To Scale the Emerald Mountain (The Willowbane Saga #1)

4. CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

“ Ellya!“ It sounds like someone is shouting down a tunnel. “ Ellya!”

Then a sharp slap lands on my face.

My eyes pop open, and I snap my head to face forward, molten rage pouring through my veins. I lash out in blind, unaware terror, landing a perfect right hook onto a striking cheek that is vaguely familiar.

The hit takes him by surprise.

In that moment of vulnerability, I turn, getting out from under him, and pin him to the ground. I punch again. And again. And again.

“Fuck!” Locane grunts.

The next thing I know, there’s no one beneath me at all, and my fists connect with the ground.

Letting out a roar, I punch into the soft grass again, splitting my knuckles and staining them green. Breathing hard and sweat dripping down my temples, I bare my teeth and turn towards the noise behind me.

Locane is there, hands raised in a sign of surrender, blood pouring from his clearly broken nose. “Drop the attack. I’m not here to hurt you. ”

My frantic eyes assess him. He’s still in a loose stance of defense, waiting for me to strike again. I keep my eyes on him, unblinking, as my heart rate slows, breaths beginning to even, and my reality slowly becomes clearer.

“What happened?” I ask shakily.

“We were walking, and then you were on the ground seizing with blood pouring from your nose. Does that happen often?”

My hand swipes my wet upper lip; I pull my fingers away to find red. “I… I don’t know,” I answer, a wave of uncertainty and the fear that accompanies it crashing into me.

“Well, did you have any thoughts during your episode? Do you remember?” he asks with searching eyes. His brow is furrowed in a way that almost resembles concern.

Or is that excitement?

Locane schools his face and the unreadable emotion is gone.

“No,” I answer hastily. Shit, that’s a lie. “Well, yes. Nothing of importance. Just the story about the cause of the Original War; and the creation of the two Continents. Nothing about who I am or where I came from.”

Leaving out the fact that the story was being told by someone who was not me, only I Saw it through the stranger’s eyes, seems prudent at the moment.

Locane gives me a puzzling look. “Interesting.”

“What’s interesting?”

“A lot about you. A beautiful, young woman on the run in the Emerald Mountains with no memories of her life, other than supposedly escaping from a dungeon. No clothes or shoes. Good fighting abilities. Passing out and having visions about the banishment of the gods. It all sounds interesting. And steadily more alarming. Perhaps you are far more of a liability than I initially thought?”

“Perhaps I am,” I reply cooly.

He just called me beautiful, I realize. I try to think of my own features, a detail that hadn’t occurred to me until this moment. I close my eyes and see an image, as if in a smooth, clear mirror; long, chestnut hair, even brows over bright emerald, green eyes. A full heart shaped mouth.

A blush creeps up my cheeks, but I reinforce my stoic mask and say, “If I am such a liability, perhaps we should leave each other now.”

Locane studies me. “No. My curiosity is thoroughly piqued. The more you speak, the more I’d like to know where this ends. And where it began. As I’ve already said, it’s all quite interesting .”

“I am not some kind of entertainment to feed your curiosity. Where are you even going?” I ask.

“Back to my home.”

“And what do you plan to do with me, since you insist on us continuing to travel together? Take me back to your home with you—and what?”

“I already told you, I planned to, at the very least, help you get proper travel attire. What is your destination?” Locane prods.

“I don’t know. I was just trying to get as far as I could from where I came from,” I admit, embarrassment weighing down my response.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you have no real plan.” His words drip with condescension.

“Well, I’ve been spending an awful lot of mental energy trying to figure out who I am and why I may have been imprisoned,” I give him as a weak excuse .

Gods. He’s right. I have no plans, and that is foolish. Why have I not given this more thought?

“And you’ve been on the move for how long?” Locane looks me up and down, fully assessing the tattered state of my pitiful shift and my feet that are filthy and torn. His perusal is like he’s studying me under a magnifying glass and judging the sad state of the creature he sees.

“Half a moons’ cycle,” I say airily. He scoffs at me. “What?”

