The Oracle's Secret (The Oracle Saga Book 1) (8 page)

Elise calls for us to start moving again. There are groans and sighs that stop abruptly when she yells for quiet. The Northerners aren’t happy. Maybe they weren’t expecting it all to take this long.

Me neither
, I think. at least they’re having a miserable time too. That’s some slight consolation.

On we go, back to our normal formation now that we’re out of danger - Tarian and I at the front with Rourke and Dearden, everyone else somewhere behind us, invisible to me. We walk for a couple of hours through forest that all looks the same. I begin to wonder how long we’ll be walking - maybe my vision won’t happen for days, maybe even weeks. Sherwood hasn’t exactly been cooperative with us so far, and it is a magic forest. Maybe it can just keep throwing obstacles at us until it decides we can have the Lightstone. Maybe it’ll
never
decide we can have the Lightstone.

Then, sometime around late afternoon, I notice that we’re starting to walk uphill.

This could be it. We could be close. I keep my eyes open, looking in every direction for the rocks I saw. The mud track beneath my feet abruptly becomes a path of large, flat stones. The same path I remember. I smile around the gag, and my heart starts to beat faster. Every step is taking us closer.

I spot the rocks on my right, through the trees. They look like they go on for a while and eventually become caves in the edge of the hill. I’m almost at the place where the shaking began in my vision. I feel a rush of adrenaline course through me, getting me ready to run. I wish I could have warned Tarian too.

And then it begins - there’s a rumbling sound first, that makes everyone look around in confusion.

‘What the hell is going on?’ demands Elise.

Then the ground is shaking, so hard that it blurs my vision. There are screams and shouts of fear and confusion, and out of the corner of my eye I see a few people fall to the ground. But I’ve braced myself, planting my feet firmly so that I won’t fall. I wrap my tied hands a couple of times around the rope holding me and yank it free - Dearden’s so busy worrying about staying upright that he’s not holding on tight.

I scream Tarian’s name, and although it’s unintelligible he hears me, pulls himself free as well, and follows me as I run towards the rocks. The ground is still shaking, harder now than before, and I stumble but manage to right myself. I wonder if this will just make things worse - if it’s an earthquake maybe the rocks will come crashing down on us - but it’s too late for second-guessing. This is what I’ve chosen and I’ll see it through.

I know where the gap between the rocks is because of my vision, and he must be able to find it using his powers, because we both head unerringly towards it. I slide through first, then he squeezes through too, his broad shoulders almost trapping him. He takes the lead then, guiding me down a narrow path through the piles of stones, squeezing through cracks and under barriers. He’s in his element.

I can’t hear any sounds of pursuit, but we keep going and going while the ground still shakes. I fall more than once, leaning myself against rocks to push myself back up again. Tarian stops to help me up when he sees, letting me lean my tied arms on his and drag myself upright. I’m beginning to feel sick with the shaking and the running and the gag making it harder to breathe. Finally the shaking stops. Tarian turns to me.

‘Almost there, I promise,’ he says, with a reassuring smile.

He leads me only a little further through the rocks, until we get to a little patch of bare ground, surrounded by stone on all sides but open to the sky.

‘We should be able to stop here long enough to get untied,’ he says. ‘Look for sharp stones.’

I walk the walks of the little space until I spot one jutting out. I start slicing through the tape holding my fingers down, but the rock isn’t sharp enough and I just end up scraping my hands without actually freeing myself.

‘Here,’ says Tarian.

I turn around and he’s behind me, flexing his freed hands. They look sore, and I want to hold them and make them better. He goes to untie my hands too but I make a muffled protest and he goes for the gag first. His cramping fingers can’t manage to untie it properly, but he pulls at it so that there’s more give and manages to make enough space that he can slide the gag sideways and move the knot out of my mouth, making it simple to roll the whole thing down and away. It sits around my neck, a limp, soggy weight. Tarian runs his fingers softly across the lines where the gag bit into my cheeks and makes a low, angry sound. My mouth is as dry as a desert. My lips crack, and I can barely move my tongue.

