The Ever Spirits by Sonya Lano

Author:Sonya Lano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, dark romance
Publisher: Sonya Lano
Published: 2017-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Don’t Trust Anyone

I threaded my way through the trees, deliberating on which way lay the best hope of escape and pondering how long I had before they discovered I’d fled.

The muted tick-tock of bristling river rattles tapping against one another had me altering my course and following the sound. They grew on the banks of fast-flowing rivers, and if I could swim across, I might lose any pursuit, chances being Kerysa’s band would assume I fled along the banks rather than over the water.

I raced headlong for the river, missed the slope, and toppled down the embankment, somehow ending up pelting down backward. Rocks and roots jabbed into my back and shoulders, the bark of a blackwood tree sheared skin off my shoulder and elbow, and then I was crashing through the river rattles, their rattling turning panicked and chaotic and their furred stalks grazing my arms.

I squished over a patch of mud and plunged into the water.

The river closed over me, refreshingly warm against my apprehension-prickled skin. The current tugged at my hips and legs, threatening an impending struggle, but I bullied my battered arms into action and angled my body adjacent to the current instead of headlong to work with it. Firm strokes propelled me forward through the water, and I reveled in the invigorating sensation of being buoyed up and carried along.

A glance over my shoulder showed no searching figures picking their way through the forest. Either Kerysa’s men hadn’t heard my tumble or they hadn’t yet reached the riverbank.

I hit the opposite shore just as the first shouts drifted fractured and segmented over the rushing water: they must’ve discovered Kerysa.

I grabbed the river rattles, their fuzzy, reedy stalks bending under my fingers, and I waded between them, my boots sucking through the mushy river bed. The stalks closed around me, their goose down fur brushing my wet cheeks and sticking to rivulets of water that dripped from my hair and streamed down my face and neck.

I clambered up the riverbank, skinning my other elbow on a sharp rock and banging my knee on a knobby blackwood root, then squatted down halfway up and peered through the river rattles. My sodden leggings and bodice sucked onto my skin, burning the newly stinging cuts and abrasions on my arms—all of it adding to my conglomeration of physical misery.

On the opposite riverbank, one of Kerysa’s Deminians poked his head out and picked his way along it in a cursory search for me. He spared nary a glance for the side where I crouched aching and fretful, but my anxiety didn’t ease.

I was whittled down from this constant fleeing: being chased, caught, kidnapped, and hauled around at everyone’s whim, but I didn’t see an end to it, not now that Kirian had somehow convinced the Nurenans they had the decoy and he had the real steal. Which meant that Nuren’s crazies could yet be combing the forest searching for me. Kirian was out there somewhere. His army, too. Kerysa’s Deminians. The Zrůda of Demin himself if she’d been telling the truth about taking me to him.

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