TRHK Chapter 10

I used the small spade I'd brought to carefully dig up the herb and tuck it into the pouch. Looking around, a few more plants of the same type grew nearby, so I repeated the process.

Two hours to find one variety. Three more still to locate. And yet something unreasonably triumphant had taken up residence in my chest, as though all the work were already done.

"Three left to find. Once we have those, treatment can start!"

Kahron received this news with the expression of someone who had been asked to care and declined. This was his own illness, and somehow he remained comprehensively uninterested. His presence here felt like something extorted—here because it was easier than continued pestering.

Which made me, absurdly, want to cure him faster. My actual goal was to get Kahron to break my binding contract so I could escape before Joel returned—I knew that—but there it was anyway, the wanting. To fix it. To make him look back and realize he'd been wrong not to trust me sooner.

Rustle.

Something moved in the undergrowth. I startled badly and pressed myself behind Kahron before I'd made a conscious decision to move. Every muscle locked.

"Kyaaa!"

Out of the bushes scrambled something small and squirrel-like—a creature, possibly animal, possibly monster, the distinction remained unclear at speed—which shot up a tree and vanished in a rapid series of tiny movements. The tension leaked out of me in a long exhale.

"If you're that frightened, you should have gone back."

Kahron glanced down at me, still tucked behind him, and made the observation.

"I can't," I said, stepping out, somewhat red-faced. "I need the herbs. And besides..."

I looked up at him. Carefully not looking at his mouth, which had become inconveniently noticeable.

"If something happens, Kahron will save me."

...He would, wouldn't he? He'd saved me before the deal was struck. Now that there was a deal, surely that held even more firmly. Admittedly, the last time might have gone differently if Landale hadn't given the order—but still.

Kahron looked down at me with an unreadable expression. He was very tall; holding his gaze at close range required tipping my head back at a significant angle. I reached up self-consciously to smooth down my hair, which had apparently reached a state of chaos at some point during the last two hours. I kept glancing at him sideways. He smiled.

"I save you?"

The question carried weight it shouldn't have, and my heart lurched. Then he started walking again, not looking back.

"You're not going to save me?"

I caught up and asked, rather more urgently than the current absence of monsters justified. But Kahron without me was Kahron leaving me as monster-food, and that was a straightforward problem.

"Aren't you looking for herbs?"

The serene deflection ended the inquiry. I redirected my entire attention to searching. It was embarrassing, technically—I was the one who knew the plants, and so far Kahron had found more than I had.

Another hour of walking, approximately. My legs had progressed past trembling into something grimmer. Finally, I found a second variety.

"Look at this. Kahron!"

I'd wanted to give some context, demonstrate expertise, make a reasonable professional impression. But Kahron had his forehead in one hand, head bowed, and the explanation died somewhere before it reached my mouth. I crossed to him quickly.

"Are you alright?"

Another headache. It did seem like I'd arrived in this world precisely as his Madness was entering a worse phase.

I pulled out the cheveurn I'd been gathering as we walked and brought it to his lips. This time he accepted it with almost no resistance, and something about that—the simple opening of his mouth, no hostility, no fight left in it—made something in my chest compress in a way I hadn't expected.

For someone with that much cruelty to spare in ordinary moments, how bad must it actually be.

"Chew it properly before you swall—"

Not chewing properly reduced the efficacy significantly, and I'd been about to say so.

My arm was caught, and I was pulled sharply forward. And then, before any useful thought could form, I was kissing Kahron.

"Hup."

It was different from the first time, which had felt like being consumed. The bitterness from the herb was still there, but the way his tongue moved against mine was different—more deliberate, slower, carrying a precision that registered in my spine before it registered anywhere conscious.

...Deeper. And strange.

"Mm—"

When his tongue found the underside of mine, a sound escaped me without permission. Shame arrived immediately after. I tried to pull away. His arm hooked around my waist and pulled our bodies flush together instead, and that was apparently all the progress I was making.

'What is this, exactly.'

The first time had a practical justification—he hadn't been cooperating with the medicine, and direct transfer had been the only option. But he'd taken the herb himself this time. He'd already swallowed it before any of this started. So why—

"Ahng."

His tongue pressed deep and held there, and I made another sound that was deeply unacceptable, and I was aware—distantly, through considerable fog—that something strange had begun happening between my thighs.

My legs were losing their reliability. My body was sinking. He caught the back of one thigh through my skirt and pulled me closer, presumably for structural reasons, but the placement of his hand was precarious. Another few inches upward and it would be somewhere else entirely. My heart was doing something alarmed and continuous.