“Well, honestly, I would think after this long you would have some idea of where you are going. So you really are just meandering aimlessly? You’re—what—just going to live in and off the forest?”

“Perhaps I will,” I say defiantly, crossing my arms over my chest.

Locane begins walking again, setting a much more brisk pace than earlier. “You’re just going to be some feral forest child hopping from one hole to the next?” he asks with dark amusement.

“I already told you, I am not a child! I’m twenty-three.”

Yes. I am. Another precious morsel of who I am. Maybe having someone to talk to is beneficial and will help me rediscover more pieces of myself. Even if I cannot stand him.

“Good for you, Ellya.”

He doesn’t sound like he thinks it’s good for me at all.

The rest of the day we move quickly, the terrain easier to travel across. It’s a hot summer day, the air thick and stagnant.

Locane moves gracefully, his feet falling surely every step.

It’s difficult not to notice the flex of his long, powerful legs on confident strides. The way the sweat sheens on the rich complexion of his forehead as he turns back to check on me. How his midnight black hair occasionally comes loose from its tie and falls into his brown eyes, so dark they appear as onyx as his lustrous strands from a distance.

The light of the sun starts to lower. Blinding rays turn into a softer orange, and the intense heat begins staving off. As the sky starts to turn to swirls of periwinkle and pink, I wonder how much longer he intends to go. Exhaustion has been hitting me hard all day, and I know I won’t be able to walk straight much longer.

As if on cue, Locane calls from much farther ahead, “We will stop here tonight.”

There’s a small clearing between a cluster of denser foliage with a bed of long, soft grass and will make for a comfortable night of sleep.

It looks utterly divine.

Locane offers me softer eyes than his usual cutting glare. “Sit, rest. I’ll prepare a fire and make bread for us to eat tonight. I also have some dried meat.”

“Make bread? Here? You must be joking,” I laugh.

“I’m not. I have a jar of dough ready to go. If you don’t prepare it soon enough it turns into more of a sourdough, but good nonetheless.”

He gets the fire going, embers crackling merrily. After several minutes he removes some of the hot coals to the outer edge with a small metal spade from his pack. He throws the dough right on top of them and then covers the top of the rounded loaf with more coals.

Locane sits and removes the other necessary items for our small meal with a quiet, pensive face. We sit in silence watching the fire crackle and pop, the warmth of the day cooling into a balmy summer evening.

The silence between us isn’t quite awkward but more… taut .

Who is this man? I find it odd that in such a desolate part of this forest, he just happened upon me. When I was in imminent danger. After escaping from a dungeon. And he has very few questions about a damsel in distress who claims to know nothing about who she is or where she came from.

I am suspicious.

My mouth opens to start asking some of my brewing questions when Locane swiftly moves from his position against a felled log to crouch before the fire and uncover the bread. Another small drip of blood falls from my nose, and he silently hands me a small piece of cloth to wipe it.

“Your vision has taken a toll,” he remarks, and I nod, unsure of what to say.

The exterior of the bread is black and charred and looks highly unappetizing. I’m about to give him a snide remark about not being confident in his bread making—hoping to ease some of the strange silent tension—when he pulls a knife from his pocket and efficiently slices the loaf in half.

I’m immediately hit with a warm and yeasty scent, the fresh steam tickling my nose and making my stomach clench hungrily. Charred outside or not, it smells amazing. I let out a slight moan of pure satisfaction at the first bite, so hot I burn my tongue.

Locane gives me a small smile and tells me, “I saw the uncertainty on your face. It is very satisfying to see it so thoroughly wiped away in a second.”

Asshole.

I inhale my food, not realizing before just how famished I was. The bread is delicious. The dried meat is spiced beautifully and dried to the most perfect textured jerky.

“So, you made the dough and jerky yourself, then?” I ask Locane.

“I did. ”

“You don’t seem like a man that would enjoy cooking or baking.”

“And what would you presume a man like me would enjoy doing?” he asks with a quirked brow.

Taking in his stance, arms folded across his chest and legs straight out in front of him, I consider my answer. “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t guess any decidedly domestic duties.”