‘Thanks,’ I manage, a croak. My jaw is so stiff.

Tarian is already using a loose stone he found to cut through the tape confining my hands.

‘You’ll be out of there in just a moment,’ he says, soothing. ‘I’ve almost got it.’

The tape comes off, and it feels like it takes half my skin with it but when I look at my fingers they’re still intact, just bone-white and rigid. I can’t move them at all. Even when Tarian manages to cut through the cable tie and free me completely, my hands are stuck like claws.

I don’t care, for the moment. All I want is to throw my arms around Tarian, so that’s what I do, weird claw hands and all. He puts his arms around me too and holds me tight, breathing hard, and with my face buried in his chest I can feel his heart hammering. I scrabble at him, trying to pull him closer, and he squeezes me tighter, wrapping me all around with his powerful arms. I feel safer now than I’ve felt in my whole life.

Pain shoots through me, distracting me. I yelp. My hands.

‘Feeling coming back?’ Tarian asks.

I nod.

‘It’ll be over in a few minutes,’ Tarian says.

He guides me to the ground and we sit. He pulls me into his lap sideways so that I can lean against his chest until the pain goes away, and he strokes my hair. My fingers throb and sting and I watch, half-fascinated, as they start to regain their colour.

‘We can’t stay here too long,’ Tarian says.

‘Looking for us,’ I agree. With my parched mouth, I can only manage short sentences.

‘But it’ll take them a while to find us in all of these rocks,’ says Tarian.

I sigh. I wish we could stay here.

‘Nice here,’ I say. ‘Safe.’

‘It is safe, for now,’ he agrees. ‘But it won’t be if they surround us.’

I raise my eyebrows in acknowledgement. We sit there for a few more minutes and I relax into him, feeling sheltered in his embrace.

‘Hands better,’ I say, finally. ‘Should go.’

‘All right,’ he says.

My hands aren’t better, exactly, but they’ll do, and we can’t afford to waste time.

‘Follow me,’ says Tarian, and he leads me out into the rocks again. We walk for a few minutes and then, abruptly, we’re at a stream, flowing through the middle of the rocks. The thought of water makes me dizzy with excitement.

‘Time?’ I ask him, listening out for pursuit.

He looks around too, his height giving him an advantage in spotting the enemy. ‘I think we can risk a minute or two,’ he says.

I kneel by the stream and awkwardly scoop water into my mouth. Nothing in my life so far has ever tasted as good as that ice-cold water does. Nothing ever can again. I don’t even care that there are bits of leaves floating in it. I drink what I can and then I just splash my face with it, rub it over my lips. I feel so much better.

Beside me Tarian is drinking too. I look up at him and he grins.

‘This is just like going for mountain walks back home,’ he says.

‘Bit more dangerous,’ I say, with less effort now than before.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘some of those wild ponies can get vicious...’

‘Maybe one day you can show me,’ I say.

‘Maybe one day I will,’ he says, and he grins at me.

We both stand up again and he takes my hand. A shiver runs through me that’s nothing to do with the cold water.

‘Livya...’ he says.

He leans in to kiss me and oh, god, I want to kiss him back so badly, but my mouth still hurts and I can’t see it being anything but awkward and painful, so I turn my head and his kiss lands on my neck instead, leaving a spot there that tingles deliciously. I put my arms around him and pull him close so that he understands I’m not rejecting him.

‘Mouth too sore?’ he asks.

‘Yeah...’ I say. ‘Rest of me’s ok, though.’

He laughs and kisses my neck again, then my jaw. He moves my hand to his face and kisses my palm, then he kisses my wrist, then he kisses all the way up the inside of my arm, leaving a slow trail of fire that makes my knees weak.