"Haa, bitter."

He broke away briefly, released a slow breath, and complained. I was still leaning against him, trying to make sense of what was happening, and finding the effort inconclusive.

"Wh... why did you..."

"You did it to me."

"I did that because you wouldn't take the herb any other way—"

If he'd taken it himself, as he just had, I would never have done any of that. And I had worked quite hard afterward to stop thinking about it, and now all of that work was comprehensively undone.

"What?"

My voice had dropped below audible. It was possible he genuinely hadn't heard, or possible he was enjoying not having heard. I glared at him properly. Kahron smiled—the kind of smile that didn't improve the situation—and bent his head again.

Before I could formulate a response, he had my lower lip between his teeth.

"Ah—"

The sound arrived before the thought could. Not just from the surprise of it. His hand, which had been at the precarious location on my thigh, had taken the opportunity to move upward and was now where it had been threatening to go all along.

Through the skirt, his grip was still extremely legible. My face went from warm to genuinely hot. The part of me he was holding followed suit. I twisted my head away from his mouth.

"What—hmm—what are you—"

I reached behind myself and caught the back of his hand, attempting to discourage the movement. It didn't work. He gripped more firmly. It wasn't painful exactly—there was enough give in the flesh for that—but humiliation and pain were separate matters and one didn't require the other.

Both hands now.

"You..."

He tilted his head, with the air of someone who had just become curious about something.

"Are you wet there too?"

He pressed his lips once against mine, brief and almost businesslike, and asked it. 'There' seemed to mean my mouth, from context—'wet' presumably a reference to the kiss—but wet there too implied a comparison, and the comparison implied an elsewhere, and I was not going to pursue that thought.

My face was now on fire.

"Don't—say strange things. Remove your—hk!"

I'd said remove your hands. He had responded by adding the second one, and both of them were now doing something unreasonable with the material of my skirt. The flesh gave and was gathered and pulled in opposing directions—

When he spread both sides outward at once, the sensation of open air arriving between my legs carried startling specificity, and I punched him in the chest.

Whack.

He didn't move. He was built like a wall; there had probably been no measurable physical effect. But he seemed to register that I was genuinely struggling, and after a moment he released me.

My backside ached in a distant way, like something that had been handled without particular care. I had no coherent framework for what had just happened.

"Ow."

Kahron looked down at where I'd hit him with a perfectly neutral expression and said this as though reporting a minor and entirely unrelated fact. That was deliberate mockery. That was simply mockery.

"If... if you do that again... I'm leaving alone."

A warning. That had been the point.

Except the moment it left my mouth, I understood the problem. I had made considerable effort to bring Kahron into this forest specifically because I was frightened of the monsters, and now I was threatening to leave without him.

I corrected quickly.

"Once we leave the forest. Until then I'm staying."

Kahron looked at me for a moment, and then laughed.

"Ha ha."

After everything he'd just done, his laugh came out clear and light, almost boyish. It made me irritated in a way I couldn't quite locate, and yet I still couldn't repeat the threat. Because I'd only be the one inconvenienced.

"Let's head back for today."

I looked up at the sky, which had darkened without my noticing. The forest pulled the light out faster than open ground, the branches making their own shade above us.

Kahron nodded, without apparent objection.

We hadn't done badly, for the day. I wrapped both hands around the pouch holding the herbs and walked.

"Shall I carry you, if you're tired?"

He offered this pleasantly—helpfully, even—while I was maintaining what I considered a prudent distance given recent events. Given the established pattern: when Kahron smiled, when Kahron was helpful, the interior tended toward the opposite.

"No."

He accepted this without comment.

Pad, pad, pad. Our footsteps in the quiet of the forest. It had been so long since I'd walked through anywhere like this with someone else that the reality of it kept slipping sideways into unreality. Though that wasn't the only reason.

I was pretending to be unbothered. My head was running the same sequence on a loop.

A tongue, soft and deliberate, working against mine. Both hands full of flesh that almost certainly bore marks even now. I pressed my still-warm cheeks and said nothing.

"......"

Kahron, who I'd expected to simply walk ahead and leave me to keep up, stayed close. His pace was still fast, but not beyond following. We passed out of the forest and into the village, and still he hadn't walked away.

I was watching his back—nearer than it used to be—and trying to identify the feeling that had settled somewhere in my chest, when—

"Maylin! Do you remember me?"

Someone behind me caught my arm and stopped me.