Bellius said to Emerie as the female shook with rage, “You know I can’t let you leave here alive. Our family would never recover from the shame.”
“Fuck you,” Emerie snarled. “Fuck your family.”
Bellius just eyed Nesta, smiling faintly. He brushed the snow from the shoulders of his jacket. “I get first crack at the High Fae bitch,” he said to his warriors.
Nesta’s gut churned, acid burning through her. She had to find some way out of this, even outnumbered, unarmed, with no magic—
The pure panic and rage in Emerie’s face told her that her friend, too, was coming up short on any solution.
Bellius stepped toward them.
And then blood splattered across the side of his face as the guts of one of his cronies spilled onto the snow before him.
The thing that crawled over the ridge had been crafted of nightmares. Part cat, part serpent, all black fur and sharp claws and hooked teeth. It halted at the edge of the camp. Didn’t look down at the gutted corpse of the warrior whose abdomen it had sliced open with a single swipe. Blood stained the snow around him in a wide circle.
The warriors, Bellius with them, readied themselves. Bellius drew his sword.
The creature leaped. Warriors screamed, weapons flashing in the bloodied, shrieking fray.
“Run,” Nesta ordered Emerie, surging to her feet. She snatched her weapons, and Emerie lunged to grab a sword as it flew from a warrior’s hand and into the snow.
A female voice rang out from the other side of the ridge. “Here!”
Nesta nearly sobbed at the voice, at the coppery head of hair that popped up, the hand beckoning as Bellius and his males squared off against the thing tearing into them. Nesta and Emerie reached the hilltop’s edge and slid down, snow spraying. Gwyn waited on its other side, bloodied and in a warrior’s clothes, face filthy and torn, but eyes clear.
“Follow me,” Gwyn breathed, and they wasted no effort arguing as they half-fell down the hillside and sprinted through the trees, aiming to the southeast.
They ran until the warriors’ screams, the beast’s roars, were distant. Until they faded away entirely.
They stopped near a trickle of a stream through the snow, panting so hard Nesta had to lean against a tree.
“How?” Emerie gasped out.
“I woke up before the others,” Gwyn said between breaths, a hand on her chest.
“So did I,” Nesta said. “I thought it was because I’m Made, but maybe it’s because you and I aren’t Illyrian.”
Gwyn nodded. “I started running, and found a cache of weapons almost immediately.” She gestured to the blood on her Illyrian leathers. “I changed from the nightgown into someone else’s clothes. From a body, I mean.” She held up her wrist. “Did you know this thing glows? I remembered your wish for us: that we’d always be able to find our way back to each other. No matter what. I figured it would lead me to you. It must be somehow immune to the magic ban in the Rite.”
She smiled crookedly at Nesta. “I kept to the trees the first two nights, watching the beasts, and I spotted that horrible male and his companions this morning. Saw they’d found my nightgown and displayed it, and I knew they were hunting for you. I thought I’d take them out before they could find you.”
“You led the beast right to them.”
“I learned where the beasts sleep during the day,” Gwyn said. “And that they get very angry when awoken.” She pointed to the cuts on her face, her hands. “I barely outran that one as I led it toward the camp. My timing was just good luck, though.”
Emerie shuddered. “The Mother watched over us.”
Nesta could have sworn the charms on their bracelets let out a soft, singing hum at that.
But Gwyn winced. “He’s really your cousin?”
“I hope I can refer to that sad fact in the past tense after this,” Emerie said coolly.
Nesta offered her a savage smile. “We need to keep moving. If Bellius or any of his friends survive, they’ll want to kill us even more now.”
Four more days. They had to last four more days.
Gwyn said hoarsely as they moved into the wilderness, the snow mercifully lightening, “You two came looking for me.”
“Of course we did,” Emerie said, interlacing her hand with Gwyn’s, then Nesta’s, and squeezing tightly. “It’s what sisters do.”
CHAPTER
68
Nesta far preferred caves to trees. But as night fell and no caves revealed themselves, she found herself with no other option but to scale one behind Emerie and Gwyn, the latter revealing how she’d managed to rest while up one: a long stretch of rope. It must have been one of the items Queen Briallyn had the Illyrians leave, presumably for trussing captives or stringing them up or strangling them, and Gwyn had used it to bind herself to the trunk of a tree each night. It was long enough that the three of them, sitting side by side on a massive branch, were able to tie themselves together and to the tree itself.