clearing in silence, Tommy moving back into the log as Atrea looks at us both, her glare sharpening.

I sit on a nearby stump as she cleans and dresses two birds for dinner. She doesn’t look at me. I don’t look at her.

Eventually she serves us both, and we each eat in silence as the sun sets. Atrea snuffs the fire as soon as we’re done. Tommy attempts to conjure the darklights, but she hisses at him to put it out, afraid of what may be lurking out in the darkness.

I wrap my bundle of dirty clothes inside out to make a pillow out of. The wood is soft enough that it doesn’t make any of my aches or pains worse.

From here I can make out a whole different set of stars, their places wrong, the pictures indistinct. I roll away from them and turn onto my side, finding fewer hot spots on my side. Soon enough, I hear Tomlyn and Atrea turn in on the other side of the log, getting settled near each other.

Even with the deep-down ache in my body, sleep does not come easily. I shift and turn, restless, nervous, angry. Just as the haze of sleep settles in, I hear the low rumble of voices.

“Don’t wanna fight, babe.”

“I don’t either. You’re the one ignoring me,” she says coolly in return.

“Sorry. Didn’t want him hurt. You think he’s cute too, yeah?”

I nearly shoot up in surprise. They’re talking about me? I mean, yes, Tommy has been far from subtle in his ogling, but even after everything that’s happened?

Tommy continues, and his voice is more playful. “You kissed him. You told me no kissing on jobs. Must be something there, yeah?”

There’s another beat of silence before, “I didn’t think I’d see him again.”

Those little words stung worse than getting thrown into the stairs by Steffon. So, she did flee from me. She escaped into the night to avoid my foolish advances. All this time, I had hoped that something had pulled her attention. It never crossed my mind that she would leave like a thief in the night.

For some asinine reason, I thought I could find her again, that she’d be pleased at my persistence and that I could invite her to Vetro di Mare, write her letters, find out who she really was. I wanted to…

My chest tightens and I curl into myself even more. They barely notice I’m awake. They keep talking as if I’m not even here.

“Not mad,” Tommy says, his tone even gentler.

It’s all right, he means, that you had a silly fling with this prince, led him on, and then ditched him. A part of the game. Now I understand: she’s as much of a criminal as he is.

“I’m glad,” she starts, and then, softer. “It’s good to know, though.”

“Know?”

“That you are capable of jealousy.”

Tommy laughs. “A little jealous.”

I can hear a soft sound from her that makes the ache travel straight to my heart. She’s so at ease with him. “Thank you for admitting it.”

“Thank you. Saved us both.”

“You would have done the same for me.”

“You don’t need it. Always planning,” he says, his tone short. “They wanted hurt him. Wanted a finger. Couldn’t let that happen.”

“A finger? Idiots.”

They continue to chat, bickering about the state of his dresser, about his clothes. He asks whether she checked the wards before she left. Finally, she seems to drift off, too sleepy to reply.

There’s a long stretch of silence and rhythmic steady breathing. I roll over, chancing a glance. Asleep and slightly curled up, Atrea’s angular face is a porcelain mask in the moonlight. A testament of still beauty that makes me think of her in the gardens, which makes my heart ache. But then I notice her hand on her dagger and am reminded that this elf is nothing more than a wolf at rest, ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

Behind her—no, sheltering her like a wolf’s den—is Tommy. His shoulders seem broader as they encase her frame like a protective shell, his arm wrapped loosely around her torso, holding her against him. He extends his arm for her to use as a cushion of her head.

It’s… intimate. Sweet. Caring. The longer I stare at them and the way they seamlessly fit together, I realize Atrea isn’t here simply because she and Tommy are partners in crime. She’s here because, well, they’re lovers. All the affection, the banter, the mundane chatter about what must be their home; they’re together and here for each other.

Tommy’s eyes open and he stares at me wordlessly. No grin or wink. Just his intense gaze glimmering like the bright red stars of Danna’s axe.

Sadness and disappointment well in me. That brief night of passion in the garden with Emeria, now Atrea. The night of companionship with Tomlyn under the stars. None of it will last past this little misadventure.

I break eye contact with him and roll back over, wiping away the foolish, pointless tears welling in my eyes. But I can’t help myself. For the first time since this whole debacle began, I recognize that I am, without a doubt, alone.

~*~

Tomlyn returns from the brush, holding on to a few long ropey-looking mammals that bear a kinship with stoats, giving a shrug. “Not sure about these.”

Atrea inspects them with her sharp gaze. “They’re too bony. We’ll lose half the meat trying to skin them.”

I try not to interrupt this domestic bliss, and instead focus all my attention into my morning forms, stretching the muscles in my lower back as I try to undo the damage of sleeping on the ground for multiple nights in a row.