I want to kiss him back but I can’t, so instead I stroke the back of his neck with my free hand, then move it slowly down his chest. I press my cheek to his, and the stubble he’s grown over the days we’ve been here tickles me. Suddenly I’m overwhelmed with deja vu again.

‘There!’

That’s Elise, yelling in the distance. They’ve found us. It was stupid, so stupid, to stand there kissing when we were being pursued, but I can’t make myself regret it for a second. If that’s the last good moment I get in my life, I’m glad of it.

‘Which way?’ I ask Tarian.

‘Along the bank of the stream!’ he says.

His hand wraps mine and we run together, following the water as it rushes away. I can still hear Elise shouting behind us, and more of them now too, but I don’t pay any attention. I just keep running, feet pounding on the pebbly shore, splashing now and then in the shallows.

The stream gets wider, then joins onto a bigger river. Still we keep running. I’m out of breath and my chest and lungs and feet and legs and everything hurt, but I’m going to keep running until I fall over, and Tarian hasn’t fallen over yet, so neither will I. It’s like we’re one creature, moving in step, our feet rattling the pebbles in tandem.

‘You’ve got nowhere to go!’ calls Elise behind us. ‘This is pointless! There’s only death that way!’

I wonder what she’s talking about, and then I see what she means. The shore disappears a few more paces away.

‘Tarian, stop!’ I say.

We stand there on the last of the bank, at the top of the waterfall. The Northerners are approaching from all sides.
This is it
, I think.

But then I look down at the water cascading below us, at the plunge pool at the bottom, at the landscape surrounding us, and I remember a vision that feels like weeks ago but was really only a couple of days.

‘It’s all right,’ I yell over the noise of the water, turning to Tarian and smiling. ‘We’re going to jump.’

He stares at me. ‘Are you sure?’

I nod. ‘Trust me.’

‘All right,’ he says. ‘After three?’

Elise’s people are getting closer. It’s now or never.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘One, two, threeeeee...’

We leap.

It’s so loud, louder than I remembered from the vision. The waterfall behind us roars so that I can’t even hear myself screaming, even though I know I am. The view is blurring past us so quickly that I can’t make anything out. Tarian’s hand grips mine tightly.

I remember suddenly that the vision ended with us plunging into the water - what if that’s it? What if that’s the end and I’ve condemned us to a watery grave?

Before I have time to think about it the water hits, and it hurts, like slamming into a wall of ice. And then we’re beneath it and fingers of cold are pinching me all over, and there’s water in my mouth and ears and eyes, and I don’t know what to do but I know that I’m still holding Tarian’s hand like a lifeline. And he’s pulling me somewhere, swimming determinedly.

I don’t know what he has in mind, but when a Finder knows where they’re going, you follow. So I kick my legs and start swimming too, as best as I can. I can’t see anything and I can’t breathe, but Tarian is with me.

Just when I feel like my lungs are about to burst, we surface. I gasp in a few breaths of sweet air, coughing and spluttering. And then I stare.

We’re in a cave. We’ve popped up into it from the pool that takes up most of the space. There’s a stone shelf across the water, big enough to walk around on. Above our heads, the ceiling of the cave is studded with some sort of shining white stones - at first I think they’re gleaming where the light hits them, but then I realise that they are the light - every single one of them is glowing softly, illuminating the cavern. It might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I can hardly make myself look away long enough to swim across the cave and climb up onto the dry shelf.

Water runs off me like another waterfall when I drag myself out of the pool. My hair hangs limply around my face. I look at Tarian, soaking too. He grins at me, and suddenly I’m laughing and I can’t stop. I don’t know what’s funny or why but I don’t stop laughing even when it starts me coughing again.

‘We’re alive?’ I finally manage to say. ‘We’re... we jumped down a waterfall and we’re still alive! This is ridiculous! We should be ten kinds of dead by now!’

Tarian’s laughing too, and we both just sit there, soaked in a cave, giggling.

‘Where is this place?’ I finally ask. ‘Is it safe?’

