Thornwyn Mossbrook's Arc

Chapter 28 of 38

The footprints climbed a slope of black leaves. Thornwyn followed them with the staff braced under her arm. Her right leg dragged. The wound above her knee had stopped bleeding, but the skin around it burned hot through the wrap. Behind her, the chimera walked with the piebald deer laid across its back. The deer's eyes were open again. He watched her stumble and could not help. She made it fifty steps before her knee buckled. She caught herself on the staff and stayed there, bent over the wood, breathing through her teeth. Her magic was back. Her body was not. She had healed the deer and spent what little she had. There was nothing left in her to close her own leg or cool the fever crawling up her spine. She looked at the tracks. The girl's prints were fresh. Hours, not days. The dragging boot beside them had grown heavier, deeper on one side. The elf was worse. The girl was pulling him now. If Thornwyn kept walking, she would fall inside the hour. If she fell, no one would find her before dark. The girl would keep going west with a dying man and no one behind her. She turned to the chimera. "Kneel." It knelt. She unhooked the sling of moss and cloth holding the deer and eased him down beside her in the leaves. He tried to stand. His forelegs shook and folded. "Stay," she said. She put her hand on his neck until his head lowered. "You guard the ground. That is all." She pulled herself up the chimera's shoulder. Her arms did most of it. Her bad leg swung across the saddle and hung. She locked her hand in the mane and set the staff along her thigh. "Follow the small prints," she said. "Slow. If I let go, stop." The chimera rose. Its wolf eye found her face again and held. It stepped forward at a walk a child could match. Thornwyn pressed the staff to her thigh and spoke the binding word for pain. The word took. The fire behind her knee dulled to a low ache. She could not heal the wound. She could hold it quiet long enough to ride. She rode. The trees passed at the pace of the girl's footprints. The tracks turned along a fallen pine, then down toward the sound of water. A thin trail of blood marked one boot print, then the next. At the bottom of the slope, between two grey trunks, she saw a small figure crouched over a larger one. The girl looked up. Her face was streaked with dirt. Her hands were red to the wrists. The staff Thornwyn had given her lay in the moss beside the elf's chest, where the girl had used it to keep pressure on the wound. Thornwyn slid down from the chimera and crawled the last three steps.