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Aguefort’s daughter hits her with dispel magic and everything snaps back into focus.
Or it would, if Sandra Lynn could see through the tears.
She drops to her knees and tosses her longbow away from herself, hears it skittering across stone as her hands scrabble to pull her quiver off her shoulder and get rid of it, too. Wishes she could rip off her own hands and toss them away just as easily. And Fig is chattering, is saying something, We’re cool, Mom, we’re cool!
Figueroth who wouldn’t hate her even after she drove Gilear away, who wouldn’t hate her even after she left her alone at the bar to fuck Garthy O’Brien. Who won’t hate her even now, even when she’s still bleeding from the arrows her own mother plunged into her.
Figueroth who forgives like it’s easy, like it isn’t miraculous and ridiculous every time it happens. Figueroth who is always so suspicious of the people who aren’t going to do her any harm, always far too trusting of the ones that will and do and have.
She wants to say something— to apologize, or tell Fig to get away from her, or something. The cat doesn’t have her tongue anymore, but she still can’t speak through the sobs. Still crouching on the ledge, she tries to make out the battle— Ragh and Tracker are back in their right minds, and Gorthalax is fighting the Nightmare King. Adaine is dead.
Baxter is surely dead.
Gilear too, most likely.
Exhaustion presses against her as she weeps, sick with the weight of every arrow she fired at her oldest friend, and with the ones she sank into her daughter. She’s always been a damn good shot. She wishes Baxter had had the sense to claw out her heart. Fig may be an arch-devil with her own domain now, but Sandra Lynn knows all too well that this is Hell. This feeling. Feeling like she needs to be unwrapped, taken apart, punished.
They may not have been her own words, but what she said before wasn’t a lie. Fig, I want you to know something. I’m awake for all of this.
She was.
She watched Baxter’s confusion when the first arrow went in.
It took three more arrows for him to stop looking confused . For him to realize that he was never immune to her uncanny knack for total and utter betrayal.
Kalina wasn’t even kind enough to throw up an illusion, to make Sandra Lynn think she was going after an actual threat. Baxter was Baxter and Fig was Fig, and she was shooting to kill. A little wind-up doll, a plaything with a bow and arrow. Pull her string and hear what she has to say as she attacks the only precious things she’s still hanging onto. She tilts forward and retches, but she hasn’t eaten in over two days and there’s nothing in her stomach. Bile burns at the back of her throat.
Baxter. Gilear. Adaine. And now Gorthalax is going to die, and it’s going to be her fault, and even if these kids somehow rally and make it out of this god-forsaken forest she’s going to get to go home to Jawbone and tell him that in addition to her imploding the little scrap of peace they’d found for themselves, she’s gotten the Elven girl he loves like a daughter impaled.
The ledge. The mist. The void.
Fig isn’t hovering over her anymore, has gotten swept back up into the action, and she’s alone for a moment while Kalina and the kids all focus on the actual fight. Back at Kei Lumennura, she told these kids that Mordred Manor was their home, and that if she ever put that in jeopardy with her own bad choices, she’d get on Baxter and take off before robbing the kids of their safe haven.
Except now Baxter is dead, because he trusted her and she shot him full of arrows.
She crawls closer to the edge and peers over.
How long before Kalina and the Nightmare King manage to get her under their control again? Hell, how long before she gets too much whiskey in her and throws herself at another one of the kids’ allies? How long before she takes everything Fig’s built for herself and crumples it up in her hands the way she did with her own life?
If she tips over right now, it’s not like Gorthalax will notice and swoop over to come to her rescue. He’s too busy. Everybody’s too busy. Fig is distracted and Kristen is busy and nobody is paying attention to the washed-up ranger collapsed at the edge of the stairs.
There is no griffin coming to catch her if she falls. She made sure of that herself.
She only hopes the kids aren’t stupid enough to waste a revivify spell on her. Maybe she’ll get lucky and fall too far for her body to even be recovered…
As she shifts, staring down into the inky black below, she feels the weight of something in her pocket. Something she picked up while possessed and then forgot about.
She’d been ghosting through the woods, drawn by puppet strings, and nearly tripped over the object in her path. Stupid. Clumsy. As a ranger, she’s usually so much more observant.
The object… it’s something that Kalina would have been interested in— she thinks maybe that’s why she picked it up, to deliver it to her puppetmaster. Maybe it would have been useful to her, or else it would have been useful to the kids, and by snatching it up she was making their task harder.
It’s not all that special. No magical properties or attack capabilities. Maybe they’d have been able to use it on Kalina like Riz is using the camera tie. Maybe that’s why she knew to pocket it.
The device just has four words recorded, and they play on a loop when she holds it to her ear.
It’s Gorgug.
Keep going.
She knows, upon listening, that this message was never meant for her ears.
She also knows it just saved her life.
Sandra Lynn pushes back from the edge and grabs her bow and arrows. She’s not possessed and she’s not dead, so she might as well make herself fucking useful. Fig brought her here for a reason, and she’s done a piss-poor job as a hireling and an even worse one as a mother. But she can’t go back and change any of that now.
It’s Gorgug. Keep going.
She nocks an arrow and scans the stairs— that creepy old centaur is going for Gorgug.
The kid just saved her life without even trying. She ought to return the favor.
Her arrow flies and hits its mark, and the centaur falls dead.
Sandra Lynn stands up.