Page 82 of Cursed Shadows 4

The slicking noise tacking to my every limb is wretched. Like peeling off a bandage from a festered wound. Like honey stuck on the fingertips.

But it is me, rolling through a mud bog soaked with the blood of the mountain’s victims.

I feel the warmth of it soaking against my face as I roll, it pushes up my nostrils, forces its way into my mouth.

I steel myself against the rising nausea.

I can break down when I reach safety.

I can weep when I am safe.

I roll back to the slope I came down. My only route out of here is to climb and claw my way back up to the forest floor.

Father will be watching.

He might even be proud.

Proud that I roll, that I remember his lessons, that those very teachings save me. And they do.

I roll all the way to the edge of the bog, close enough to the slope that I can reach out and claw my fingers into the moist earth of the hill—and not even the gloves can protect my nails from tugging.

If Father is proud, then Pandora might be the one who carries the stunned silence. Neither of them had any faith in me.

Not to get ahead of myself, since there is more time out here to survive, and who knows how long it will take until the mountain chucks us back through space and time to where we belong, or the iilra pull us out if their grip on the portal weakens. I could be here another minute, then gone, or another week, then dead.

But I know one thing.

Father and Pandora never expected me to survive as long as I have, and not in the way I have either. I haven’t hidden. I have been a target, time and time over, I have faced threats, escaped them, defeated them.

I feel the weight of that lift off of me as I claw up the slope.

It’s only when my boots are free from the mud that I pause, just to rest my head on the soil, fingers dug into the dewy earth.

I sag.

For a long moment, I slouch against the slope, boots and hands dug into the mud, and I tuck my chin down. I hide my relieved sobs from the spectators.

I cry into the soil.

20

††††††

I am coated, head to toe.

Every strand of my hair is slicked in the bog’s blood, a red so dark that it shines black as tar when the mists dim the mountain.

Looks like I’ve soaked myself in a bath of thick merlot. Only it’s not merlot. It’s blood, and I can still taste the metallic edge to it, the hot and thick rush of it down my throat when I first landed.

Every prickle of my flesh aches to wash it off, to find a nearby stream and scrub myself raw with a rock.

But I can’t.

I shouldn’t.

It is an advantage, a camouflage to wear, the death and mud of dead blood having lost all its scent, and now I smell like any other damp patch of earth or corpse left to rot.

I wear it all over me, coating my face and neck and hair and armour and boots.

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