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A blur of movement momentarily blinded her, and she was pummelled into the snow, the wind knocked out of her completely.
A searing pain pierced her shoulder.
The scream that left her lips was garbled.
Warm blood gushed from the wound, the sensation shockingly hot against her chilled skin.
Thea gagged as she saw the source of the pain… where one of the basilisk’s fangs was still embedded, torn from the monster’s mouth.
With a cry of agony, she wrenched the fang from her flesh as the monster struck again, ice shooting past her.
But Thea was airborne.
She threw herself at the creature, wrapping her legs around its scaled neck and plunging its fang into one of its sapphire eyes.
The basilisk thrashed and roared, flinging Thea from its body, blood pouring from its eye, where the fang still protruded gruesomely. More blood rained down as its whole body spasmed in pain, jerking and flailing, until its tail slipped over the edge of the cliff.
Thea gasped for air desperately, clambering back as a final shriek nearly deafened her. The basilisk had no hold in the snow as gravity did the rest, dragging its upper body towards the deadly fall.
A mad laugh of disbelief died on Thea’s lips.
With its own fang still embedded in its eye, the monster was hauled by its own weight over the edge of the cliff face.
It fell.
Several moments later, a crash echoed from below.
Thea blinked, shock wrapping around her like a vice. Half sobbing, she forced herself to crawl, to put as much distance between that ledge and the beast below as possible.
At last, her hands and knees met solid ground beneath the snow, and she worshipped it with tears and blood, bringing her lips to the frosted flakes with a broken cry.
Only when she stopped heaving for ragged breaths, only when her tears were spent and the bleeding had slowed to a trickle that cut through the soft white beneath her, did she look up.
A frozen wasteland stretched before her.
And time ground to an ominous halt.
CHAPTER FORTY
WILDER
Time was a circle without Thea: no beginning and no end. Wilder had no notion of the hours and then days that had passed, but for the vague awareness of the rise and fall of the sun somewhere beyond the pines.
He kept himself as busy as a man stranded in the middle of a frozen nowhere could: tending to the horses, gathering firewood, building a makeshift shelter, hunting. A simple existence punctuated by bodily needs and the changing colour of the sky.
At some point, he was wrenched from the haze of his days by a throbbing sensation across his forearm. It was the wound from the skirmish with the arachne. And the venom that had coated the cut.
‘… a fifty-fifty chance it’ll kill you. It’s slow to activate, so you won’t know right away… But basically, avoid it at all costs. It’ll fuck you up either way,’Torj had told the apprentices in Aveum, the same words Talemir had once shared with them as Guardians.
Glad for the distraction, Wilder settled against the trunk of the tree he favoured, right by the road and right in front of the swirling mist of the mountain. There, he removed his vambrace and grimaced as he worked the fabric of his shirt away from the sticky slash.
A bitter tang hit his nostrils.
‘Not good,’ he muttered to himself. He’d taken to doing that a lot since Thea had crossed the threshold into the Great Rite. Besides the horses, his voice was the only sound across the expanse, and it temporarily relieved him of the torture of being trapped in his own head.
He stared at the wound. It was on the verge of festering; that was his first mistake. The second was that heknewarachne venom was slow-moving, that its effects could sometimes lie dormant for days…
‘Fuck.’ The last thing he wanted when Thea emerged from the Great Rite was for her to find his frozen corpse.
