Chained Soul by Eva Chase
21
Talia
At his lord and brother’s call, August jolts forward a step before he glances at me, his eyes wide, torn between staying with me and defending the rest of his people. The guards are already dashing to Sylas’s aid. August’s lips pull back in a snarl of frustration.
“Stay here,” he orders both Madoc and me. “Keep out of sight.” Then he charges into the fog with the others.
He reaches them not a moment too soon, from what I can tell. Grunts and groans and snarls are filtering through the haze—the battle already sounds desperate.
I strain my neck to see around the side of the carriage, but even that tiny motion sets off a wave of pain through my body. It condenses in the middle of my abdomen, right between my heart and my stomach, and continues to radiate in a steady, searing pulse.
“What’s going on?” I ask, my voice coming out ragged.
Madoc frowns, peering into the fog. “I don’t know.” At a yelp and a raven-ish shriek that carries from the fray, he winces. His fingers tighten where he’s still gripping my arm.
All at once, he tugs me farther around the back of the carriage, where I won’t be able to see anything at all. His breath is coming fast.
Panic lances through the pain inside me. “Are they heading this way?”
“Not yet, but if they can cut through your fae to get to you, they will.” His eyes dart to the trees around us, his mouth pressing flat, and my muddled mind pieces together one clear thought.
It’s the Murk. My mates and their warriors have been ambushed by rat shifters. Who else could it be? Why would any of the fae of the Mists want to prevent me from being healed?
“They’ll look for you at the carriage first,” Madoc says, his expression hardening as if he’s made a difficult decision. “We can’t stay here—we can’t take the chance.”
He wraps his arm right around me, easing my own arm across his shoulders so that he can support my weight. I stumble across the ground next to him, barely able to control my steps. Every press of my feet against the forest floor sends fresh knives up through my thighs and belly.
I grit my teeth against a cry that might bring the attackers straight to us. A hiss still escapes me.
“I’m sorry,” Madoc mutters. Then he scoops me right off the ground, tucking me close against his chest. His stormy scent fills my nose, matching the furor in his eyes.
He hurries several paces away from the carriage to a spot where a few trees stand close enough together to provide a decent amount of shelter. There, he lowers me so I can lean against the trunks. He pauses for a moment to touch my cheek, gazing into my eyes as if trying to read just how much distress I’m in.
“I’ll get you away from here—back to your Heart,” he says. “I won’t let them hurt you more. I wish— That’s the only thing I can do.”
He turns and starts to intone magical words under his breath, spreading his hands over the damp earth. Pebbles and twigs jitter and dart across the ground to combine into a heap beneath his palms. More and more come, along with clumps of mud and bits of bark—a mess of debris that makes no sense to me.
Pain stabs through my gut, and I muffle another gasp. My jaw is aching from how tightly I’m clenching it. I close my eyes, trying to think myself away from the growing agony, to run somewhere inside myself where I can avoid the need to scream and sob with it.
A shudder wracks my body. I start to slump to the side, my muscles refusing to hold me up. My back scrapes across the trunk as I topple.
At the squeak that slips from my lips, Madoc whirls around. He catches me just before my head smacks into the dirt. As he eases me upright, his arms slide around me again, and for a moment he just hugs me. I tip my head against his shoulder, a whimper working its way up my throat despite my best efforts.
“I’ve got you,” he says, his voice raw. “You’ll get through this. You’re too fucking strong for Orion to get the better of you—I know it.”
In that moment, I can’t say I know it. I feel as if I’m already unraveling, sheared into slivers of myself as I do.
Madoc keeps me nestled against his body as he swivels back to his work. I tense and shiver with a sharper hail of pain, and he alternates between the words of magic he’s chanting and murmurs of reassurance.
When the agony eases back briefly, I manage to glance over to the heap he was conjuring. Except now I can see it’s not just a heap or a mess.
The pebbles and twigs and the rest have assembled into the vague shape of a boat—so narrow only one person could sit in any part, only maybe five feet long but growing as Madoc continues working his magic.
Of course. He wouldn’t be able to direct the Seelie carriage or Corwin’s Unseelie vehicle with his magic, so he’s making one of his own. The Murk I talked to in the Refuge did say they’d found their own way of traveling quickly through the Mists.
