19

Fear Isn’t Always
Rational

I follow Reven down thousands of steep, narrow steps that switch back on themselves so many times I’ve lost count. The way Wildernyss floats in the sky, it’s like the underneath is an upside-down range that dips its peaks into the ocean. Mountains above and mirrored mountains below.

And that’s where we are. Below.

On a path carved out of the underside of the rock, this staircase is an ingenious way to climb down undetected.

Not that Reven has said what happens when we get there.

My palms are raw from dragging a hand over the surface of the rock wall to my right with every step, as far from the edge as I can get. Almost every second, the steps look like they go right over the edge, only to curve around into more rock.

Goddess, I hate heights.

I am literally having to force myself to take each next step, because I know if I stop, I’ll never get started again. My bones will freeze in place. They’ll have to build the tomb around my body when I finally die.

I am still having trouble wrapping my head around the whole Shadowraith thing. Honestly, I’ve thought of little else, other than getting back to Tabra, all through the night and the trek here. His being the Shadowraith makes such complete sense, given his ability to manipulate the dark, that I’m still pissed at myself for not realizing sooner. Not that he’s confirmed or denied any of it.

I asked. He ignored. I guess saving his life doesn’t give me the right to answers.

A step ahead of me, he pauses, and I almost smack into him. Mostly because I was keeping my gaze glued to my feet and slightly canted toward the wall to avoid looking down at what would be a long plummet to my death.

“Stop here.” He’s back to growling commands at me.

What crawled up his backside this morning? I’m the one facing down a crippling phobia here. “The word ‘please’ would go a long way,” I mutter as I do what he says.

The way his shoulders brace, I swear he flinches at the words. But can he blame me?

Rather than respond, he points. “Watch out for this loose rock.”

He continues down the path, and I plod along behind him, now feeling like a total wretch because I snapped at him for looking out for me. Hard to tell with Reven. Emotions are clearly not his strong suit. Not mine, either, for that matter.

As Reven gets farther away, I force myself to move again, gaze right back on my feet and where I’m placing them. My muscles will be sore after this, not just from the strenuous journey but from the tension turning every fiber of my body into a mass of frayed knots under my skin.

Turns out, I’m not as brave as I want to believe.

“We’ve reached the bottom,” he calls back.

I won’t be happy about that until I am leagues away from any ledges and drop-offs. I risk a glance outward with a frown only to swing my gaze abruptly back to my feet. But he can’t mean the bottom. The ocean is still a good hundred feet below us.

Ahead of me, Reven disappears around a bend, then reappears, offering me a hand, and I hesitate only briefly before taking it. Touching him feels…different now. Sleeping against him in the hollow tree was definitely different. Almost like… I don’t know.

And I don’t want to know.

He leads me to a wide, flat platform-looking space that is overshadowed by what is essentially the base of the mountain that juts out above our heads.

Fear recedes a tiny bit with more ledge between me and falling, and I take in the platform in more detail. Like the stairs, it’s connected to the mountain, carved from it, the floor of what looks like a cavern jutting out, only sort of curved above and below, with sharply pointed boulders along the edges of both the bottom and the top.

Almost like we’re in the mouth of a—

“Not possible,” I breathe.

Reven turns and catches my slack-jawed stare and maybe even almost smiles at my awe. “A dragon, we think,” he says. “The rising dominion revealed it about ten years ago. Calcified into the rockface.”

I am standing in the mouth of a dragon. A creature who hasn’t been seen since before even Eidolon’s birth. I feel like I should sense some sort of magical field around it, but it’s just petrified bones.

“This way,” Reven says. Like dragon bones are no big deal.

Ten seconds later, horror doesn’t even begin to cover the pit roiling at the center of my stomach as I stare at a narrow contraption he walks over to, so small I hadn’t noticed it at first.

“What is that?” I ask, moving no closer.

“A bridge.”

“Sell me something else. I’m not buying.”

