Mercurial Page 8

  Tal’s brow crinkled more deeply. “You need me. To start a fire?”

  She narrowed her eyes. Was he mocking her? Or perhaps he didn’t know how to start a fire either. “Never mind,” she said shortly. “I’m certain I can figure it out.” She tossed the rabbit onto his lap, where it landed with a squelching sound. “While I do that—and find a passable place for us to weather the blizzard without freezing to death—you can put those blades to use and skin this.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she turned and marched away. The silence at her back lay heavy on her shoulders, which was how she knew he was staring after her. A thought struck her and she turned back. “Do you…you don’t know me, do you? Did we interact at all on the train? Or before that?” Perhaps that was why he was acting so standoffish. She tried to strangle the hope that bloomed in her chest—if he was acting standoffish because he knew her, and not because he didn’t know her, that hardly boded well—but hope was a weed hard to kill. She wanted to remember herself, even if it also meant remembering why this boy seemed to dislike her so much.

  But: “No,” Tal said, finality ringing in his voice. “We don’t know each other at all.”

  It turned out disappointment made a fine weed killer. “Of course.” She hesitated. “Do you remember where the train was going? Where it came from?” Maybe that could give her some hints, at least.

  He shifted, gritting his teeth at the pain the movement caused as his broken leg bent further beneath him.

  “You shouldn’t be moving around,” she interjected.

  “I’m fine,” he snapped.

  She crossed her arms and made ready to fire back a retort, but before she could, he held up the hare by its back legs. “I can’t skin a rabbit with a sword,” he said in a level, utterly emotionless tone that told her he must be feeling quite a lot of emotions indeed. “Give me your dagger.”

  Fear feathered along her spine. Her fingers curled, nails digging into her palms. “I’m not giving you my only weapon. How do I know you won’t turn on me while I’m defenseless—”

  “Defenseless?” he scoffed, incredulity breaking through his emotionless mask for a scant instant.

  She uncrossed her arms with a violent movement, true anger finally snapping to life within her. “Listen,” she hissed, stalking forward a step so she loomed over him, “I have been nothing but considerate to you. I could have left you here to die, and come back to steal your trousers when you were a frozen block in the bloody snow. Instead I offer you a portion of my hare, and a spot by the fire that I will figure out how to start, and am willing to build a shelter by myself that you may share, and you offer nothing in return except surliness and threats.”

  He dropped the hare back onto the snow. “I have never threatened you,” he said flatly.

  She snorted. “You threaten with your every glance. Your every word. You think I can’t see it in your eyes, hear it in the evenness of your voice? You are bitter. A rage stalks you that has nothing to do with me. So yes, of course, I suspect that you might stab me while I am defenseless and take for your own all of the things I have already freely offered to share.”

  He looked away and took a steadying breath. Then he gazed back at her, those green dark eyes a nameless accusation. “I will protect you, and not allow harm to come to you, and never harm you myself. Is that good enough for you?” Bitterness leeched every word drought-dry, revealing the bare bones of truth beneath. He didn’t like what he said, but he wasn’t lying.

  “I don’t know how you expect to ‘protect me’ in your condition,” she said, mollified slightly, “but I appreciate the sentiment.” She drew her dagger from its sheath and tossed it at him. Alarmed, he jerked sideways just in time to avoid being impaled by it. It made a crunching sound when it sank into the snow two inches from his neck. She tried to look regal and slightly intimidating, as if that had been exactly what she’d meant to do rather than an unthinking and nearly disastrous accident, and once again turned her back on him.

  Shelter. She needed to focus on finding a shelter.

  She scanned the landscape before her, focusing now not on the bodies but on the debris. There was one mostly-flat sheet of blackened metal not too far off that she could perhaps…lean up against another piece of metal? She shook her head, displeased with that idea. Even if she found a convenient coil of rope and more useable sheet metal, there was no way she would be able to build a passable lean-to in time. They needed something secure, and insulated if at all possible. Wind bit cold on her face already, flushing her skin, building to a low howl in the distance. Time was growing short.

