Chapter 422 - 421 - Gwen Riding Viktor
The road to Redwood didn’t wait for dignity.
Neither did Viktor.
The first leap covered roughly half a mile.
Gwen knew this because she had excellent spatial awareness — it was an elven archer’s baseline competency, the ability to read distance the way other people read text — and because she measured the gap between where they had been standing and where Viktor’s boots hit the road next with the detached professional part of her brain that was still functioning.
The rest of her brain was screaming.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING—"
The second leap.
The ground dropped away beneath them like a stage floor pulled out mid-performance. The tree line blurred. The road below became a brown thread. The morning air hit her face with the sharp cold of genuine altitude, and Gwen’s stomach expressed a unanimous and urgent opinion about this situation.
Thoom.
His boots landed. The impact transferred through his legs cleanly, absorbed by the specific muscle structure of a man who had apparently decided that the ground was a suggestion. His arms didn’t even tighten around her. His breathing was completely even.
Gwen pressed her face into his chest and made a sound that she would be describing later, to no one, as a completely reasonable vocal response to unreasonable circumstances.
"STOP—"
Third leap.
"VIKTOR—"
Half a mile. Clean arc. The forest canopy spread below them like a green blanket, and for one half-second at the peak of the jump the entire landscape was visible — the tower behind them, small now, the road ahead, the distant grey suggestion of the Redwood territory border — and then gravity remembered its responsibilities and they came down.
Thoom.
Gwen opened her eyes.
She was in a princess carry. She had been in a princess carry since the garden, which she had been objecting to and which Viktor had been entirely ignoring. His left arm was under her knees. His right arm was at her back. Her quiver had shifted during the third leap and was now pressed sideways against his ribcage. Her bow was across her knees. Her arms — and she registered this with the specific betrayal of a body that had made a survival decision without consulting its owner — were wrapped around his neck.
Her breasts were pressed against his chest.
The contact was— his chest was—
She adjusted her grip. Her hand found the back of his shoulder and she gripped it in the way of someone gripping a very large and very inconvenient piece of stationary infrastructure.
"You," she said, into the side of his jaw, "are going to explain what that was."
"What what was," Viktor said. He rolled his neck once — crack pop crack — and looked ahead at the road. Completely uninterested in the concept of an explanation.
"That. The— the ’leaping.’ You covered—" She looked back. Estimated. "That was three miles in under a minute."
"Two and a half."
"That is not the point—"
Fourth leap.
"AAAHNN—"
The sound she made at the sudden vertical lurch was— she pressed her face back into his chest and refused to acknowledge what had come out of her mouth. Her pointed ears went flat. Her legs, already across his arm, tightened involuntarily. Her breasts compressed against his sternum and she felt the vibration of his chest when he exhaled — short, controlled, the specific breath of someone not laughing.
Not quite laughing.
Thoom.
"You said you were teleporting me," she said, muffled, furious.
"This is faster than teleporting," Viktor said.
"It is NOT—"
"Teleporting has range limits. This doesn’t." He looked down at her. His dark eyes had the mild, considering quality of someone examining interesting topography. "You’re trembling."
"I am not trembling."
He looked at her hands. Specifically at the way her fingers were gripping his shoulder.
She released his shoulder. Gripped it again because the fifth leap was clearly imminent. "That is a structural grip. Not trembling. Those are different—"
Fifth leap.
Her stomach went somewhere ahead of them.
"—THINGS."
Thoom.
Viktor said nothing. He shifted his grip slightly — his left arm more secure under her knees, the adjustment of someone redistributing weight for long-distance carry — and picked up the pace of his stride between leaps with the brisk efficiency of a man who had somewhere to be.
"We were going to the capital," Gwen managed, when she’d recovered the use of her lungs. "You said. Capital city. That was the—"
"Capital’s west," Viktor said.
"I know it’s west—"
"Redwood territory’s north."
"I know that too, I have ’cartography’—"
"Then you know," Viktor said, pleasantly, "that these are two different places."
Gwen stared at the side of his face. The mild dark eyes. The complete absence of anything resembling an apology. The way his jaw sat, the specific angle of a man who had already arrived at all the relevant conclusions about this conversation and was waiting for her to catch up.
"Why," she said carefully, "are we going to Redwood territory."
"Academy admission."
"The— what."
"Capital academy." He glanced down at her. His expression had the texture of a man explaining something obvious to a competent person, which was somehow more irritating than condescension. "My father’s in Redwood territory. I need his approval letter for the admission process. Can’t apply to the academy without it."
Gwen processed this.
"You," she said.
"Mm."
"You— with pregnant wives— and a dungeon tower— and a town—" Her silver-blonde hair had escaped whatever it had been doing this morning and was doing something else now, entirely on its own, across her face. She pushed it back. "You want to go to an ’academy.’"
"Of course."
"Why."
Viktor was quiet for a moment. The road unrolled beneath them between leaps. Trees on either side, the specific mixed canopy of territory between Millbrook and Redwood — oak and silverleaf and the occasional enormous mushroom that nobody had adequately explained.
Then: "Don’t you want to see," Viktor said, in the tone of someone making a perfectly reasonable academic observation, "how hard and deep I can actually go?"
Gwen’s ears went straight up.
"...What."
"For women," he clarified. "Politically. Strategically. Don’t you want to see how far the network goes when—"
"That is NOT what that sounded like—"
"When I have access to the capital’s resources and infrastructure—"
"You said ’hard and deep’—"
"I did," Viktor agreed, entirely unbothered.
"THAT IS NOT A POLITICAL METAPHOR AND YOU KNOW IT—"
Sixth leap.
"AAAHNN—!!!"
Her face went back into his chest. She stayed there this time, both hands gripping his shoulder, and breathed through the arc of it — the terrifying brief eternity of height, the stomach-dropping descent — and when they landed she did not immediately move her face.
The chest beneath her cheek was warm. And solid. And moving with entirely too much patience.
"You bastard," she said, into his shirt.
"Mm."
"You absolute— you should be grateful." She lifted her face, found his jaw with her glare. "I haven’t told my mother that you’re the one running Millbrook. That you’re the one who did all of that. The town, the announcements, the— she thinks you’re just— a ’resident,’" the word came out slightly less convincing than she intended, "and if she knew—"
"She already knows," Viktor said.
Gwen went still.
"What."
"She knows." His dark eyes were ahead. His voice was the voice of a man stating a fact with the specific weight of a fact that has other facts behind it that he is choosing not to enumerate. "She knew before this morning."