From what I can tell from my relatively safe distance away, the pathetic excuse for a crossing sort of stretches diagonally between the underbelly of Wildernyss to the ice shores of Tyndra diagonally below and across the way, the ocean directly below us. It is hardly more than a simple, cobbled-together ladder that drops away from the dragon’s maw, tied to some of its teeth. It spans the channel that separates the two dominions. The iceberg-laden channel, I mentally correct. At least I assume that’s what the massive white icy-looking things in the water are.

Omma’s amulet, still strapped around my neck under my clothes, pulses with what I swear is dread. Sharp and blazing. Mine or its, I can’t tell, but its energy twangs at an answering apprehension inside me, sending my barely leashed fear to a whole new level.

When I say I’m frozen with fear, I mean it. Otherwise that call from the amulet would have caught more of my attention. But I can only deal with one thing at a time.

“Nope.” I shake my head. Hard. And slowly back up. “Uh-uh. Not happening. No way are you getting me on that…that thing.”

I slip out of my authoritate pattern of speech completely, not that I’ve been all that stellar at keeping it up. He doesn’t call me on it.

“It’s perfectly safe.”

“And my grandmother was the personification of kindness and love.”

Reven actually makes a sound that could be a laugh, but then quickly swallows it as he takes in my expression. Part of me expects his usual brand of “do it or else” to hit me any second. When he remains quiet, I glance up to find him watching me with a speculative gleam in his eyes that I don’t like.

“What?” I demand.

“Are you…frightened?” The disbelief in his voice deserves a good stomp on his toes.

“Only the incredibly naive wouldn’t be afraid of that.” I point with a fling of my hand.

It’s a pathetic excuse for a bridge. What brilliant soul thought to name this a bridge, anyway?

Was that a twitch of his lips?

“I’m not joking,” I snarl.

Hells, I’m starting to sound like him.

He wipes the hint of his amusement away. “I can see that.”

“I’m not going.” I march back to the not-much-better-but-at-least-solid-rock staircase. From down here, I can’t see the jagged peaks of the right-side-up mountains. All I see are the shards of the upside-down mountains overhead. I can make myself go up those stairs.

So long as I don’t look down at the iceberg-infested ocean below, I’ll be fine.

A total lie to myself, but I take a step anyway.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Reven’s hand grasps my arm and tugs me back around to face him.

Up close and with the shaded sunlight kicking the color of his eyes up a notch to brilliant turquoise, I actually listen. Hells, he didn’t need to steal Tabra. All he needed to do was look at her like that and ask nicely.

I beat back the thought with a scowl.

His eyes widen slightly. “You really are scared.”

I am nimble and strong and healthy. The likelihood of my falling off is slim. But tell that to my imagination, which has already pitched me to my death at least fifty times while we’ve been standing here.

Reven tightens his grip and steps between me and the bridge and the damnable drop, gaze steady. “Is it the heights or the monsters in the water?”

When I don’t answer, he gives me a squeeze. Like he actually cares. “Which one?”

“Heights, okay?”

Weakness is weakness, but honestly, I wished the threat of Devourers was making me like this. I’d rather be scared of real monsters than something my logical brain tells me is mostly in my head. I barely managed to make myself climb out of my own second-story window hiding from the Hag. This is a thousand times worse.

“You handled the stairs without a problem,” Reven points out.

“You think so?”

I am starting to squeak, so I pin my lips shut with determination. He straightens, probably realizing that the shaking threatening to rattle the teeth loose from my skull isn’t only from the idea of climbing down that death trap, but a reaction to the hours—yes, hours—of exposure to this entire situation. My nerves in that time have gone from rolling to stretched so taut I might split apart, frayed edges and all.

“Look at me.” His words are slow and even.

I swallow again, barely hearing. If I am going to die, it sure isn’t going to be this way.

“Look at me,” Reven says again. He slides his hands up under the heavy fall of my hair, and the heat of him, the warmth of that unexpected touch, manages to snag my attention. I drag my gaze to his, hitting a wall of understanding.

Which is completely unexpected.

I blink as I absorb his expression, some of my panic slipping away in the face of it.

His mouth crooks slightly. “Knew you’d be trouble.”

“Not helpful.”

Except Reven is close, like he’s trying to take up all of my focus, which seems to be working. “I know you don’t trust me,” he says.

