[Feather fall] leveled to 26 by the time Vel got back to the ground, but from that point, her illness grew, enough that Sigurd went from supporting her to carrying her. Clouds rolled in overhead, Velmira soaked and shivering as she clutched Sigurd's shirt. By comparison, he wasn’t even shivering.
The entrance to the dungeon was a welcome sight, but inside, it was no warmer. Rather, air passed through it more, whistling against carved cavern walls that looked to be the remnants of an old mine.
“A little further,” Sigurd said.
“You said that hours ago too,” Vel whispered through chattering teeth.
“I was hoping to get you to go a little further. You’re not━” he grunted, shifting Vel, “a short girl. Ever considering dropping a head or two?”
“If I did that, I’d have never gotten over the temple walls. You should have seen the size of Amalia.”
“Is she a dwarf?”
“Worse.”
“Uh . . .” Sigurd raised an eyebrow. “A gnome?”
Vel smiled, shaking her head. “Not that bad. She’s too skinny to be a dwarf. From the stories Edard told me, I bet a dwarf could have scaled the wall by jumping out of a second story window and been just fine.”
“They are a sturdy race,” Sigurd said, then released a sigh as the mine opened up, light pouring over them.
Turning her head, Vel’s jaw dropped. She patted Sigurd’s chest. “Put me down,” she said.
“You sure?”
She nodded, and Sigurd gently set Vel down, then huffed when she dropped to her knees. At least the view was still better, facing what appeared to be a valley, but instead of mountains, crystallized cavern walls encased a deep basin. Differing platforms of elevation gave variety to the landscape with blue light shimmering from massive crystals that protruded from the ground. Straight across from them, falling from an upper cavern, was a small waterfall, filling a bowel at the deepest point to the place with crystal clean water.
Edard would have loved this place, she thought, a pang stinging at her heart as she missed him. “I should have gone with him,” she whispered.
“Hm?”
“He asked me to leave, the night before I was to be sacrificed. Asked me to run away with him, but I was so sure about my sacred duties. So foolishly sure!” Vel hissed, anger shoving aside grief. Not anger at Edard, or even the church, but at herself.
How could I have not gone with him! She curled her hands into fists, dragging gritty dirt into them. Before, she’d have been bothered by getting that under her nails, but now that was such a trivial thing. All of it was! Her clothes, her hair! For retribution’s sake, she’d shave her head and be totally nude if only it meant having Edard back!
Sigurd placed a hand on her right shoulder, gripping it firmly. It wasn’t until he’d been trying to console her that Vel’s tears spilled out. She held a hand up to her lips, driving down sobs that threatened to force themselves out. He knelt down beside her, then used his hand on her shoulder to shift ever so slightly, prompting her to look at him. His eyes looked as sore as she felt, his brow furrowed over them, and lips deeply downturned.
“I’m going to do what I can to reunite you with Edard,” he said, voice soft. He looked away, shame seeping into his tired and sore gaze. “If only to redeem myself for not better protecting the one I loved.”
That struck Vel, harder than she expected. Enough that the tears slowed. She stared at him for a long moment, contemplating. Edard was still alive, far as she knew. This man, despite his task, had spared Edard. He, without his wife, could have been bitter, could have been coldhearted, and robbed Velmira of her chance at love.
“What happened to her?” she asked, voice painfully small.
A heavy sigh escaped Sigurd’s mouth, and he adjusted, sitting beside Vel. For a long moment, the silence lingered, a look of contemplation over the hunter’s face. “She trusted me, and I trusted the church,” he said. “It was a mistake, one I’ll never make again.”
Clearly, he wasn’t ready to talk about the events, and yet, Vel wanted to grasp at something, anything to help the heavy ache in her chest. So, she talked about the man she loved. “Edard came to the church, injured,” she said, thinking back on the day she met him. Oh, how ragged he looked, and how torn. He was raw, vulnerable, and had no one to support him.
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“His company had just left him behind━he was a knight.”
Sigurd gave an amused snort. “‘No soldier left adrift’,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s what they teach those knights.”
Vel nodded, shifting and pulling her knees to her chest. Even that much reminded her just how sore she was. “I didn’t do any healing. Occasionally I changed bandages when we ran out of healers, but otherwise I just poured water,” she said. “I poured his water, and you know what he said to me?”
“Something cringy, I’m sure.”
A smile grew on Vel’s face. She nodded. “He’s good at cringy, but I love it,” she said. “He said that he’d traveled all the land, venturing from the capital city Rumovor, and that had he known he’d gain the chance to see my long lavender hair, he’d have taken two arrows to the knee twice over. It was so silly.”
“I bet. A man with an arrow sticking out of his knee really had his priorities straight,” Sigurd said. “Probably would have set me straight sooner too.”
Giggling, Velmira shook her head. “He visited me every day. I shooed him at first, but then he brought me the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted.”
“A kiss?”
