Page 21 of Cursed Shadows 4

The scratch of a sturdy branch strikes my neck, then hooks on a braid plaited to my scalp—my head snaps back.

My mouth circles a grated gasp. Hands flail, as if to reach up and grab the now-broken branch that falls with me. But all I manage to do is flail.

I don’t know how far from the ground I fall, if it really was from above the clouds.

I just know that I hit the earth,hard.

The impact punches the air out of me and reverberates through my bones. My spine is screaming, my ribs are thrumming. The backpack digs into me in all the wrong angles, and I choke on a breath that doesn’t come.

Snow has lifted up around me. I’m submerged in white dust, disturbed. The icy sprinkle of it peppers my twisted face. My lips part on the gasp for a breath. No sound comes.

Silent, my back arches against the burn of my starved lungs, and it’s all I can do to writhe mutely until the cold, sharp air sucks into me.

The warmth of the gloves protects my hands as they fist in the icy foliage. Lamely, I squirm, a mouse poisoned and too close to the end.

Ears ringing, still I hear the echo—the shouts and grunts and cries of the other contenders. Fae landing on the mountain, some I suspect with broken bones, others straight into a fight.

I have no fight in me.

My fingers clutch onto the remnants of earth. I feel the crunch of the light snow, the creak of the soft, stretched branches beneath me, the patches of dead, dried dirt packed under the weight of my body.

But I can see.

And for that, I am mildly grateful.

I stare above at the tree looming over me. It is raining. Chunks of snow floating down to me.

I blink.

A frown is slow to knit onto my face.

Then I realise, I slammed into a branch during my fall, hard enough that the wood broke and fell with me. Now, from its mother-tree, a hunk of dead leaves and snow rains down on me.

It dusts me.

Coats me.

Freezesme.

A grunt balls in my throat. Teeth bared against the burn of my lungs, I roll onto my side. Then—

I’m limp again.

My temple sinks onto the cold ground. I stare ahead—and see the slope of the mountain at an angle that my ankles ache in response at the mere sight of it.

But the prospect of rolled ankles aren’t my concern right now.

Where I landed, it’s midway on the mountain, or lower down than that, maybe. If I was high up, the snow would be thicker, it would cover the dead, brown dirt and hide all the soil’s cracks in a perfect sheet of fluffy white, or I would be slumped on a sheet of ice ready to splinter under my pressing weight.

There is no ice supporting me. And the snow is peppered around, some patches thicker than others, some melted and watery, like a poorly tended garden in an old, rundown manor in the midst of winter, or a sludgy village road that—with one wrong step—has folk flying and skidding all over.

I must be far down the mountain, far from the summit.

I can’t yet decide if that is a good thing or not. I don’t know where Dare has landed, and he’s supposed to be the one to hunt me, to find me faster than the others. For all I know, he’s landed at the top, and it’ll take him weeks to get to me. Or Rune has landed just behind me, and with that, I’m captured.

Either way, I am cursed.

An ache starts to sear the deep muscles of my shoulder. I have laid on my side too long. I let the burn ease in my lungs, feel the loosening of their constrictions.

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