Wystwood

39. Salt in the wound

Raeph and Ada trudged up the bank of the stream, their path laid out for them in a spray of white pebbles thrown up from the burbling waters. It wasn't easy going, not with the sun settled at its summit and baking the earth beneath their boots. Ada had taken off her cloak and folded it over one arm, letting the warm velvet ripple around her thighs.

There was no great risk, as there had been in the city, when she allowed the breeze to catch her hair and tug it back from her face. The valley was green and sweet and vast, abundant with life in every aspect but one: Ada and Raeph were the only two to walk the grassy banks. The slope was ghostly, any paths once trekked across the ground long since lost to wild roots thrust up through the mud, or clusters of cowslip now blossoming in the buttery sunlight.

The stream was all that spoke, babbling and bubbling as it rushed towards Wysthaven. Its clear waters ran with a silvery sheen, which Ada had initially dismissed as sunshine, but when she stopped to cool her palms in the current, she found that small crystals caught upon her fingers. They glittered like minuscule diamonds against her skin, before being washed away.

Raeph marched on ahead, clad entirely in black yet undaunted by the sun. He didn't wait for her, and only slowed his pace to run a hand through his hair, feathering it over his neck like smudged ink across parchment. Ada sighed, gathering her cloak from its heap upon the grass and continuing her amble up the stream.

"How do you know these women have the iron dagger?" Ada called to Raeph, now several strides in front of her. "What if they've given it away, or lost it?"

Raeph didn't turn. "They'll have it."

Ada went back to counting steps, and the long grass rustled in waves across the valley, as it had for the past hour. The sky was free of clouds, and there wasn't a bird in sight to sweep strokes across the wide blue canvas above.

"Did you get some magic gust of valley wind to tell you?" Ada asked, and she almost smiled at the thought of Raeph cross-legged upon the floorboards, as Min had once sat, his eyes sternly shut and undoubtedly whispering insults at the weather.

But the man went rigid ahead of her, and his shoulders shuddered up with the sharp intake of a breath. 

"There's no wisdom to be found in magic," Raeph said, his voice so deathly quiet it was almost washed away with the current. "There's no hope it can provide, or balance it can bring. The sooner you get that into your head, the better."

He continued walking without a backwards glance. Ada watched a dandelion catch below his boot and mud ensnare its cotton seeds, spotting them brown before they were sucked into the sodden dirt.

"How can you say that when you live day in and day out between the walls of that awful city?" Ada shouted after him. "Don't you feel even the slightest speck of sympathy? Haven't you seen the children suffering, and threatened them yourself?"

Raeph's footsteps stilled, and even the murmur of the stream seemed to fade from the valley. 

The world was silent when he replied, "Every action requires a sacrifice. You're foolish if you refuse to see that."

Ada fisted her fingernails into her palms, feeling them bite scarlet sickles into her skin. She dug her boots into the mud, surging up the bank and around Raeph. 

"I'm only a fool for thinking you had an ounce of humanity within you," she said.

Cold fingers wrapped a circle around her elbow and tightened. Raeph jerked her to a stop with such a force that Ada's cloak swirled around the pair in a gust of navy.

"It may have slipped your notice, but the only human here is you." Raeph's voice was a hiss against her ear, dark hair tumbling down across his brow. "Your kind has forgotten our power, and you've certainly forgotten your place. We could crush you beneath our boots like woodlice."

Ada wrenched her arm free from his hold, whirling around until their eyes met, inches apart. She could feel his breath, hot across her jaw, his nostrils flared and pupils inflated. She curled her lips back. 

"Did your Lady teach you that? Did she pat you on the head like a good little lap dog and send you on your way last night?"

"Don't," Raeph whispered, eyes flashing like a firebrand, "presume you know anything about me."

Ada shoved him away. Folding back her cloak, she forged forwards up the stream, packing down the mud with each strike of her soles. She could feel Raeph's stare upon her back, hot as a flame and twice as deadly.

Not a word passed between them as they resumed their journeying, only the gurgling stream and whistling grass filling their silence. As the sun began to drift into its lazy descent, jagged wystwood branches rose over the hillside to carve up the horizon. They were a stark grey against the grass banks, as if a fire had once swept through the forest and left only barren skeletons in its wake.

The trees clustered together in dismal ranks, somehow more macabre than their twins across the valley. Their trunks were thick with crisscrossing gashes, hardened sap left seeping from the old, amber wounds. It was with faint relief that Ada found the stream did not run into the forest, instead veering left as the ground began to level.

The stream wound in sharp twists along the treeline, its water lapping against Ada's boots as they drew closer to its source. White stones were spread throughout the mud nearby, larger rocks speared deep into the earth like shards of rotted teeth. A slow wind wailed through the wystwood trees, shadows dancing out from their crowds and dusking the dirt around their roots.

Beneath the trees, the land began to rise. It sloped upward in a low breach from the ground, braced by brown rocks that merged into a stony outcrop. Shrivelled moss coated flaking slabs, though it only took a breeze from the forest to send scraps shuddering through the air.

There was a sharp crackle beneath Ada's boot, and she froze. No sound came from the forest, and Raeph walked with a spectral silence behind her. She held her breath as she looked down, fingers finding the dagger strapped to her hip. But nothing was there, and as she lifted her foot, she saw that only hardened mud lay beneath it. Ada took another step, and again, there was a crack.

She crouched down and ran a hand across the earth. Her skin didn't smudge with mud, but the ground ran rough with something grainy and coarse. Raeph swept around her, offering no explanation as his boots crunched a trail around the final bend in the stream.

Ada followed, wide-eyed, as they approached the water's source. Surrounding the spring rose rocks that were tinged a fleshy pink in the sunlight. They bulged up into the air and ran thick with veins of the purest white Ada had ever seen. The ground around them spread out in a pearlescent sheet, slight bumps embellishing its surface like freshly fallen snow.

It crusted back from the spring to Ada's boots, thinning as it moved further from the water, until finally fading into the mud. The rocks cleaved amongst it loomed up to Ada's torso, and each one was frosted with the white granules. When Ada brushed a hand across the closest rock,  crystalline fragments crumbled off against her palm.

"It's salt," she whispered, watching as it sifted between her fingers and tumbled down into the stream. She didn't dare say the next word, even as it twisted around her teeth and tingled upon her tongue. Saltsworn.