Shadeborn: A Book of Underrealm Read Free

his eyes fixed on hers, until she turned her gaze away.
    “His corpse was a league south of the village when we found it. He lay facedown, head turned to the side, eyes open and staring. There was no blood in his spittle, but it had greatly frothed and gathered around his lips.”
    Loren swallowed, knowing what would come next: the tale of his wound, the one that had slain him, there in the same forest where they now sat. Chet watched, gauging her reaction while she kept her face still.
    “He had bled to death; we could see it at once. Though the fletching had broken from the arrow, the shaft still stuck from his thigh. It had hit a vein or nicked it as he crawled, and the lifeblood had drained from his body. Its trail stretched far south, mayhap half a league. We followed it and found the signs of a struggle. Between him and, I guessed, you, but also a third person we did not know. I thought it might have been the wizard sought by the constables.”
    “You were right in that,” said Loren, glad her voice left steady and not in a croak. “That was Xain. My father nearly strangled the life from him.”
    “He would have had you not stopped him,” said Chet quietly. “And he might have killed you, too.”
    Loren remembered the fight as though it were happening again, the spite that filled her father’s eyes, the spittle that left his lips with every hateful word. Now she imagined him crawling north after the fight, the shaft protruding from his flesh, life soaking the dirt beneath him. She saw him shuddering and convulsing as he finally died, and wondered if he had spent his final words cursing her; his flesh and blood, whom he had never given anything so wasteful as love.
    “Likely my words cannot help you. But you should not blame yourself, Loren. You restrained your hand beyond all reason. You might have planted your arrow in his eye, or his heart. You did not. You tried to show mercy. And mayhap, if he had stayed where he was, he would not have died in the end.”
    But Loren knew better, remembering when she would chop her father’s logs how he would employ threats to make her work faster. And she remembered how, if he thought she were being lazy or disobedient, he would take her into the woods and beat her, his thick and meaty fists leaving bruises beneath her clothing that would linger for weeks. And she remembered going back to chopping his logs, gripping the axe tightly in her hands and picturing it lodged in his skull, or in his back, between the ribs to still his heart forever.
    Loren’s breath rose ever faster with her racing thoughts. One after another flashed through her mind: the corpse, the arrow, the axe and the corpse, the spittle and the blood. Again, the corpse.  
    Then the corpse became Jordel’s, and she saw the Mystic’s twisted body sprawled upon the valley floor.
    Loren fought her vomit and fell doubled up on hands and knees.
    “Loren!” Chet kneeled beside her side and placed a hand on her shoulder. She pushed him off, breathing faster until stars danced before her eyes and her head was spinning. She lifted her gaze to stare upon the sky but could see only black where there should have been blue.  
    Black and blue, like my bruises.
    She screamed and slammed a fist into the earth. She struck again, and again. Her fist flew sideways, into the boulder. Her knuckles split and spilled an ugly gush of blood.
    Pain gave her focus, and Loren clutched her hand close. At last she could sit back without her gorge rising. Rage turned to hot, bitter tears, leaving trails of grief upon her cheeks. Chet sat with an arm around her shoulder, the other cradling her mangled hand.
    “It was not your fault,” he kept murmuring. “It was not your fault.”
    Soon, she felt herself regain some control. As she had so often, Loren took her rage and grief and hid them deep, inside her soul where no one could see. At last she looked up at Chet with a wan smile.  
    “I am all right,” she said softly. “Come.