“It’ll only take another minute or two before it’ll fly,” Madoc says before taking up his incantation again. The strain the hasty magic is taking on him carries through his tone and the flexing of his muscles where I’m pressed against his solid frame.
He’s barely added to his carriage when footsteps and shouts ring out closer behind us. I flinch in Madoc’s arms instinctively before I recognize August’s voice, rough with worry. “Talia! Talia, where are you?”
“We’re here!” I call back, the words coming out more a croak than anything else. But August hears me. He races over, twigs crackling in his wake.
Madoc stands to meet him, setting me on my feet but keeping me close against him for support. He’s just straightened up when August reaches us, my other mates and a few of the guards right behind me.
August’s eyes are wild, blood streaking past one of them from a cut on his forehead. Corwin is bleeding too, from a wound on his shoulder that I only catch the ache of now that I’m seeing it, I was so lost in my own pains. That’s all I have time to take in before Whitt is springing at us, wrenching me from Madoc’s grasp.
As he gathers me against him, the other men stalk toward Madoc, who backs away with his hands raised and his face paling.
“You set them up to be ready for us,” Sylas growls. “And then you thought you’d steal away our mate?”
No, that isn’t what happened at all. I try to speak, but as I open my mouth, the curse erupts through my torso, and all that comes out is a squeal of pain.
My mates are already lunging at Madoc. He shoots a frantic glance at me and then springs away, transforming into his rat form in midair and dashing between the trees to vanish into the haze. August moves to sprint after him, his shoulders hunching with the start of his transformation, but just then one of the Seelie carriages soars into view.
“My lord,” one of the warriors on it calls out, his arm hanging limp at his side.
“We have to go,” Sylas barks, and August draws up short. The Seelie arch-lord raises his voice to echo through the hazy woods. “But the treacherous rat should know that if he shows one whisker around my domain again, he’ll be torn to pieces, along with any others of his kind.”
No. This isn’t right. I shake my head against Whitt’s chest as he hefts me into the carriage, but he doesn’t understand.
“It’s all right now, mite,” he whispers in my ear in a soothing tone. “We’ve got to get you out of here before the Murk follow us. They won’t venture far from the fringes.” He looks past me to the arch-lords who’ve just climbed in, the carriage jolting forward the second they’re inside. “He was fashioning a vehicle of his own, did you see?” he says to them, his tone sharpening. “Heart only knows where he was planning on taking her.”
Home, I think. He was only going to take me home where I’d be safe. But the pain is jumbling my mind too much for me to form any kind of coherent speech. I can barely even follow what’s happening around me.
The Murk attacked. My mates and the guards fended them off—but not completely. Only enough to come for me and escape? All of them are bleeding here and there—there’s a warrior slumped in the bottom of the carriage with one of the healers murmuring hastily over her—a few snarls still echo out of the fog. Are we leaving people behind? That’s not right. That’s not—
The next searing blade cuts right through my chest down to my core, and a scorching blaze of agony explodes in my belly. The scream I’ve been bottling up for so long rips out of me. I double over in Whitt’s arms, my muscles quaking, cramps burning all through my abdomen. They throb on and on and—
Whitt makes a choked sound, his arms going rigid around me. “We need the healers with Talia. Right now. Please…”
There’s something horrifyingly desperate in his voice, but I don’t really understand. Nothing’s changed—nothing’s worse than it was before, is it? He only hates seeing me in so much agony. He only—
The world tilts as gentle hands come to rest on my belly and my thighs. I become vaguely aware that something down there is… wet. The fabric of my dress, sticking damply to my skin. What—?
As my eyes pop open, the three healers who made it onto this carriage weave their voices together in a single chorus. I stare at the place where they’re touching me, where the pain rakes its claws through me again—and all I can think is that I might as well already be dead, the way I look. How can they fix this?
There’s blood on me. So much blood, spreading all through the skirt of my dress even as I watch, pooling beneath me on the cushions.
How can— No one cut me. Has the curse slashed through something deep inside me?
Then, as the healers’ increasingly ragged voices swell around us, as August reaches to squeeze my shoulder with a shaking hand and stark horror reverberates through my bond with Corwin, understanding hits me.
I’mnot dead. I’m losing the other life I was growing inside me.
No. No!I rally against the realization with everything I have in me—but almost everything in me is agony.
The curse’s endless blades pierce my lungs, my heart, and then my mind, and the world around me blinks away into nothingness.
