The Darkangel Read Free

her flesh. The ground was in motion beneath her, slipping, sliding. The icarus was already far away, a dark blot against the stars. She glimpsed the shadow of his dozen wings very small against Oceanus.
    "Eoduin! Eoduin!" she started to cry; then her head struck ground with a sickening jolt.
    The back of her skull went numb. All the sky was white stars for a moment. Her scalp felt wet and warm. Then suddenly the brightness dimmed. "Eoduin," she heard herself breathe, barely, once, just before all the light in the world went out.
    Aeriel licked her lips and burned her tongue on the sweetness of horn liquor. She was lying on hard, sloping ground. Jagged pebbles pressed into her back like great pus-pox, hurting her. She could feel the goatskin bottle on her chest and the warmth on her cheek and throat where it had splashed out, spilling. She was lying on the slope, her head lowest, her feet uphill from her: her toes were numb. All this she knew without opening her eyes.
    She opened them slowly, saw the star-littered sky above through the slight glare of sun in her eyes. She tried to move and found it hard, very hard. Her head came away sticky from the ground with a soreness that made her feel sick and stupid. She got one elbow under her and propped herself up, gazed straight at Oceanus, a huge and constant blue with no shadow of wings across it now.
    She said, "Eoduin," and wept, but she was too weak to weep much.
    Her hand was cold. All her body was warm in the sun, but her left hand was cold: she looked at it presently and saw that the shadow of a boulder down the slope had crept across it. That frightened her. She snatched it from the shadow and sat up, twisted around—too quickly. Her temples pounded; she felt the blood running out of her head, and blotches of darkness wandered across the stars.
    Solstar was setting. She could see it as her vision cleared. It was barely three degrees above the horizon—and that would diminish as she descended the mountain. She twisted her head around the other way. The pain increased sharply at the sudden move. She could already see the shade of night across the desert to the west. She had two hours, maybe less, to get back to the village by nightfall. With the wedding procession about to begin, who would miss one little slave?
    She chafed the leaden, cold-bitten hand in her lap and felt nothing. It was numb. She groped for the flask at her neck: yes, there was a little of the liquor left. She poured the bright liquid out onto her limp, waxy hand, then grimaced, rocked in pain as the heat soaked through the frostbite, burned to the bone and then to the marrow. As the heat diminished and was gone, color returned to her hand; she could move it.
    She got to her knees and then to her feet, took a step, stumbled and fell. She got up again and started down the slope. The soreness in her head was mostly dull, but when she missed her footing and staggered, the pain stabbed. She clung to the rocks of the mountainside, to the scrubweed, to the crannies. She raked her arm on bell-thorn and scraped her knuckles raw when she slipped. Twice the winding trail crumbled beneath her feet and fell away down the mountainside like a tiny meteor shower. And always the sun sank lower as she descended the steep, and the shadows lengthened. The air grew warmer and thicker: her breathing eased.
    Solstar had halfway sunk into the Sea-of-Dust by the time she heard the marriage hymns drifting up into the foothills on the soft plains wind. Strange. It seemed strange after the airless, muted steeps that here below, still a quarter-mile from the village, she could hear the singing so distinctly so far away. She listened to the words floating in the long, harsh twilight.
    Farra atwei, farra atwei. Narett, miri umni hardue __.
    Here in the foothills, just coming into the village, the path was much broader, smoother, less steep. She had come this way a dozen times: up to the spring to catch minnows, up to play in the caves