Chương 59: Love or Not?

POV: Evelisse Ardentia Gamdes came into view through the thinning cloud, and it looked exactly as I remembered it. It rose alone out of the foothills, a single great peak. The base was still swallowed in dark evergreen, the forest climbing the lower slopes in a dense green skirt. Higher up were grey scree, and higher still the grey went white, snow clinging to the upper reaches year-round. Above all of it, the summit sat wrapped in shrouds of cloud.

The Rosemarots grew in the middle section, and Gamdes was one of only three peaks where the conditions ever came together. That was what made Rosemarots so rare and valuable; they were often used as the key material for the highest-quality potions that were said to be able to cure even fatal wounds. I had come here once before, years ago, under the Church's banner.

I remembered the way the air thinned as you climbed, the particular hush that fell once you passed the treeline, the care you had to take not to drift too high. It felt strange to be approaching it again like this. No banner. No orders. A demon carrying me instead of the Church's party.

"We're close," Nyx said, over the wind.

"Where should we land?"

"We should land in the mid-slopes. The Rosemarots should be there. Though, they might be quite hidden." Nyx angled us down toward the band of open rock above the treeline, and a few moments later, our feet met solid ground. She let go of me and stepped back. We'd landed exactly where I'd hoped. The last of the forest ended maybe fifty paces below us, the tall firs thinning into stunted, wind-warped scrub, and above that was nothing but open slope. The cold hit differently up here than it had lower down.

Not the sharp, biting kind. It was a thin, restless chill that the wind carried in gusts, and beneath it, oddly, a faint warmth. If I crouched and pressed my palm flat to the stone, I knew I'd feel it; the low, buried heat that seeped up through Gamdes from somewhere far below, the reason anything grew here at all. Cold air above, warm ground beneath. The strange in-between the Rosemarots needed.

The wind was steady and loud, worrying at my hair and the hem of my clothes, carrying the clean mineral smell of high places and, underneath it, something faintly sulfurous from the earth. There were no birds. I had put on a cloak before coming here, yet Nyx came here in her relatively thin clothing. She was not showing any sign of discomfort, too, which I found myself admiring. I pulled my cloak a little tighter and scanned the slope.

"They grow low, in the cracks of the bigger rocks," I said.

"We'll have to go slowly and check as we climb." I glanced up the slope, toward where the grey gave way to white and cloud.

"And we stay below that line. Whatever's up there, we don't want to meet it." Nyx followed my gaze, then looked back at me, unbothered.

"Then let's find your flowers and go." The terrain wasn't easy to cross, but it wasn't punishing either. Loose scree that shifted underfoot, the odd stretch where I had to pick my footing carefully between larger stones, but nothing I couldn't manage. I kept my eyes moving as I climbed, scanning the cracks between rocks, the hollows in the lee of the bigger boulders, anywhere where the grey-green stems might be hiding.

Nyx searched too, at first on foot, then after a while of picking across the uneven ground, she gave up and simply drifted low above the slope instead, skimming from rock to rock without touching down. We'd been working our way upward for some time when she spoke.

"Hey." She didn't look up, her attention on a cluster of cracks near the base of a boulder.

"Why did you help us?"

"You mean…why I turned against the Church?"

"I know that part's because of Milo." She said it plainly, like a fact already settled.

"I'm asking why him, specifically. Was it just that he pulled you out from under the Cerberus once? You feel you owe him?" I turned. She was still floating, still combing through the rocks nearby, not looking at me. And I found I couldn't answer. Which should have been simple. I'd made my choice. I didn't want him to die. That much I knew all the way down. But why? Back in Eremiah, I'd laid nearly all of it out for sis and Mel, and I still hadn't been able to put a name to the thing at the center of it.

I'd told them what I kept telling myself: love doesn't arrive this fast, so it couldn't be that. I didn't want it to be that. But if it wasn't, then what was it? Was it genuinely something I couldn't understand, or just something I kept refusing to look at directly? Nyx turned in the air and fixed her eyes on me.

"Do you love him? Is that it? Is that why you can't leave him be?"

"I—" The word rose right up to the edge of my mouth. Love. And then it stopped there, and wouldn't come. Nyx let out a breath. I couldn't tell whether she was frustrated with how long I was taking, or whether she'd worked out something I hadn't and disliked the answer she'd reached.

"... This is going to take a while, isn't it," she said. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. She sank down out of the air, landed a few paces off, and walked over until she was standing right in front of me. Then she jabbed a finger against my chest.

"Listen to me. Sort this out, whatever it is. Because if you don't, it's going to get messy."

"Messy how?"

"How do you think?" She dropped the hand.

"You'll start doubting yourself. You already are. And once you're not sure what you feel, someone else stops being sure of you too. Then there's distance where there wasn't any. Small at first. Then a misunderstanding, because neither of you will say the plain thing, and an opening like that never stays empty for long. Something always comes along to fill it." She held my eyes.

"And I promise you won't enjoy what does." A chill went through me that had nothing to do with the wind.

"You're saying a lot," I managed, "for…something that's my business."

"It stops being only your business the moment we're all relying on you." Her voice didn't soften, but it lost its edge.

