Eventually, the shrinking tunnel drove them to their hands and knees and forced a reconfiguration.

They left Nick to nap with his head on Mara’s folded jacket while Eli unearthed a length of rope from his pack and bound it to the straps of Mara’s.

Eli would go first, pushing his own pack ahead of him. Then Nick, who Eli would magically compel to stay calm and crawl between them. Then Mara, dragging her own pack behind her.

They took a longer rest than they had before, since it wouldn’t be practical to take another until they reached the far end of the narrow section. Mara ate half an apple and roused Nick to eat the other half. She also forced him to drink some water, though she was growing concerned about the lightness of her flask. She and Eli each carried three, and she was already halfway through her second one.

When she voiced her concerns to Eli, he waved them off.

“Loftland is a hard place to go hungry or thirsty,” he told her, flapping a hand. He sat against the opposite wall, knees upraised to fit in the narrow space. “There’s snowmelt creeks in every culvert, wild berries on every bush, and the small game practically crawls into your lap.”

“I thought it was a hostile place,” she said thoughtfully, struggling to reconcile the dark Loftland legends with the fertile image he was drawing.

“It can be. Humans aren’t the only creatures who find it hard to go hungry, there.”

Mara took another, deeper sip of her water. “Did you take an oath that prevents you from providing clarifying details, or do you just enjoy being cryptic?”

For a moment, silence filled the oppressive emptiness of the narrow tunnel and Mara grit her teeth, glaring at her own knees and cursing her impulsivity. What was she thinking? Was she thinking? Her life was in this man’s hands, and he’d already demonstrated more patience with her than she had any right to expect. What sweet insanity had inspired her to tease him?

The silence broke with his small, surprised huff of laughter, and Mara’s muscles went slack with relief as he replied, amusement lifting his tone from its usual measured cadence. “Loftland is discerning, and she doesn’t lack for defenses. If you entered the forest with intent to steal or do harm, you would discover a hostile, savage place populated by blood-thirsty beasts. If you enter the forest with intent to seek refuge, or to pass peaceably through, it’s the safest place this side of the Shipway.”

“See, that’s a proper answer.” Mara took another sip of water. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. How is your shoulder?”

“It’s fine,” she lied, averting her gaze.

“We’ll be crawling for some time. If it’s sore, let me work on it a little more.”

“It’s fine, really. It just aches a little.”

“Mara.”

“You’ve been keeping Nick calm all night,” she blurted. “You’re going to burn out.”

His brows drew together, as if she’d said something absurd. Had she? It was hard to tell. Her mind wasn’t exactly at its most sound.

“I just mean… I mean shouldn’t you save your magic? What if we run into trouble and we need you for something more serious than a sore shoulder?” That made sense, didn’t it? Did it not?

Perhaps it did, because the befuddled frown melted from his face.

“I’m nowhere near my limit,” he said simply. “Nick slept the last few hours, so I had a break. And the stronger you are, the less energy it takes to heal you. Better to do it now, before you go crawling around and making it worse.”

Mara was starting to get a little aggravated, with herself, with the situation, even with him. She was meant to be the sensible one. That was why Davy had married her. She was smart, competent, and good under pressure, having spent most of her life serving the city’s poor and oppressed. She snuck about after curfew, bargaining and trading her way into an impressive collection of books and ingredients and tools. She taught herself lay magic so that she could better care for the people she considered her own.

And now here she was, in perhaps the defining crisis of her life, floundering about, spiraling into anxiety, and offering nothing to the escape effort but the occasional silly, token protest. All the power of her mind and spirit were sinking into the pit of her grief, leaving her helpless. A hindrance. A waste of time and energy.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

She knew better than to think she could postpone grieving her husband forever, but she needed at least to postpone it until they reached safety. She could not afford to fall to pieces or drift loose from the earth when her son needed her so badly.

So, she decided, she would play pretend. She’d lied to her son, implied that they’d be meeting his father where they were going. What further harm would it do to tell herself the same lie? And if doing so let her borrow back her sanity, her utility, then wasn’t that harm a worthwhile price to pay?

“Mara?”

She jerked a little, coming back to herself, and found Eli watching her with a line between his brows. “You alright?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “But you’re right. It makes sense to let you heal it.”

His expression relaxed, and he dipped his head in a grateful nod. “Thank you. Is it okay if Nick takes a nap while I work?”