He nods. ‘I don’t think they could find it unless they knew where it was. It wasn’t obvious at all.’

I take his word for it - I wasn’t exactly paying attention to my surroundings on the way.

‘So... what now?’ I ask.

He gives me a long, thoughtful look. ‘For right now,’ he says, ‘I think we should stay here for a while, clean ourselves up and recover. After that... I don’t know.’

Getting clean sounds like an amazing plan. Our frantic trip through the plunge pool got rid of a lot of the surface dirt but I still feel grimy. I wish I was at court right now and I could use my huge bathtub with the water jets. Even my lukewarm shower in London would be bliss. But this cave pool is still the best option I’ve had in a while. I run my hand through the water.

‘Hey!’ I say. ‘It’s warm!’

I must have been too cold and scared to notice when we came in, but the warmth of the water is all the invitation I need to strip off all my clothes and slide into it. Briefly I wonder if I shouldn’t, because of Tarian, but it’s hard to have inhibitions when you’ve just been dragged through a forest together and jumped into what should have been certain death.

There’s a shallow place just near the shelf that’s perfect for lying back and soaking in the water. My aching muscles ease in the cosy embrace of the pool and I close my eyes for a moment, forgetting all my troubles in the water.

‘Mind if I come in too?’ Tarian says, behind me.

I turn to smile at him and find him in the middle of undressing, pulling his tank top up and over his head, revealing a perfectly toned six-pack and... oh god... a tattoo just above his heart, a knotted pattern - a pattern that I’ve kissed, traced with my fingers.

It’s him.

My heart beats faster and I feel like the world is spinning around me. This can’t be real. It can’t be him. But it is, and I’ve never been gladder about anything in my whole life.

‘Livya?’ he asks.

I suddenly remember that he was asking me a question. He’s looking at me quizzically, a hint of a grin on his face. What was it, what was it? Oh.

‘Of course you can come in,’ I manage to say. ‘Plenty of room!’

I don’t know what to do, what to say, how to feel. Should I tell him? Should I wait? What if it turns out to be some sort of huge coincidence? Maybe he has six brothers and they all have the same tattoo?

But no, this is right, I can feel it. As he finishes undressing and walks into the water, I’m filled with a certainty that I’ve never felt before. And I stand up and go to him, facing him, waist-deep in warm water and lit by glowing crystals.

He smiles at me, uncertain. ‘Livya?’ he asks again.

I’m close now, close enough to touch. And I know what I want.

‘Kiss me,’ I say.

He does. It’s slow at first, his lips just brushing mine, but even that little contact sends surges of want through me. I want to grab him and pull him to the ground but I don’t want to rush the moment, I want it to last, I want to remember every second. He kisses me deeper, his hand on my neck, his thumb brushing my cheek. Every place he touches me, I tingle. I move closer to him, pressing close to feel the shape of him, and every vision of him I’ve had floods my memory. The feel of his arms around me is just the way I knew it would be, the taste of his lips is deliciously familiar, the scent of him, even in the water, is the musky, earthy scent that drives me wild. I can’t tear myself away from him, not even for a moment. I want his mouth, his hands, his arms, his shoulders, his heart beating beside mine. And I want more than that, infinitely more, I want everything, every part of him joined with every part of me, if only for one earth-shaking moment.

And I remember a vision, several nights ago. A warm, dark space. Water, glowing light. A feeling that everything was falling into place.

‘Tarian,’ I manage to gasp, between kisses.

‘Yes?’ he asks, his voice low.

‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I say.

He looks confused, but he lets me lead him back to dry land so that we can sit together and talk. I’m fighting the urge to start kissing him again, but I need him to know. I don’t want to keep him a secret from himself. I don’t want to worry about it while I’m kissing him, I just want to be in the moment, knowing that he wants this as much as I do, understands what he’s getting into.

‘I’ve been having visions,’ I say, ‘visions of you. Except I didn’t know it was you until just now. I didn’t know who it was. I...’

I’ve started all wrong.

