Brandon Ashveil's Arc

Chapter 11 of 18

Brandon climbed out of the chamber with the lantern low and the last thread humming under his ribs. The tunnel stretched ahead, blue stone and cracked floor, the air colder than when he had come down. He found Dayna where he had left her, kneeling beside the black hound, one hand on its flank. The herbalist looked up. Her curls were plastered to her forehead. Her satchel lay open, near empty. "They're above us," she said. "I heard boots on the bench. The queen's people. They know the seam is broken." Brandon crouched beside her. The hound's ribs rose and fell slow. "How many fireflies left?" "Four. Enough to keep this one asleep another hour. Not enough for us and the climb." She held his eyes. "If we go up now, they cut you down at the stairs." He felt the truth of it in his chest. The bond was a whisper, but Thornweave was still breathing on the slab behind him. If Brandon died on those steps, the last thread would drag the fae lord after him. Everything he had done in the chamber would be undone. "Then we don't go up," Brandon said. Dayna frowned. "There's no other way out." "There's the way they don't know." He lifted the lantern to the tunnel wall. The blue stone ran on past the hound, past the chamber mouth, deeper. "Thornweave came in from somewhere. He didn't crawl down the same stairs we did. His kin brought him." She looked past the sleeping hound into the dark. "You want to walk further under." "I want to live." He pulled her to her feet. "Take the fireflies off the dog." "It'll wake." "Let it. It'll meet them on the stairs before it comes for us." Dayna's mouth tightened. She did not argue. She opened the lantern and coaxed the four small lights from the hound's fur back into the glass. The beast twitched. Its paw scraped stone. They ran. Brandon led with the lantern, Dayna's hand fisted in the back of his jacket. Behind them the hound coughed awake. Above them, muffled through rock, came shouting, then a snarl, then a scream cut short. The tunnel bent. It bent again. The floor sloped down, then up. Brandon's lungs burned. The bond-whisper stayed steady in his ribs, which meant Thornweave still lived on the slab behind them, still tethered, still coming for him one day the way he had promised. They came out through a crack in a hillside he did not know, under a sky going gray with dawn. No antlers. No boots. Just wet grass and their own breath. Dayna bent double, hands on her knees. "We're not free." "No," Brandon said. He touched his chest where the thread pulled north. "But we're above ground. And he's still down there."