  The mountainside sloped sharply downward not far away. She slogged her way through the snow, boots breaking through the crust every few steps, to get a better look at what lay below. Perhaps extra debris, or the rest of the train and more helpful survivors, might be down there. But when she reached the edge of the slope, what she saw was even better: a distant dark hole in the craggy mountainside that could only be a cave.

  Excellent. A cave would be both secure and insulated. But now that she’d solved one problem, another became more urgent. How was she to get Tal all the way down there? The slope was treacherously steep. If he tried to walk down, even with her helping, he was likely to injure himself even worse. And that was if they could make it in time without getting lost once the blizzard began in earnest.

  Maybe a crutch might make his descent safer. She turned in a slow circle, peering again at the debris field, searching this time for a rod or long piece of wood. Then her eyes fell once again to the mostly-flat sheet of metal she’d already collected. She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes, then walked up to it and gave it a light push. It moved easily across the snow. She grinned, and then began gathering wood.

  By the time she returned to Tal, she was proudly dragging the metal over the snow with a rope made of clumsily tied-together—and bloodstained—clothing. Atop her homemade sled was a stack of wood fragments she’d gathered from the debris: a bit of door panel here, a mostly-intact floorboard there. From the size of the pile she guessed it would hopefully last at least a few hours as firewood.

  She dropped the clothing-rope and gazed down at Tal. He’d been busy while she was gone. The rabbit had been not only skinned but carved apart, bones dropped in a pile and meat wrapped up in a bundle of fur. It was an impressive job—not that she was about to inform him of that—but also a messy one. The hare’s blood had gotten everywhere, including all over his trousers. Though of course she couldn’t be sure how much of that blood was the hare’s and how much was his.

  He hadn’t looked up yet from where he sat cleaning her dagger, though she had to assume he’d heard her approach.

  “I’ve found shelter,” she announced, raising her voice to be heard over the growing wind. “And transport. And firewood.”

  Tal looked at the sled. His eyes fell to the rope made of clothing and his lips tightened. “So you’re a corpse robber now.”

  “That’s what you’re worried about? How about the fact that we are about to become corpses if we don’t get moving?”

  He was still looking at the clothing. His gaze was intense, as if he were trying to pick out details in the bloodstained fabric. He hesitated then, looked at her and then away. “Is there…” He cleared his throat. “How many bodies?” he asked, sounding brisk and businesslike, which didn’t fool her at all.

  “Around a dozen, perhaps more,” she answered cautiously. “Surely you’re not squeamish? I thought you were a soldier, from the looks of you. You have to have seen dead bodies before. But if you like, you can close your eyes while I help you onto the sled.”

  “I am a bodyguard,” he said quietly, “and I have seen many dead bodies.”

  She turned around and gazed across the snow. She couldn’t see all of the bodies now, as the snow was falling more thickly, but she had a good eye for detail and had given each at least a cursory glance. She had begun to understand what Tal meant to ask, and decided to help him a
long. “You’re looking for someone. If you describe them to me, I can tell you whether they were among the bodies I searched.”

  He gritted his teeth. His jaw worked. He was trying very hard to say something difficult, or perhaps working to not say something. At last, he spoke. “She’s two years older than me. Brown skin. Long hair—” Here he stopped abruptly and took a deep breath before continuing, his hands curling into fists in the snow. “—short hair,” he corrected. “Dark brown eyes.”

  Elodie quickly shook her head. “No one like that was among the bodies.”

  Tal’s whole body sagged. He raised a hand as if to cover his eyes, but then saw how bloodied it was and dropped it back to his lap. “Then she may have made it back,” he said roughly, but his voice was still nearly as tense as before.

  Elodie finally asked the question that had been nagging at her. “Tal, what happened on that train?”