“The rest of the birds seem to have been scared off overnight. Nothing in the trees nearby,” she says and rolls her eyes. “We’re going to need to find some sort of animal to hunt. I don’t know enough of the vegetation around here to make safe guesses.”

“Maybe we boil? Like a stew?” Tomlyn says hopefully, holding them up.

I roll my eyes. “We should go out past the pond. There will probably be many animals there. If they work anything like our world, it’s a natural place to—”

“I scoped that out earlier,” Atrea says with a snap, dismissing me with a wave of her hand. “But thank you for trying to give me basic hunting advice.”

My gaze hardens at the clear insult. “Oh yes, I forgot, my farce of a hunt bored you, right? I suppose that the hunts where you are from are much more advanced. Where exactly was that? The forests surrounding Yaventown? Or perhaps further north, in the Fingers. You clearly have no business being this far south.”

Atrea’s eyes flicker with anger as she looks in my direction, the stoats forgotten. She stalks past Tomlyn to size me up.

“I think you forgot who was actually directing us in the forest earlier,” I say, my words flowing out of me now, rushed, heated and angry. I don’t care anymore; I clearly will have nothing to do with her after this. Didn’t she say that she had a life to get back to, after all? “ You’re such a skilled hunter, but you can’t tell him how to even walk in a straight line in any direction. Who do you think was leading us around successfully this whole time? Making sure we could eat? We lost a whole day of travel because he didn’t know the first thing about finding a heading.”

“I’m not in this. I’m peace here,” Tomlyn says, shaking his head and walking out of the clearing, grabbing his spears on the way out.

Atrea gives me a level look. “If you think that changes anything about what’s happening now, I—”

“No!” I shout, furious. “I will not be talked down to like a child. I do not care about your history. I don’t care who either of you are, or that you murdered people in such a horrid fashion, like you drained the blood from them like some godsdamned vampire.”

“I use every weapon at my disposal,” she says, her tone cold enough to leave frost. “If you had ever been in an ounce of danger before in your life, perhaps you would have listened to him in the first place and I wouldn’t have had to kill any of them.”

“Or perhaps, if he had let me lead from the beginning, we could have gotten in and out even before any of them showed up!”

Atrea is about to retort back, but then there’s a noise in the bushes, a high-pitched chitter. She turns, forgetting me entirely, and grabbing her bow, replies with her own high-pitched call. There’s another sharp chirp from the woods, and Atrea is on the move. “Get your staff. Tomlyn’s found something worth hunting.”

Then she starts towards the path Tomlyn took.

I grab my quarterstaff, my temper getting away from me. “You can’t stop in the middle! I was talking to you! Do I really mean so little to you that—”

“Do you want to eat today, or not?” Atrea snaps, barely looking at me as she moves into the woods.

I groan in frustration but follow her anyway.

The path she takes me on is winding, and occasionally she chirps again. The call continues, until finally we stumble upon Tomlyn, posted on high alert near the base of another giant tree. Gone is the easy posture, and in its place is a warrior, poised to strike.

“What is it?”

Tomlyn tries to think of the words, and finally leans in low. “Waist-high, hot blooded. Horns. Slow. A good kill.”

Atrea pauses for a moment, and I watch as she spins a plan in her head, finding a suitable tree and grabbing the lowest branch. “You and Ephraim draw it out. I will take it down.” With that, she pulls herself up, showing surprising strength and flexibility.

Tomlyn looks at me and gestures to the farther side of the tree. “I take this. Try and force it towards me.”

“Are you sure this is wise?”

He nods. “Keep your feet. Don’t let it get in front of you. Easy pickings,” he says, and flashes me a grin that, even in the deepest pits of my melancholy, stirs something deep in me. I like the confidence, that arrogant side of him. With that, he starts to hoot and holler, banging his spear blades together with a bright peal of sound like a struck bell.

For a moment, there’s no response, and then, with a low bellow, a large mammal that looks like a cross between an elk and a mountain cat charges out of the den, its dark green-glass eyes trained on Tommy. He feints left and tears off, still banging his spears again to draw it further out. Not wanting to leave him hanging, I start in on the game, yelling at the top of my lungs and coming in from the side. It spins, flickers of fear in its expression. But it doesn’t stop it from charging me. As it charges me, I block it with my quarterstaff. I look up towards Sylf and she shoots, the arrow landing in its flank. But it barely slows on its path to charge me again.

“You’ll have to tire it out!” she snaps from her position, pulling another arrow.