A single bark of laughter pops from my mouth before I can swallow it back down.

He ignores that. “But you know that I need you alive.”

A tiny part of me latches onto those words. After a second… “Uh-huh.”

“So, if I promise that I’ll get you across safely, you can believe me.”

I take a sharp breath, then another deeper one. “Please don’t make me do this.” The words come out as a whisper full of humiliation.

For a wishful second, I think his blue eyes soften, warm. But from the way his thick brows immediately drop into a slashing scowl across his face, I guess I was wrong.

“What if I make it so that you can’t see the drop?”

If I can’t see the fall, would it be as bad? Logically I’ll still know it’s there, but if I don’t have to see it… “Maybe.”

He must’ve taken that as a yes. “I can do that.”

Shadows, thick and impenetrable, rise up and spread out underneath the bamboo structure like a dense black fog, settling a foot or two below like a net, obscuring the view of the drop and the waters and icebergs.

That band of tightness eases a fraction more.

A grunt escapes Reven’s throat, and I look at him more closely. Is he a little paler? “Manipulating the shadows is what knocked you out, isn’t it?”

Reven’s lips flatten. “You just worry about getting over the bridge.”

He goes first but only moves a few rungs down before he waves to me. Like a child, I sit and scoot to the edge, analyzing the best way to attempt this. The ladder doesn’t hang straight down or stretch straight out like a bridge. It’s angled, so I’m going to have to clamber across and down at an angle as well.

The ladder rung holds under my feet, although how the thick ties made of vines binding the thing together hold—

Don’t think about it.

Even so, I test it with a few bounces. Sturdy. I guess that’s something.

“I’ll be right here,” Reven assures me.

I look into his eyes—eyes that match the centers of the icebergs below me, I realize incomprehensibly at that moment—and, again, my breathing eases. The shaking, too. Like he is willing them away.

Just go.

Words that should be my motto. I manage to turn around carefully and take a step down. The midnight clouds below me actually look soft. Not welcoming, exactly, but safer than—

“Oh, goddess,” I mumble.

Strong arms come around either side of me as he climbs back up, settling his chest against my back. “Don’t think about it,” he murmurs, his lips at my ear and his voice wrapping around me. “I’m right here. I won’t leave you.”

The man has no fear. None that I can detect, anyway. Except that moment in the clearing when the soldiers had me. The image pops into my head, but I shake it off, needing to focus. Having him on my side is… Goddess forgive me, I was about to think the word nice.

“When I step, you step,” he says. “Focus on your feet.”

“Don’t let me fall,” I whisper. A plea that comes from some place down deep and frailer than I like to admit.

“Never.”

I believe him.

He steps, and I do, too. Caged in between Reven and the ladder, which thankfully doesn’t wobble even a tiny bit, I relax a teensy bit more. Not by much, but progress. Maybe enough to get me to the bottom.

“Again,” his breath whispers across my neck, sending a different tension coiling through me. I grit my teeth against it. Together we move, almost in unison, his presence steady behind me. “Keep going.”

Slowly, carefully, we set up a rhythm as we make our way down the precarious ladder balanced between two dominions. A dance. And Reven’s shadow moves with us.

“Is it you?”

I pause. Not with fear but confusion. That wasn’t Reven’s voice. But I heard the words, clear as day, almost like they echoed in the cavern of my own mind.

“Did you hear that?” I whisper.

“Keep going,” Reven says.

So that’s a no. Now I’m hearing things.

“Ssssspeak to me,” the voice gurgles in my head, and my stomach turns sour. The amulet held against my skin by my clothing pulses again. Once. Hot and sharp.

That can’t all be in my head.

“One more,” Reven urges behind me, his arms tightening on either side of me like a protective barrier.

He takes a step, and I go to do the same only to stop dead at the sight of a tentacle sliding off the rung two more below where he stands. Bluish-purple in color, almost iridescent in the daylight, darker on one side than the other. The suckers on the bottom are white and appear to move independently, almost like they’re tasting the ladder as the tentacle slides back into the cloud of shadow.

“Come on, princess,” Reven encourages. “You can do it.”

Fear thunders in my ears. “Don’t. Move.”