  He picked up the bundle of rabbit fur and meat and tucked it into his shirt. He rose up on his good knee, balancing with one hand on the ground and wincing as he tried to leverage himself up. “There was an explosion,” he said shortly. “It destroyed the dining car.”

  Elodie ducked down to help him, pulling his arm over her shoulders so she could support some of his weight. He went stiff but didn’t protest. “Do you know what caused it?”

  “No.”

  His answer was sharp in a way that told Elodie he didn’t want to talk about it further. She supposed he couldn’t be blamed for that. She helped him get to his feet, hunching her shoulders against the wind as she did so. When he tried to take a step, he let out a sharp breath and went alarmingly pale. He squeezed his eyes shut. Beneath her arm, he shuddered in pain.

  She tightened her hold on him, feeling strangely helpless once again. If only she had any medical knowledge at all, or even, she was willing to admit, a more keenly-tuned sense of empathy, she would be better at helping him. But no, she had to throw knives at him and accuse him of squeamishness.

  She could distract him from the pain, at least. “You said you were a bodyguard. So whose body did you guard?” She helped him take a hobbling step onto the sled, where he quickly sank down, resting his back against the wood pile. He didn’t answer her question; something else he didn’t want to discuss, apparently. She dropped the subject and gave up on her attempt at distraction. Instead, she grabbed a few pieces of less-bloody clothing that hadn’t been woven into the rope and dropped them on top of him like a blanket. He gave her a strange look.

  Feeling self-conscious, she shrugged. “The slope we’re going down is steep, and the wind is strong. You should stay warm.”

  He didn’t answer, but he did tug the clothing more snugly around himself.

  She grabbed the rope with her uninjured hand and started forward. The sled was heavier now with Tal on it, but she refused to be stymied, and threw all of her weight into dragging it toward the slope. By the time they reached it, the wind was nearly gale-force, and the snow blinded her to anything further than a few yards away.

  She pulled the sled to the very edge of the slope, tossed the rope onto the metal, then sat down in front of Tal. Then she waited. She hadn’t told Tal her plan yet, mostly because her plan involved travelling at inadvisably high speeds down a dangerously steep slope with no safety belts or braking mechanisms. Any moment now, he was going to question her wisdom. She readied her retort.

  Tal squinted past her. He exhaled, and he was close enough now that his warm breath brushed over her cheek before the wind snatched it away. “Where are we going?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard.

  “There’s a cave at the base of the slope.”

  He raised one eyebrow, still looking past her. “The very steep slope? That you are no doubt planning for us to career down, on a slab of decrepit metal, in the midst of a blinding blizzard?”

  She drew herself up to sit straighter and raised her own voice above the wind. “I know exactly where the cave is, if you are insinuating that I’m going to get us lost. And it’s not the ‘midst’ of the blizzard. It hasn’t even truly gotten started yet.”

  “But you have no answer to the ‘decrepit metal’ or ‘career down’ accusations.”

  Her lips thinned out, and she inhaled to begin her prepared arguments. But before she could, he brusquely shook his head and leaned back against the wood. “It’s not as if I’ll dissuade you,” he said.

  She smiled. “Quite true.”

  His gaze lingered on her expression for a long moment before he looked away, that expressionless mask of his firmly back in place.

  She stuck out one leg and pushed to move the sled forward until they were teetering on the edge of the slope. The world lay before her, veiled thickly in snow. An unfamiliar exhilaration juddered through her bones as the sled slowly tipped beneath her. The world seemed to hold its breath; everything was frozen and glittering and full of possibility. And then they tilted all the way forward, and flew.

  The wind was a roaring beast, flinging snow like grit against her skin, frosting her lips and cheeks. The landscape was a cacophony of gray and white and speed. She squinted through the ice that had begun to coat her eyelashes, trying to keep her gaze—and the sled—trained on the spot where the cave was bored into the mountainside. Behind her, the wood rattled in its pile, and a few pieces slipped out before Tal threw out an arm to secure the rest.

