Chapter 20 – The Weight of a Vow
The adrenaline left Ronnie's blood like a tide going out.
What remained was the cold.
It seeped into her wet clothes, turning the mud on her skin into a crust of ice. Her hands, cut and bruised from the chain, throbbed in rhythm with her heartbeat.
She knelt beside Uzo.
He was unconscious. His breathing was shallow, a wet rattle in his chest. His left arm lay at an unnatural angle, the bone pressing dangerously against the skin.
"Okay," Ronnie whispered to herself. Her voice sounded small in the vast, darkening forest. "Okay. Step one. Move him."
She grabbed Uzo's good arm and draped it over her shoulder. She gritted her teeth and heaved.
He was dead weight. He felt heavier than the boulder she had just dropped.
She stumbled, her knees buckling. They fell back into the mud.
"Damn it!" She slammed her fist into the ground. Tears pricked her eyes not from sadness, but from frustration. She was exhausted. She had nothing left.
Get up, she told herself. If you stay here, the Clowns come back. If you stay here, he dies.
She looked at Uzo's pale face. He looked so young without the darkness of the Unword in his eyes. Just a boy who had been erased by the world.
Ronnie placed a hand on his chest. She could feel the faint hum of the Lexicon in his pocket, vibrating against her palm.
She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw. She didn't pray to the gods. She didn't pray to the Houses.
She made a promise. A promise so heavy it felt like iron in her throat.
"I will carry you," she whispered. "I swear it. Even if it kills me, I will get you up that mountain."
The air shifted.
It wasn't a flash of light. It was a sudden, sharp pressure in the center of her chest.
A gray vein pulsed on the back of her hand the hand touching Uzo.
The humming from the Lexicon spiked. It wasn't protecting Uzo this time. It was answering her.
A True Vow had been spoken. A debt had been signed.
Ronnie gasped as energy flooded her system. It wasn't warm. It was cold and hard, like steel reinforcing concrete.
The pain in her legs vanished. The exhaustion in her muscles was locked away behind a wall of numbness.
She stood up.
She grabbed Uzo again.
This time, when she lifted him, he felt light. Impossibly light.
Like she was carrying a ghost.
Ronnie looked at her hands. They weren't shaking anymore.
"What the hell..."
She didn't question it. She turned North, toward the snow line, and began to climb.
The ascent was brutal.
The mud turned to frozen slush, then to hard-packed snow. The wind howled through the Weeping Pass, cutting through their tattered clothes like knives.
Ronnie didn't stop. She couldn't. She knew, instinctively, that if she stopped, the power of the Vow would break, and the exhaustion would kill her instantly.
An hour later, she found a cave.
It was a small fissure in the rock face, sheltered from the wind.
She carried Uzo inside and laid him gently on the dry stone floor. The gray vein on her hand faded, and the weight of the world came crashing back down.
Ronnie collapsed against the wall, gasping for air. Her body screamed in protest, but she forced herself to move.
Step two. The arm.
She crawled over to Uzo. She needed to set the bone before he woke up. If she did it while he was conscious, the shock might kill him.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, gripping his wrist and his elbow.
"This is going to suck."
She took a breath.
She pulled.
CRACK.
The bone snapped back into alignment.
Uzo's eyes flew open.
He didn't scream. He made a sound like a strangled gasp, his back arching off the stone floor. His eyes were wide, blind with pain.
"I got you, I got you," Ronnie hushed him, pinning his shoulders down. "It's done. Breathe."
Uzo stared at the ceiling, his chest heaving. Slowly, the panic faded, replaced by recognition. He looked at Ronnie.
He looked at the steam rising from her skin in the cold air.
"How..." Uzo rasped, his voice wrecked. "How did you carry me?"
Ronnie tore a strip of cloth from her shirt to bind his arm.
"I don't know," she admitted. "I just... promised I would."
Uzo looked at her hand. He saw the faint, fading trace of gray light beneath her skin.
His eyes narrowed.
"Ronnie," he whispered. "You swore an Oath."
"So?"
"In the Lexicon," Uzo said, coughing weakly, "an Oath is a type of magic. It binds your life force to a task. It gives you strength, but..."
"But what?"
"But if you break it... or if you fail..." Uzo looked at her with terrified eyes. "The Debt kills you."
Ronnie tied the knot on his sling tight. She sat back, wiping sweat from her forehead.
She smirked, though it looked tired.
"Then I guess I better not fail."
Uzo tried to argue, but he was too weak. His eyes drifted shut again.
Ronnie moved to the mouth of the cave to keep watch.
The snow was falling harder now, erasing their footprints.
She looked out at the pass.
Fifty yards away, sticking out of the snow, was a marker.
It wasn't a signpost.
It was a spear, driven into the ground.
Impaled on the spear was a helmet.
A helmet from the House of The Brute.
The metal was crushed, as if something had squeezed it like a grape.
And carved into the rock face next to it were symbols.
Not elegant runes. Not magical script.
Jagged, angry scratches.
NO WORDS.
ONLY BLOOD.
Ronnie touched the chain-dagger at her waist.
They had escaped the Clowns.
But they had walked straight into the den of the Barbarians.