“A kiss!” Velmira exclaimed, blushing. “Sigurd, I am a woman of great propriety. Never have I been kissed before! No, no, he brought me a cookie.” She grinned.
“A cookie?”
“A cookie.”
“A cookie?”
“Are you deaf?”
“Nope, just shocked at how unrefined your tastes are,” Sigurd said, then stood up. He offered her a hand. “Think you can walk?”
“Maybe a little,” Vel said, taking his hand and allowing the man to flex his obviously superior strength when he lifted her all the way up to her feet. Someday, she’d flex on him.
While her legs were shaky, she did manage, with his support, to start down a gradual decline against the cavern wall.
“Graysie made cookies a time or two,” Sigurd said. “Poorly, mind you. She was a nobleman’s daughter. They’re not exactly taught to bake or cook, usually far above such things. Yet, I loved her cookies. It wasn’t the ingredients, or for retribution’s sake, how she burnt them, but rather how she joyfully overshared them. That was her way of trying so hard to blend into a commoner’s world.”
“How did you manage to get a noble to let you marry his daughter if you didn’t have the money for it?”
“You make it sound as if men buy their wives,” Sigurd said, raising an eyebrow. “I didn’t convince him. Didn’t have to when he’d garnered so much hate from her.”
“Oh,” Vel said, raising her brow. “I thought parents were supposed to be wonderful.”
“Supposed to be,” Sigurd said. “High society isn’t kind to a healthy family dynamic. It’s not the first time someone escaped it by marrying another beneath them━a lowly [hunter]. Not even a knight ordained from a noble order. I didn’t deserve her in the end.”
Velmira looked away, nodding. “I don’t know that I deserve Edard,” she said.
“I think you do, Vel, and when you’re reunited with him, you’ll see that.”
Vel looked up at the hunter. “Thank you, Sigurd,” she said.
He nodded, then guided her to a barren platform near the pool. “We’ll rest here tonight. I’ll get a fire started, see if we can’t dry you off and get you to stop chattering your teeth. Giving me a damned headache.”
“What are you even going to burn?” Vel asked.
Sigurd pulled a thin blanket from his pack and tossed it to her. “Passed an old wheelbarrow up near the entrance. I’ll tear it apart, see if it’s dry enough to burn. Try not to run into anything dangerous sitting there.”
“I’ll try not to, but I think danger finds me more often.” Vel watched him go back up the incline, but once he was out of sight, she pulled the blanket around her, then slowly laid down on the ground, wincing at the pain in her shoulders. However, not even her wounds could keep her from falling asleep.
When she next awoke, she was pleasantly surprised to find herself warmed, clothes dried. A fire roared nearby, Sigurd shifting thick sticks with a dagger. Flipping the dagger in his hand, he sheathed it, looking over at her.
“Good morning.”
“Morning? I slept all night?” Vel asked, darting upright.
“Sure did. You have a lot of healing to do, which will also slow down our travel time,” Sigurd said, pulling a pan from over the fire. “Give me your waterskin.”
Vel, grimacing, got herself up to her feet, pausing when she felt the sole of her left slipper flop. It was coming apart. “These shoes were not made to take a beating,” she said, handing him the waterskin.
“They’re slippers, hardly even proper leather,” Sigurd said, filling her waterskin with the boiling water. “We’ll need to get you a set of boots in Lamone if we can.” He hissed when he accidentally burned a hand. He set the pan aside, then corked it and tied it shut with sinew.
“And clothes? Something sturdy?” Velmira asked, looking down at her ragged bloomers from underneath his jerkin. She felt bad that she’d bled over the back of the jerkin as well.
“I can’t imagine what people are going to think when they see you,” Sigurd said, sighing. He offered her the waterskin, its warmth a welcome to Vel’s hands, not that she was anywhere near as cold as the night before. She placed it over her good shoulder and held it close, then picked up the blanket.
Sigurd doused the fire, took the blanket from her, and tucked it away in his pack with his pan. “Up that incline there,” the hunter said, nodding with his head towards a steep, jagged path up towards the waterfall. It was so uneven, it could hardly be called an “incline”, more of a climb.
Velmira followed after him, taking his hand as he offered it to help her over crystals and stones. Her injuries protested, aching with each flexing muscle. “Will there be a lot of climbing?”
“Some,” Sigurd said. “The climbing is the easy part.”
“The easy part?” Vel raised a questioning eyebrow.
“There are snakes, rats, elementals, and spiders throughout these caverns, most of them not the kind sort.”
“There are kind spiders?”
“Yeah, the ones that sit in a corner and mind their own business. The ones in here want to eat you.”
Vel paled. “You couldn’t have told me that before we started this way?”
“You’ll be fine. Probably,” Sigurd said, and as he reached the final ledge ahead, the waterfall tumbling down beside, he paused.
“Is something wrong?”
“Earth elemental,” Sigurd said, then pulled himself the rest of the way up. He turned, taking Vel’s hand to help her the rest of the way. Just as she cleared the ledge, she gasped at the moving stones before her, a rock flying towards her.
