Diaspor Aspenwind's Arc

Chapter 10 of 11

Diaspor ran until the trees blurred and his boots dragged. Blood from his shoulder soaked his pale yellow sleeve and ran down to his fingers. He found a low opening in pale stone, a shadowed mouth ringed in hanging vines, and braced himself against its cold wall. He pressed cloth to the wound and listened. No wings. No voice. The forest had gone quiet behind him, and that was new. He understood it slowly. She had not followed. He had cut her arm before he ran, and she was bleeding too. Somewhere out there she had been forced to stop. He pictured her sinking against a trunk, that dark dagger across her knees, the amethyst at its hilt dull with her own blood on the blade. The thought sharpened him. This was the window. He would never get another. He pushed off the stone and tracked back along his own trail. Drops of his blood pointed the way. Then, beside a broken fern, he found a different smear — darker, not his. He followed it until the trees parted around a willow with lavender branches hanging to the ground. A red handprint was pressed into its bark, fingers splayed wide. She had leaned there. She was close. He parted the curtain of branches with the flat of his golden blade. She sat in the hollow of the roots, robe pulled open at the forearm, binding the cut he had given her. The dark dagger lay beside her hip, its gem dim, just out of her reach. Her falconbees were not with her. She had outrun them too. Her red eyes lifted to his and did not widen. She only smiled, tired, almost glad. He stepped in and swung. She rolled. The blade bit deep into the root where her throat had been. She caught the dagger left-handed and drove it up under his ribs as she came to her knees. He felt the cold open inside him. He twisted the golden sword free and brought it down again, and this time it met her shoulder and broke her grip on the hilt. The dagger fell into the moss between them. They both stared at it. He kicked it away. She lunged for it anyway and he ran her through. She folded over the blade without a sound, one hand closing on his wrist, the other reaching past him toward nothing. Her weight pulled him down to his knees with her. The willow's branches closed around them both. When he could move again, he pulled the sword free and she did not get up. The hunter was dead. Her dagger lay in his blood and hers, and somewhere far off, he heard the first confused wingbeat of a swarm without a master.