They took a direct line back to Wend-A-Way, leaving Aphen outside to wait as Cymrian began searching through the inside of the hull. He was gone a long time before reappearing. “Nothing,” he said.
They stood together once more, looking everywhere but at each other. “I’ll have to use the Elfstones,” Aphenglow said finally. “It’s risky, but I can’t afford to worry about that. Arling could be dying out there.”
To his credit, Cymrian didn’t argue. He simply nodded.
She pulled out the Stones and dumped them from the pouch into her hand. Closing her fingers about them, she stretched out her arm and formed a picture of her sister’s face, holding it firmly in her mind as she summoned the magic.
The blue light blazed to life and then spun away to their left. She wheeled quickly to square herself up to its beam, fixing the direction as it traveled only a short distance to a jumble of branches that had been torn away in the crash. Beyond was a tangle of grasses in which a body lay prone, nearly invisible against the muddied earth. The light held fast for a moment to mark the spot, then flared and was gone.
Cymrian was already moving. She hurried after him, jamming the Elfstones back in her pocket. It took them only minutes to make their way back through the trees and the brush. Arling lay just a short distance from where they had turned back from their earlier search. Aphen gritted her teeth in fury. They had been only steps away.
She rushed over to her sister and knelt. Arling was covered in mud and bleeding from her nose and mouth. She was breathing, but just barely, and her pulse was weak and unsteady. Quickly, Aphen checked for other injuries without finding any. But since Arling was unconscious it was difficult to be certain.
“She’s in a bad way,” she told Cymrian. “I’m afraid to move her.”
“Can you tell if anything is broken?”
“Doesn’t seem to be.” She felt up and down her sister’s arms and legs without finding any sign of broken bones. She explored Arling’s body, as well. Nothing. “Can you lift her? By her shoulders, but don’t let her head move when you do.”
Cymrian did as she asked, and she felt underneath her sister’s back. She had almost finished her exam when her fingers found metal splinters. Her breath caught in her throat. That last barrage from the Federation fire launchers must have done this. There were at least two, and perhaps more, of those splinters embedded in Arling’s back. It was impossible to tell how deeply they had penetrated, but it seemed likely they were the source of the problem. The splinters, and the impact of Arling’s fall from the ship, would explain a lot.
She took off her cloak and spread it on the ground beside her sister. “Can you roll her over on her stomach?” she asked Cymrian, indicating the cloak.
The Elven Hunter did so—carefully, tenderly, keeping everything as protected as he could manage. Aphen helped by turning Arling at her hips and legs as Cymrian turned her at her shoulders. It took only a moment to lay the injured girl on her stomach. Now both her sister and their protector could see the splinters and the blood that seeped from the wounds they had made. The splinters protruded from halfway up her back, close to where her heart was.
“I’ll have to take them out,” she said, looking at him. “But I don’t know what that will do to her.”
“If you don’t take them out, you know for certain what it will do,” he answered.
She called up her magic and layered her sister with a deadening spell that would numb her body against the pain and help to seal off the wounds as soon as the splinters were removed. She cut away Arling’s tunic to expose her back and was horrified to find that in addition to the larger, more obvious wounds, there were dozens of smaller ones, as well. Arling must have been caught in a hailstorm of metal shards in that last attack. A wave of fear swept through her. If she made a mistake now or if she failed to do enough, she was going to lose her sister.
Before any further thoughts of that sort could take hold, she began the process of extracting the splinters. One by one, she removed them with steady, practiced movements, ripping off the sleeves of her tunic to wipe away blood and debris, pouring small amounts of liquid from her aleskin onto the wounds to help with the cleaning. She worked as quickly as she could, refusing to be distracted by her fears. Cymrian knelt beside her, watching silently. It seemed to her that it took an inordinate amount of time. The larger splinters came out easily enough; they were deeply embedded, but didn’t appear to have penetrated or damaged any bones or the spinal column. The smaller shards were a different matter. Some of them were long and thin and not easily located. She reached inside her sister’s body with her magic, extracting the splinters one by one.
When she had the last of them she cleaned the wounds and sat back, staring down at her sister’s still body. Her breathing hadn’t changed. Her pulse was still irregular. Something wasn’t right. Taking out the splinters hadn’t been enough to solve the problem.
She shook her head, knowing she had to do more, that she had missed something.
Across from her, Cymrian suddenly turned and looked off into the trees. “Someone’s coming.”
She hadn’t heard anything. But she had learned by now that his ears were sharper than hers, in spite of her instincts and her magic. He would not be mistaken about something like this. She stared at him in confusion, saw the look on his face, and quickly said, “Don’t go.”
“You’ll be fine,” he said, already on his feet.
“It’s not me I’m worried about. If you go, you’ll be all alone.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t let whatever’s coming reach you and Arling. I have to stop it.”
“Wait a few more minutes. I’ll come with you.”
He shook his head. “We don’t have those minutes.” He moved over and knelt beside her. “Take as long as you need with her. Whatever’s out there, I will find a way to stop it.”
She glanced down at her sister, knowing she was losing her, knowing at the same time that she was about to lose him, as well. “Cymrian, no.”
He gave her a momentary smile. “It’s my job to protect you, Aphen.”
She made a small sound in her throat and reached for him, pulling him to her and kissing him hard on the mouth. She held the kiss for a long time, desperate to keep him close, realizing for the first time how terrible it would be to lose him. How many times had he saved her? How many times had he been there for all of them? She hadn’t realized it before—hadn’t let herself accept it, perhaps—not in the way she understood as she kissed him now. But there it was, full-blown and alive in her heart.
She cared for him every bit as much as he cared for her, in spite of all her efforts at distancing herself from his long-held affection for her.
When she released him, she said, “Be strong. I will come for you.”
Her eyes held him fixed in place for a second more. Then he turned away and was gone.
Stoon was not happy. The Federation warship had come out on top in the encounter with the Elven vessel, but as a consequence of the damage inflicted, the latter had gone into a steep dive and disappeared into the depths of Drey Wood, lost beneath a tangle of tree limbs and clouds of mist that obscured the entire forest. To make matters worse, the Federation ship had lost her steering capabilities and so much sail that it had barely managed to land for repairs. Spars, radian draws, and parse tubes alike were smashed and severed and exploded in such numbers that it would take hours, if not days, to put things right.
Realizing that by then they would lose track of the survivors of the crash—if there were any—he made up his mind to go after them on foot. Unfortunately, that meant he would have to release the mutants in the hold, because he certainly wasn’t about to go mucking around in the forest alone. He lacked the necessary skills for that sort of work, and he imagined the Elf who served as Aphenglow’s protector was much better trained in it than he was. Plus, he was not about to wager that any of them were dead, the crash notwithstanding, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way that they were alive and well and enraged enough at what had been done to them to want to make an example of him.