Chapter 125: The Unfolding Truth V

Third Person POV

The rain did not care about anything. It came down hard and indifferent, hitting the leaves above and the mud below and everything in between with equal commitment, the kind of rain that had not been asked for and was not going to be apologized for.

The trees at the forest’s edge offered some cover and very little comfort. The path beneath Sonita’s feet had stopped being a path and started being a decision the mud was making on her behalf with every step she took.

She kept moving.

Her cloak was soaked through. It had been soaked through for a while now, the fabric heavy and clinging, doing none of the things a cloak was supposed to do and all of the things water did when fabric gave up trying to stop it. Her boots made sounds she could hear even over the rain. She pushed forward anyway.

Her mother’s voice was still in her head.

Not the last thing she had said. Not the begging, the cracking voice calling her name through the open door and into the rain. The earlier things. The things said clearly and with full intention. White-haired girl. Mistake of the Old World. Chaos that brings predators.

The words sat in her chest alongside the cold and she walked through both of them.

She had one direction. One destination. The only place that made sense when nothing else did. Helen’s hiding place, the clearing she knew, the quiet space where a girl with white hair lived at the edge of everything and asked very little of the world around her.

That was where she was going.

Everything else could figure itself out once she got there.

The mud pulled at her boots with every step and she pulled back and kept moving and the rain kept coming and her mother’s voice kept cycling through her head the way voices did when they had said something that had not finished landing yet.

She did not cry.

She had already done that. The rain had taken care of whatever was left.

Just then a rustle came from her left.

Not wind. Not a branch settling. Something deliberate, moving through the undergrowth parallel to the path she was walking, keeping pace with her without announcing itself. Sonita’s feet slowed without her deciding to slow them. Her fingers twitched at her sides.

She was a sorceress.

She had been a sorceress since she was old enough to understand what the golden light at her fingertips meant, which was earlier than most people would consider comfortable.

She had been trained and she had practiced and she had grown up in a house where power was not a gift but a craft, something worked at and refined and never fully finished.

She was not a helpless girl in the rain. She stopped walking.

The undergrowth to her left went still.

Then it moved again. Closer.

It came through the bushes in a burst that scattered wet leaves in every direction, landing on the path in front of her with the particular weight of something that had made a decision. A wolf. Large and its fur slicked flat against its body by the rain, standing in the middle of the path with its head low and its eyes fixed on her.

The eyes were the wrong color. A sickly gold that had nothing warm in it, the kind of gold that was not a color so much as a warning, the mark of a wolf that had been in the wild too long and had lost the thread that connected it to whatever it had been before.

Rogue.

Sonita looked at it steadily.

"Don’t even think about it," she said, barely above a whisper. Her fingers were already moving, the first syllables forming somewhere below her breath, the familiar warmth of her power rising through her chest and into her hands. "I am in no mood for a hunt tonight."

The wolf growled. Low and continuous, the sound of something that had already made its decision and was simply letting her know.

She began to back up. Not retreating. Positioning. She needed a better angle, a few more feet of distance to give the spell room to do what it needed to do.

She took one step back.

And walked into something solid. Not a tree.

Too warm. Too steady. The particular solidity of something that had weight and intention behind it, that absorbed the impact of her stumbling into it without moving at all.

She felt it against her back before she understood what it was, and then understanding arrived all at once and her whole body went tight with it.

She spun around.

Her hands came up fast, the spell already redirecting, looking for a new target.

A hand caught both her wrists.

One motion, fast and complete, closing around them before she had finished the turn. Her back was against a chest and her wrists were held and another hand came up and covered her mouth and the person behind her bent down, bringing their face close to the side of her head.

"Be quiet." The voice was low and completely calm. The calm of someone who was not afraid of the wolf in front of her or the sorceress in their arms or the rain or anything else currently occupying this path. "Do not make a sound."

Her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her throat.

The hands released her.

He stepped past her.

She turned sideways and watched him move and the watching was what made her understand that whatever she had prepared for when she felt that chest against her back, this was not it.

He moved the way very few things moved, with a quality that was not grace exactly and not speed exactly but something that sat between the two and did not need either of them to make its point.

He drew his sword as he went, not with any drama, the weapon coming free from its sheath with a sound that was clean and final, and he turned it once in his hand with a small flick of his wrist, the blade catching the weak light and throwing it back.

The wolf lunged.

It came off the ground fast, all the weight and momentum of it directed forward, the kind of charge that did not leave room for response from most things in its path.

He did not flinch.

He did not step back. He did not move at all until the very last possible fraction of a second, the point at which there was no longer any space between what was coming and where he was standing, and then he moved. One motion, economical and blindingly fast, the sword swinging with a controlled force that suggested he was using significantly less than what was available to him.

The wolf’s head hit the mud before its body did.

The body followed.

The path was still again.

He stood there for a moment, looking down at what was on the ground in front of him. Then he turned the sword once more and the rain cleaned whatever needed cleaning from the blade and he sheathed it with a sound that was exactly as final as the first sound had been, a metallic click that ended the whole thing completely.

He turned around.

The clouds had shifted slightly, some gap having opened above them without announcement, and the moonlight that came through was thin and cold and adequate. It hit his face as he turned and Sonita stood in the rain and looked at him and her breath stopped doing what it had been doing.

He was not what she had expected.

She had expected capable, given what she had just watched. She had expected tall, given what she had walked into. She had not expected this face. The structure of it, the jaw, and the line of it, and the particular arrangement of features that did not require good lighting to work in its favor. Rain was running down his face and he was standing in the mud of a forest path next to a dead rogue wolf and he looked like that was exactly where he was supposed to be.

And his eyes.

Green. Deep and sharp and fully focused on her, the kind of green that was not a soft color the way green was sometimes a soft color. This was the green of something that paid attention.

Sonita’s chest did something she did not immediately have a category for.

Then the sharp cold came in behind it.

She had seen this face before.

The certainty of it moved through her without being attached to a clear memory, the way certainty sometimes arrived before the evidence did, sitting in the chest as a fact before the mind had worked out where it came from.

"You look familiar," she said. Her voice came out unevenly. The cold and the rain and everything that had happened in the kitchen and everything that was happening now all pressed into the same space.

He looked at her. His expression did not change exactly but something in it shifted, a small adjustment that was not surprising and was not the absence of it either.

"Do I?" he said. "Then perhaps our paths were always going to cross again at some point."

Sonita opened her mouth and closed it. She was trying to locate the memory and it kept moving away from her the way certain things moved when you reached for them directly.

"I know I have seen you," she said. "I know your face."

He took one step toward her. Not threatening. Just closing the distance between them by a measured amount, enough to change the quality of the space between them without removing it.

"Tell me, witch," he said. The word landed with a precision that told her he had known what she was before she had started the binding spell, possibly before he stepped onto this path at all. His green eyes held hers without effort. "Where can I find Helen?"

Both her secret and the name hit her like something physical.

A weight, arriving in the center of her chest and pressing outward in every direction at once. The warmth that had been sitting in her since she turned around and saw his face, that involuntary pull that she had not asked for and had not been ready to examine, went cold in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

He was not here for her.

He was here for her best friend.

She stood in the rain and looked at his green eyes and felt the warmth and the cold existing in the same place at the same time and did not know what to do with either of them.