‘What kind of visions?’ he asks.

‘Visions of us,’ I say. ‘Together. I’ve been having them for months. I never saw your face. It wasn’t until I saw your tattoo that I knew... I don’t know why I’ve seen you in visions so many times, or what it means - except that you must be important to me, to my life. And I wanted you to know, because we shouldn’t do this just because I’ve seen it. I don’t want to let my visions dictate my life for me. I want us to choose it.’

He studies me with those fathomless eyes, glinting golden brown in the glow. ‘So, have you had a vision of this, now, this very moment?’ he asks.

I shake my head. ‘Not this exact moment, but I’ve seen us here, in this cave.’

‘And what were we doing?’ he asks.

I blush. ‘We’re both still wet from the pool,’ I say. ‘We’re both naked. I’m smiling at you.’

And I can’t help myself, I do smile at him, and he smiles back at me and my stomach does backflips.

‘Then what?’ he asks.

‘Then,’ I say, ‘we stand, and I pull you closer.’

He stands up, offers me his hand and helps me up. I put my hands on his waist and draw him towards me, and for a moment everything feels unreal, the vision like a layer of mist over the real experience.

‘This all sounds pretty good to me,’ Tarian murmurs. ‘What next?’

I’m running my hands over his chest, full of wonder. It’s all coming true. My fingers trace his tattoo. The lines are dark, thick. I want to ask him what it means, but that can wait.

‘Next,’ I say, ‘whatever we want. Whatever we choose.’

‘I choose you,’ he says. ‘I choose everything about you. I choose us, here, right now.’

Warmth floods me and I kiss him, folding my arms around him as he folds his around me. His skin is wet against mine, just like it was in the vision, and I shiver with anticipation. He lays me down on the stone floor and brings me close, his fingers stroking down my side, tracing down, then his hands caressing everywhere he can reach, moving from shoulders to thighs to breasts to hands to hair, no order, no method, just touching and leaving sparks in the wake of his hands, his hands that make me lean closer, gasping, wanting more. He kisses me, and for a moment I think, this is the kiss from my vision, and then there’s nothing else, nothing but the kiss, cocooning me, blocking out the world, making a whole new world of it’s own that’s just us, forever and ever. I can’t imagine needing anything else for the rest of my life.

He pulls away and I sigh, bereft. He kisses my neck and I tense with desire at the touch of his lips, writhing with it as his kisses move downward past my collarbone. The pressure of his hands is firm on my hips, keeping me close. I clutch at him, anywhere I can reach, every place that’s firm and soft at once. And then I’m crying out without words as he takes my nipple in his mouth, teasing it with his tongue. It’s already so much, so good, that I’m not sure I can bear more, but I want him so much, want to feel him inside me, and he knows, he knows even though he never had a vision of me like I did of him, and he strokes between my legs, discovers the wetness there, and I’m so ready, so ready I could explode at every touch of his skin on mine, even the way our knees touch is like fire and magic.

‘I want you,’ I say. ‘Oh god, I want you...’

I take a moment to perform a contraceptive incantation, shaking with the effort of keeping myself away from him for just the few seconds it takes, and then we’re colliding and he’s inside me and he’s filling me up and I’m surrounding him, a moment of perfect balance, and we move together like one being, slower at first, savouring it, fingers still roaming, hands still cupping, and then we move faster, urgent, no more soft touches, only holding each other tight to get closer as we rock, mouths enmeshed, bodies pressing together. My eyes squeeze shut now and I’m all touch and smell and sound and taste, his mouth, his scent, his body solid and slick and real against mine, his grunts escaping along with my gasps. And then even that is gone and there’s only one thing, one unbearable, exquisite feeling that builds and builds and builds and then bursts like a flower and sends me soaring, reeling, spinning. His ecstatic cries mingle with my own, echoing against the cave walls as we both come at the same moment. Stars fill my vision and for one moment I believe completely that we have left the Earth together.