“Well, seeing as I live alone, all domestic duties are decidedly mine,” he says with a bite.

“Right.” I swallow. “How far are we from your home?”

“Not far, about two days. We should reach the base of the mountain sometime tomorrow evening if we move swiftly. After that, about another day.” His eyes pop up at me. “You throw a fantastic punch, by the way.”

“Oh, a compliment for me?” I deadpan with a smile.

“Funny. Seriously, you do,” he says, with that same blank face of his that I’m starting to feel like I know.

“Well, thank you. I must have had an excellent teacher,” I tell him happily.

“Yes. It seems so.” Even though he’s agreed, there’s an odd tone to his voice, akin to disapproval.

We fall into a comfortable silence, listening to the symphony of crickets as the sky finishes its transition to the inky black of night. The stars wink in the night sky as I think about who that teacher may have been. I’ve spent the last two weeks scouring my brain for any scrap of information on my life before. It usually leaves me with a pounding headache, like my brain has been scrubbed raw by a rough steel sponge.

Fully basking in the sounds of nature, I feed off of the strange energy of Locane, and my muscles loosen as I settle in for the night .

“That’s it, good hit, darling girl! Where you may be small, you are fast. And your speed gives you better opportunities to hit those weak spots while they’re open.”

Backing away from the man holding his side, I turn and grin at the source of praise—a small woman with chestnut hair, matching mine. Her face almost looks ageless, other than the fine laugh lines around her kind hazel eyes.

My grandmother.

“Thanks, Nana!” I yell enthusiastically.

“No need to thank me, Elly. You’re the one that has done the work.”

I’m twelve and new to training. This is my first true victory, besting a man twice my age, more than twice my size.

Leaning my wooden staff by the polished door of the quaint stone cottage, Nana comes to my side and gives me a tight squeeze.“I am so proud of you.”

That pride swells in my chest as I’m wrapped in a familiar and comforting presence.

Nana herself trained with the Bokhaiish in the island region just off the southwestern coast of the Mother Continent. The Imperial Islands of Bokhaii is a sovereign nation, completely separate from the Territories and the Kingdoms. It’s an honor for an outsider to be trained personally by the Bokhaiish with their sacred techniques. The fighting style with the traditional wooden staff is a true art form. I insisted on learning the art as well.

Though I’m not able to train in the exotic islands where the fighting style originated, Nana hired a native that had relocated to the Emerald Mountains, Taiik, to help with my training.

The first time I held a staff it felt right, like an extension of my arms, flowing beyond my finger tips to become one with my body. Nana and Taiik both claim that I’m a natural, but today is special. This is the day I landed my first blow on the staff master. The light of my victory pulses in time with my adrenaline.

Nana hasn’t fought with me yet, only overseeing my sessions with Taiik.

“You are not ready yet, darling girl,” she tells me every time I ask.

Taiik tells me that she’s legendary in Bokhaii, although he is too young to have seen her in action during her prime. We are both dying to see her fight. I have been since I was a small child, Nana telling me bedtime stories about her adventures across the world. For a long time, I thought they were nothing more than nursery stories. The products of a fantastical and imaginative mind trying to entertain a small girl who did not want to go to sleep.

I believed the stories were real the day Nana showed me her favorite staff. Her weapon is made of rare fenwood. The nearly extinct tree only grows in Bokhaii, at the base of an active volcano where black basalt rock meets nutrient dense soil of the rainforests around it—a rainforest that thrives on the living magic the moons provide. Not only is the landscape of Bokhaii fueled by the light of the moons, it powers the lunar Shifter gifts of the island peoples as well.

The deep indigo fenwood of Nana’s staff is carved with intricate designs of cherry blossoms that bleed into the tail of a fierce phoenix, surrounded by licks of fire. The blunt end of the weapon is fashioned into the bird’s taloned foot, cradling a large, obsidian stone. The other end sees the deep blue wood whittled to a curved hook—the point dagger sharp. If her stories are true, many throats have seen their end with that hook.

Yes, I have long yearned for the day to see my grandmother wield that fine weapon.