Tomlyn lets out a high laugh, clearly enjoying the chase. He tosses his spear forward, lobbing it lightly so it lands near enough to the creature to scare it but not to pierce its skin. But the ground shudders underfoot, and some dark green crawling moss comes up, trying to pull him down, spears and all.

Tomlyn performs an acrobatic leap and dodges the hazard altogether before landing on the other side of me, preventing the animal from running away into the woods behind us.

The game falls into place now, and I keep up to the best of my ability with Tomlyn, pinning it in. Tomlyn gets hit once with the crown of horns, all pointing in odd angles as if they were broken and regrew. But Tomlyn keeps moving, his eyes alight as he pulls it back into line with me.

Finally, the beast starts to slow, bellowing in pain and alarm as it stumbles over its own feet. It tries to charge Tommy a final time, but he blocks it off and crosses his spears, locking it in place. He turns it towards Atrea. As it sluggishly turns again, an arrow downs it, dropping it between us.

Tommy punches the air with his fist, clearly exhilarated.

I kneel down, looking over the beast as Tommy chatters excitedly in his own tongue and Atrea starts heading down from her position.

The horns are made out a material that reminds me more of translucent abalone shells back home than the horn that I’ve seen from something like an elk or a stag. They’re a hardened black substance that gleams in the light and cracks apart in my hands. As I finger one of the sharp broken pieces, I find some lighter gray nubs poking through near the front.

“Wait a moment,” I say, looking at the two elves, motioning for them to come closer.

Something’s not right. I look down at its ears, seeing how oversized they look in comparison to its head. I continue to inspect, noting that it has feline-like paws in the back, clearly too big for the rest of its body. Its front legs are too spindly, the knees apparent, like a lanky young foal.

“Oh no,” I whisper.

“It’s a nice-sized beast. I wonder if its pelt is waterproof—do you see how slick it is?” Atrea asks, leaning down to retrieve her arrow.

I look at her, eyes widening. “Tommy, was this the only one that you saw? No others?”

“This one only,” he replies, wiping his forehead off as he jogs back over. “Why? We look for more?”

I shake my head as I stand up, putting the pieces together. “It’s a foal… or perhaps a kitten. Something. It’s a baby.”

Atrea stills next to me, and looks at it, working through the process quicker than I did.

“Baby?” he frowns. “But waist-high to me. Big baby.”

“Shit,” Atrea sighs, grabbing her quiver.

The roar from the trees is deafening.

Whether it was the dying cries of the beast, or the noise we were making, the mother makes its presence known, knocking over one of the giant trees that we had made a home in last night like it was nothing.

She roars in anger and charges us, the ground buckling and breaking beneath her feet. From all around us, the ground gives way and pockets of swarming white and black moths erupt from the earth.

Tommy laughs. He’s laughing ? We’re going to die and he’s laughing. “Of course this happens! Woods trying to kill us. Again!”

“What do we do? How are we supposed to fight this thing? It’s the size of a building!” I hear my voice cracking with a shriek.

“We get high ground, yes?” he says, and looks at the tree, realizing that it is not high ground to a creature that size.

Atrea shakes her head, starting to run. “You are the worst woodsman! How could you not tell it was a baby?”

We all start to run, but we haven’t explored much of the forest yet. Even in the familiar forests of the woods near my home, if you step off your normal paths it's easy to lose your way. But here? Not only is a gigantic monster chasing us, it seems as if the earth beneath it has become its own hazards.

“We need distance!” Atrea says over her shoulders.

“I can make a distraction!” Tomlyn replies, snapping his fingers. All at once, a haze of darkness floods the area, dropping over us like a veil. Hopefully it will distract the beast for long enough to get us to higher ground. The terrain begins to tilt sharply upward, which would, in theory, give us the advantage, if the monster wasn’t ten times our size.

“We need to get a better vantage point!” Atrea snaps, pointing to one of the gigantic trees nearby. “We need a way up!”

Tommy is already pulling, his arm extending out into nothing at all, like he’s done so many times before. With some effort, he tugs out a rope ladder.

“That’s… that’s how you got all that stuff!”

Tomlyn throws a wink at me and then starts to toss it up with force towards the closest branch.

The tree attempts to fight back, the branches whipping back and forth, forcing Tomlyn to start again. With each failed effort his mission grows ever more futile.

He attempts to grab the ladder again, but as his hand is reaching out for it, the shadows beneath it shift, then widen, and then deepen. The ladder falls away into the inky black abyss that emerges from the shadows. He steps back, eyes wide with confusion. “Here? Otho’s embrace?”

Then he’s sucked in all at once. Before either Atrea or I can move, scream, think about what happened, the shadows rise off the ground like a cresting wave, and crash down onto us, consuming us both in pure darkness.