Page 48 of Heart’s Rescue

Arryn tilts her head to the side. “Sure?” Her voice lifts at the end, making the word sound like a question.

“Okay, it’s like a fence,” I continue, interlacing my fingers and holding them out. “But any fence that stands for long enough, through enough rain and snow, enough windstorms and wandering animals, and it’s bound to get a hole or two.” I pull back my index finger, leaving a gap.

“Wandering animals?” Arryn sounds like she’s not sure if I’m joking.

I shrug. “Void beasts, whatever. The point is that nothing lasts forever. Even the strongest, toughest, tallest fence in the Lands Below is going to break down over time.”

Arryn’s watching me with wide eyes now. “Are you saying the barrier is falling apart?”

“No,” I answer. “I’m saying it’s got a couple of holes.”

“Stars.”

Arryn makes the word sound like a curse. When she looks up again, there’s a tightness around her lips that reminds me she’d held a knife to my throat two mornings ago.

“And you were, what?” she asks. “Looking for a place to bring an army through?”

My laugh escapes before I can stop it. An army? Me?

“No,” I gasp, wheezing desperately as I try not to lose it again. “No, no army. Just me. And Phaedron, of course.”

Arryn looks down at the bowl in her hands, and I get the sense she’s wondering whether or not she can trust me. It’s a look I get a lot; claims that you’ve traveled into the void and survived are generally met with a healthy dose of skepticism, even in the Outer Ring. Arryn sets her bowl down, tosses her hair back, and turns to me with an expression that suggests she’s completely done with me and my bullshit.

My back stiffens. That’s yet another look I’m intimately familiar with, but this time, I’m not sure I deserve it. I haven’t been feeding her any bullshit.

“So you’ve already seen the stars, then,” Arryn says, in a clipped voice. “Why bother asking me all those questions about them?”

“Uh, what?”

She huffs. “If you and your brother have already gone through the thin place—”

“Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa,” I say, holding my hands up to her, my palms out and open. “I found the thin place. I haven’t gone through it.”

Her eyes narrow.

“It’s kind of a one-way thing,” I stammer. “I mean, you can leave the Lands Below. You can’t come back in that way. Like how you got here. You could come in that way, but you couldn’t go out.”

“So, why are you still here?” she asks. “Why not leave? Go see the stars for yourself?”

I throw my hands up. My fingers bump into my favorite sweater, the blue one, which is now stained with Arryn’s blood, poorly mended, and dripping water all over the slush on my side of the shelter.

“Heh. Yeah. Good question,” I reply. My voice is tinged with a bitterness I didn’t fully intend to let show.

Arryn finishes her stew in silence, staring at the fire the whole time. Then she sets the bowl down and looks up at me.

“Phaedron?” she guesses.

I shrug. “Pretty much. I’m not leaving the Lands Below without him, and he just… He isn’t ready. He keeps saying we need to wait until things are bad.”

I toss another handful of sticks on the fire, and the movement sends a jet of sparks through the opening in the shelter’s roof. It’s dark violet up there right now; the glowsoft has gone out for the night, leaving only the distant amethyst burn of the void.

“Um, no offense,” Arryn says softly, “but it seems like things are pretty bad right now.”

I laugh, sharp and hard. “They’re as bad as they’ve ever been,” I agree.

I prod at the fire with a stick, wondering how to put all of this into words. Phaedron’s stupid, hopeless, insanely noble quest for a position in the Royal Guard. The way he cares about everyone living in our sad little town, how he checks on them when he makes his rounds, how he’ll bring eggs or flour or a full, hot meal from the World’s End pub to whoever’s feeling down. Voids, he’ll even feed their chickens and milk their goats for them.

How much I admire him. How much I suspect, way deep down, that he’ll never leave the Lands Below unless he’s dragging our entire broken down, backwoods village with him.

An army? Hardly. A loose collection of farmers too stupid or too stubborn to realize the warmth is never coming back, too connected to the frozen plot of land where they built their house or buried old so-and-so to move to the Crystal City, the one place in the Lands Below where we might have enough magic to resist the void for another century or two.

Yeah, Phaedron would want to bring them all with us, dragging their pitchforks and goats and chickens. And how would that look to whoever was waiting in the Worlds Above, those monsters who wore crowns and swung their blades at farmers?

I shiver; the shelter seems colder now. Arryn is staring at the fire again. Shadows dance across the curve of her lips and pool beneath her eyes. If we were home, Phaedron would probably insist she rest for a week to recover from the shock of falling through the ice.

We have food for two days. I finish my stew and throw another log on the fire.

“Get some sleep,” I say, not quite looking at Arryn. “We’ll get moving first thing tomorrow morning.”

If it kills us, I think but do not say.