"You're going to be standing next to hi—us in the next fight. I can't have someone at my side who freezes up because she's spent the whole time tangled in a question she won't answer. I bet it had happened before during your last fight against the current Hero." I opened my mouth to argue and found I couldn't. She was right. That half-second I'd faltered, when Ywain had leaned in and whispered. It had nearly cost me everything.

"I'm not telling you what the answer has to be," Nyx went on.

"Maybe it's love. Maybe it's guilt, or that ridiculous sense of justice you carry around. I don't care which." She turned back toward the rocks, the conversation apparently reaching its limit.

"I only care that you know it. Because a person who knows exactly why she's doing a thing doesn't hesitate. And a person who hesitates in the wrong second gets the people beside her killed." She drifted back up off the ground and resumed her search as though she hadn't said any of it. I stood there a moment longer, the wind pulling at my hair. Do you love him? The honest answer was that I didn't know, and Nyx had just made it very clear that I could not avoid answering that anymore.

I turned back to the rocks and kept looking, though my mind was no longer entirely on the flowers. We'd been combing the cracks for a good while, and still hadn't turned up a single Rosemarot. Had someone been here before us? Stripped the place? I had always heard Gamdes grew them in abundance, but that made no sense against what I knew; who would risk this climb, this close to whatever ruled the summit, to strip a mountainside bare? Even I didn't know what waited up there.

It seemed far too dangerous to be anyone's regular harvesting ground.

"Is this the one?" I turned. Nyx had wedged one arm up to the shoulder into a narrow fissure between two boulders, barely wider than her arm, her face screwed up as she groped blindly at something inside. She grunted, twisted, and finally dragged her hand back out, clutching a small fistful of grey-green stems.

"Yes. Those are Rosemarots."

"Great. Is that enough? Can we leave now?" She held them up between two fingers.

"Or does her ladyship require a specific quota?"

"A little more, to be safe." I ignored the tone.

"If they were growing there, there may be more nearby. We follow the vein a bit further. If there's nothing past that next ridge, then we take what we have and go. I'd rather not get any closer to the peak than we have to."

"What's the deal with the peak?" Nyx glanced up toward the cloud.

"Monster up there?"

"Supposedly. Though no one's ever actually seen it." I kept my eyes on the rocks.

"The Church sent an elite party up to gather Rosemarots, years ago. They didn't come back. After that, nobody bothered finding out why." Nyx looked thoroughly unimpressed by this, and drifted ahead to resume searching.

"Found more over here." Good. Enough, maybe, to keep a stock for ourselves on top of what Arkhay needed. I moved up to join her, and she was right; this stretch was thick with them, far more than the barren path we'd climbed. I crouched and began working the stems loose from the cracks, careful, one at a time. Beside me, Nyx had adopted a less delicate method.

I heard stone crack and split as she simply broke the rock around the plants to get at them faster, crude, and loud, and admittedly a great deal quicker than my picking. Between the two approaches, it didn't take long before I had a healthy bundle stowed in my backpack." Finally." Nyx straightened, brushing grit from her hands.

"Now can we—" A shriek split the air. It came from above, high and layered and wrong, two tones sounding at once that shouldn't have belonged to one throat. I looked up toward the cloud line, and a shape was pulling free of the mist. Wings first. Then the body; long, and far too large, unfolding out of the shroud like the mountain itself had decided to move. It dropped below the cloud, and I saw it clearly. A wyvern, but not one head. Two.

Set on long twin necks rising from the same body, and the two of them were nothing alike; one scaled in deep blue, rimed white with frost, its jaws already trailing a bleed of freezing vapor; the other burning red, heat shimmering off its scales, embers guttering at the corners of its mouth. As it beat down toward us, both heads opened at once, and one loosed a churning jet of fire while the other spat a lance of ice, the two streams braiding through the air side by side. I ran. Nyx was faster.

She dropped, caught my wrist, and hauled me up off the ground; I threw my other hand up and she seized that one too, and then we were airborne, the slope dropping away beneath my dangling feet. The wyvern wheeled and came after us. It was fast, faster than something that size had any right to be, and it kept firing, alternating heads, fire then frost then fire, forcing Nyx into a hard weaving line.

But she was fighting half-blind; hauling me by both wrists meant she couldn't turn to track it properly, and I could feel the strain in it, the way she kept having to guess where the next blast would come from. We weren't going to outrun it like this.

"Let go of me," I said.

"What?"

"Let go. I'll try to stun it, and then we run for it."

"You can fly?" She hurled us sideways as a spear of ice tore through the space we'd just left.

"Why didn't you tell me soo—""I can't fly. I can float, for a little while. It should be enough to either drive it off or buy us a window." She didn't argue. She let go. I dropped. The slope rushed up at me, the wind screaming past, and I forced the flight buff into my legs before I'd fallen too far, felt it catch, felt my fall bleed into something more like a controlled glide.

I banked hard through a jet of fire, the heat of it washing across my back, twisted under a blade of ice, and in the half-second of clear air I found, I spoke the words." Lumina manica, indue me." Light unspooled along my arms and shins, the gauntlets closing over my hands, the greaves down my legs, pale and translucent. Both wyvern heads swung toward me at once, jaws splitting wide, the red one blazing and the blue one frosting over, drawing breath to erase me from the sky.

I drew my fist back, the light gathering to a blaze around it, and threw myself straight down their throats.