  The exhilaration strengthened. She felt odd up here—deliciously powerful and utterly out of control at the same time. The feeling was alien but amazing. A wild laugh rioted its way out of her, and then she gave in wholly and whooped a shouted cheer.

  The sled began to twist sideways. Behind her, Tal growled a curse and thrust one arm down into the snow to try to slow them and right their angle of descent. But they were moving too fast, and the effort nearly tore him from his seat.

  Elodie risked taking her eyes off their path to throw a glance back to her passenger. “Stop that!” she shouted. “You’ll hurt yourself!”

  “I am aware,” he called through gritted teeth, and did not withdraw his hand.

  He began to slip sideways. Elodie quickly calculated their trajectory and speed. They were quite close to the cave now, and although they’d slowed somewhat, if Tal fell off he was certain to further worsen his injuries. With her own shouted curse, she made a decision.

  Letting go of the rope that she’d been clutching, she lunged backwards, wrapping her arms around Tal. The movement sent the sled into a wild spin that flung them both off—but she twisted around so that she hit the snow first, with him landing atop her, cushioned from the worst of the blow.

  They skidded down the slope, with Elodie just barely managing to avoid a head-over-heels tumble that would surely harm Tal. He was rigid in her arms, so much that she worried the crash had already jarred him into further injury. She dug the heels of her boots into the snow to slow them down until they finally came to a halt. The mountainside loomed only a few yards away, a slab of slate gray through the sheet of blowing snow. The cave was a dark, gaping maw in its side.

  “What,” said Tal, in a low and dangerous voice, “are you doing?”

  She eased him off of her and stood up, brushing the snow from her clothes before it could melt through. “Saving your life,” she snapped, exasperated. “Again. Though I suspect I’d be a fool to expect gratitude.”

  “Stop touching me.”

  “Of course, I will respect your wishes,” she bit out, raising her voice to be heard above the wind. “Enjoy walking the rest of the way to the cave by yourself on a broken leg.”

  She glanced around for the sled. It was coming to a stop not too far away, but all of their precious firewood was now scattered across the lower third of the slope. She’d have to hurry in order to gather it back up before the weather buried it or made navigation impossible. Then she squinted, pausing in her assessment. A smear of red was moving across the snow. A fox—rusty-crimson, with patches of white winter fur coming in—was darting away. The bundle of har
e meat dangled from its mouth.

  “No!” Elodie shouted, charging through the snow at the creature. She waved her arms madly, hoping to scare it away. “Drop that this instant!” The recalcitrant fox did not obey, instead breaking into a faster lope, and within moments vanished within the veil of the oncoming blizzard.

  Elodie stormed back to where Tal was attempting to ease himself to standing. He didn’t look up at her, only asked, “Am I correct in assuming that fox just made off with our entire store of food?”

  “Yes. I despise wildlife.”

  He nodded and continued trying to push himself off the snow. His face was grim and beaded with sweat. She wasn’t sure what that indicated, but knew enough to understand that sweating in a snowstorm couldn’t possibly be a good sign. Frustrated with his obstinance, she thought quickly, trying to come up with some way to convince him to allow her to help. Earlier he had sworn to protect her, to allow no harm to come to her. She had no real reason to trust that he’d meant what he said—people were untrustworthy in general, and as prone to betrayal as that thieving fox—but somehow, she had a suspicion this boy put a high value on duty. Which was sheer foolishness, in her opinion, but she could use it to both their advantage now.

  “You vowed to protect me,” she said, crossing her arms. “You can hardly accomplish that if you insist on dragging yourself through the snow without assistance, likely worsening your injury even further. You need to be in as good a shape as possible to defend my person.”

  He paused. His jaw tensed and his hands curled into fists, as if he were fighting something internal. Then he let out a long breath and slumped. “It seems I have no choice.”