Page 28 of Great Falls Cadet
“Leralynn?” Dropping to one knee beside her, Coal surveyed the girl’s face.
Color high but decent, eyes sharp, lips pink. He had to be missing something—she was strong, one of only a handful of people who’d been able to keep up with him. If she crashed this suddenly,somethinghad happened.
“Talk to me, Lera,” Coal ordered, his eyes intent on hers.
Twisting away from his gaze, Lera bent double, dry-heaving into the earth. “Please,” she whimpered between bouts of coughing, her body trembling like a newborn foal’s. “Can’t. Just. One. Breath.”
Coal’s gaze narrowed. Where the hell did that one-word speech come from? She’d said “One moment, sir,” easily enough—why would she find it harder to speak now? Coal’s attention shifted to Lera’s chest, its rise and fall steady enough.
Something cold slithered through Coal’s core. In all his years as a soldier, Coal had pushed himself and others enough to learn the breaking points. Knew enough to stop pushing a hair before such a point was reached.
And he sure as hell knew when someone was lying.
A simmer of heat started in Coal’s blood, spreading like a crack in a glass through every fiber of his body. His jaw tightened, his fists clenching in a fury to rival the coming rain. Leralynn waslyingto him. Playing him. As she had all damn day—sparring with him, forcing his guard down with every parry and thrust, all but goading him into taking their run farther. Until now. The girl was no more at endurance’s end than she’d been minutes earlier, her elaborate show merely a way to buy time while she marked the land as carefully as a cartographer.
Yes, she’d found something. Perhaps the very something that had her climbing over the wall last night, a sword at her back.
Coal followed her gaze, still seeing nothing of particular interest except perhaps a set of switchback tracks. No, Coal didn’t know what the bloody hell Lera sought, but he knew when he was being toyed with. And that Lera was doing it dug so painfully into him that bile rose up Coal’s throat.
“What’s wrong?” Coal demanded, his voice low. One last chance for Lera to give him the truth.
“Can’t. Breathe.”
Coal’s jaw tightened, the chill in him turning into crackling ice. An idiot. He’d been an idiot, while River has seen the woman for what she was. The first time since the western isles that he’d loosened a part of himself with anyone but River and Shade, and this was what he got. Deceit. Like that of another woman who’d once brushed Coal’s soul.
Something inside Coal snapped, as clear and loud as a branch beneath a careless boot.
Grabbing Lera’s nape, Coal forced her to her feet, the woman’s stagger damn believable except for the spice of excitement, not misery, spicing her lilac scent. When she tried to mutter something Coal couldn’t bear hearing, he tightened his grip to the edge of pain. If Leralynn wanted to play games, he would ensure there was no need for feigning distress.
6
Lera
Ifound it, I found it, I found it.
As Coal pushes me on, I mark every landmark in sight, the path back to the shattered tablet—only one steep gulley away—dimming all the world to irrelevance. My heart pounds, the tendrils of hope sending new energy through my body.
Even as Coal leads me back into the thicker part of the forest, away from that clicking aspen grove shimmering on the next hillside over, I keep the image in my mind, tracing our route to get back to the tracks. With the weather threatening to turn, I’ll have to go out tonight. Even if it means swallowing my pride now.
“On your back. Legs six inches up.” Coal’s icy voice hauls me back to reality. Face unreadable, the male points to a shallow, fast-running stream—an offshoot of the Great Falls waterfall a mile off. The riffle is just over a pace wide, small stones agitating the rushing water to a white foam.
I wave away the buzzing mayflies, trying to make sense of the order.
Instead of explaining, Coal sweeps the back of my knee, only his quick grip on my tunic stopping me from cracking my head open as I fall into the stream. The freezing water is upon me at once, clawing my lungs and face and thighs. Taking my breath. My muscles seize, the shock of it jerking me up, only to have Coal shove me right back into the water.
I fight to draw air, freezing liquid rushing over me, jetting into my mouth and nose and ears. I spit, my heels pounding the stream as Coal holds me down, my head downstream of my body. The water turns to needles, my constricted lungs screaming. I gasp for air, able to draw none into my shaking body. When I finally do, it flows together with the rushing stream.
I choke, my heart pounding, driving panic though my blood. Bile and spit and water climb up my throat. My thrashing limbs make turning my head into an unbearable effort, even when Coal’s hand lifts from my chest to let me retch.
“Are you—” My tongue is too thick for my mouth, the words possible only from fury alone. “Are you insane?”
Coal crouches beside my head, his beautiful, chiseled face as hard as I’ve ever seen it, the graying sky reflecting in his blue eyes. “Do I have your attention now?” he asks, his low voice a deadly rumble. “On your back. Feet six inches off the earth. I don’t give a damn what you do with your head, but if you get up before I tell you to, you’ll be doing this with my hand pressed down on your sternum.”
My mind spins, finding no logic. No footing.
Swallowing my curses together with rushing water, I hold Coal’s gaze as I surrender to whatever this is. Lie in the stream. Keep my legs up as water weights down my boots. Try to keep from choking on the rushing stream.
Ten seconds. Thirty. A minute. Until not even anger can warm me, despair rushing in to fill the void. My body numbs, my muscles shaking against the hard rushing stream. I can’t do it. It isn’t bloody fair, and I can’t do it. And—my head goes under, the water rushing gleefully into my mouth. Deeper. Into my throat and up my nose, pounding against my clamped vocal cords.