She wanted to say no, that she didn’t want her sweet son spending any more time in magic induced catatonia. But that was one of those illogical, grief-stricken widow thoughts. A product of her desperate reluctance to endanger another thing she loved. So she simply nodded.

When Nick was asleep once more, Eli gestured for her to sit back against the wall and shuffled close enough to touch her, Nick’s sleeping form nestled between them. Though she was loath to let him touch her, she offered him her hand, knowing that he needed skin-to-skin contact to heal.

She needn’t have worried about undue intimacy. He took her offered hand like it was a delicate object, his thumb pressed lightly in the center of her palm, two fingers cradling her knuckles, the rest curved toward his own palm.

She wanted to say something about the absurdity of it. His obvious reticence made the whole thing worse, somehow. But before she could speak, his eyes met hers.

“Ready?”

Healing sessions hurt, often more than injury itself. Bracing herself, she nodded. “Go ahead.”

Heat flooded up her arm from where they touched, sinking into her shoulder. The ache became a throbbing, burning, tearing pain, and she grit her teeth and leaned her head back against the wall. She forced herself to breathe, in through her nose and out through her mouth.

Gradually, burning and tearing faded to just burning. Then the burning eased to a tingly itch. Her breath came easier and the heat gave way to pleasant warmth. And finally, the saving grace of healing magic–a wave of soothing cool traveled up her arm and washed away the echoing remnants of the pain.

Eli released her hand, and she flexed her fingers, experimentally rolling her shoulder.

“Wow.” Sometimes it made her jealous, what a healer could do. There was value in what she did as a physik. For one, lay magic was accessible to any who attempted to learn it, while healing magic was an innate skill, limited to those to whom it was gifted at birth. For another, the power of healing was limited by the strength of the patient. A physik could do far more for an exhausted, malnourished patient than a healer could. A physik could brew antidotes to poisons, where a healer could only protect the body as it eliminated the poison itself.

Nonetheless…

“I know you flubbed the evaluations, but you’re at least a level seven,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a ten.”

“How does it feel?” he asked, ducking his head a moment too late to hide the flicker of a smile.

“Good as new.”

“Truly, though.”

“Truly. Doesn’t hurt at all.”

He let a breath out through his nose, nodded, and shuffled away toward his pack. “In that case, get some rest. I’m going to scout ahead a bit.”

Mara straightened. “What?”

He was already shuffling away, moving his pack so that it sat beside hers, the rope spooled atop it. “I’m going to scout ahead.”

If Mara hadn’t just resolved to be less of a hindrance, she might have burst into tears. She didn’t trust him, didn’t even like him all that much, but that didn’t mean she’d rather be alone.

But she had just resolved to be less of a hindrance, and scouting ahead was a practical thing to do. If some part of the cavern had caved in, or was too narrow for him to pass through, better for him to discover it than to wait until all three of them were stacked up behind each other with their packs in tow.

“Okay.” Her voice quavered, so she cleared her throat. “Sounds good.” She punctuated the lie with a firm nod.

“I shouldn’t be longer than thirty minutes. If an hour passes and I’m not back, turn around. There’s a ward at the top of the stairs. The Caretakers will know to come let you in. They’ll hide you and help you figure some other way out.”

Mara frowned, irritated. She hadn’t realized there was an Eli-free escape option. If she had, she’d have chosen that one. “Why couldn’t they do that in the first place?”

Eli sat back on his heels, and his eyes caught hers in the eerie light, flashing with something she hadn’t seen in him before. Something that snagged on the loose threads of her own tattered emotions. “I know you don’t trust me, Mara, but I am your best chance of reaching safety. If there was someone else to take you, some better route to travel, we wouldn’t be here.”

She opened her mouth and then closed it. Opened her mouth. Closed it again. In the silence, Eli pulled the watch from his pocket, unclipped the chain from his belt, and handed it to her. The metal of the watch itself was warm, the chain cool where it draped over the back of her hand. “Thirty minutes.”

She nodded and offered him the light, but he waved it off. Watch in one hand, light in the other, she sat and watched him turn and crawl away. The tunnel shrank so rapidly, he was still in sight when he was forced from his hands and knees down onto his belly. Her eyes burned, but she didn’t blink, watching his feet until they disappeared into the dark.

It was only after the sound of his shuffling progress faded into silence that she realized she desperately wanted him to return.