Gilded Serpent by Danielle Jensen (top 10 novels txt) 📕

rising up like broken razor blades below. But the thought of falling bothered her much less than the question of how she was going to get Marcus through this.

She’d left him tucked on a ledge, head between his knees and a death grip on the rope strung around this particular tower of rock they needed to circle, shoulders rising and falling in rapid panting breaths that had nothing to do with exertion.

Terror.

She’d seen him face down certain death so many times, but never had she seen him like this. Pale and shaking and unable to speak. There were times she didn’t think he could even hear her, he was so lost in the fog of fear. What sort of willpower it took for him to keep pressing forward was not something she could even fathom, but he kept doing it.

Kept following her as they scaled and descended the sharp ridges of rock, going around their edges or over their tops, then over short bridges that crossed ravines with bottoms lost to darkness.

Very rarely was there solid rock beneath their feet. Sometimes it was spikes that had been set into the rock, sometimes ropes snaked through steel loops, one for hands and one for feet. Sometimes it was wood ladders and platforms anchored into rock. Those she hated the most, for they were deceptively sturdy looking. Their wear had become obvious only after Teriana’s feet had gone through a rotten plank, nearly sending her falling to her death. It was only by the mercy of the Six that Marcus hadn’t seen it happen, because she thought it might have undone him entirely.

Squinting into the bright light, Teriana continued in her progress around the side of the towering ridge of rock, giving each spike she stepped on a good stomp before committing her weight to it. The wind was rising again, trying its damnedest to rip her free from her perch. It forced its way through her clothing, turning the sweat on her skin to ice and chilling her hands and feet despite the thick fur encasing them.

The sun was growing low in the West, casting long shadows across the strange mountain range. Another hour of sunlight, at most, and she had no idea how close they were to shelter. The wolves were not a threat with sheer cliffs on all sides, but she didn’t think they could survive the night in the open. Not with the temperature dropping, the wind howling, and next to nothing to use as fuel for a fire.

“Stupid Sibern,” she muttered, reaching the opposite side of the ridge and finding a relatively gentle rocky slope leading down to a wind-scraped plateau. “I hate this place. Once I get my ship back, I am never leaving the tropics! To the underworld with lost profits!”

Jumping down the last few feet of incline, she trotted across the plateau, searching for something to indicate which way she was to go next, but there was nothing but rock crusted with ice. Lifting her face, Teriana looking farther afield, stopping in her tracks as the enormity of the view took hold of her.

It was like standing on a platform in the sky, the shadows of towering ridges of rock running east and west as far as the eye could see. The one she stood on now was taller than most, and from it, she could make out a twisting white path running through them: a river.

And rivers had fish.

The thought made her stomach growl, the last of their food supplies having been exhausted that morning, and Teriana picked her way to the edge of the plateau to look down.

Three hundred feet below was a wide river, barely visible in the shadow cast by the mountain on which she stood. It was wide, she could tell that much, and the gaps in the ice suggested the water beneath ran too rapidly to freeze in these temperatures. On the opposite side, perhaps two hundred feet away, rose a cliff as sheer as the one on which she stood, and she searched it for any sign of how they were supposed to get down and then back up again. But there was nothing.

And the sun crept lower.

“Shit,” she muttered, and that was when motion between the two cliffs caught her eye, her gaze focusing, understanding hitting her even as her stomach dropped.

Coming here had been a mistake.

 64MARCUS

He was so cold.

Marcus pressed his forehead into his knees, feeling the chill of the rocks beneath him sinking into his bones, the incessant wind pushing through his layers of clothing and freezing the sweat coating his skin. His feet burned and his hands were numb, fingers stiff from clenching the rope mounted on the rock next to him.

He knew he needed to get up. To move and get his blood circulating so that he didn’t freeze to death. Yet every time he willed himself to do so, his limbs refused to obey—like they’d been weighted down with lead. His head throbbed, his mouth so dry it hurt to swallow, but he couldn’t bring himself to let go of the rope long enough to retrieve any water. Nausea swirled in his gut, the rock beneath him seeming to move like the deck of a ship.

You don’t get seasick, he reminded himself. So even if the mountain is moving, you shouldn’t feel like this.

Do mountains move?

Is this possible?

He tried to shake his head to clear it, but the muscles of his neck cramped painfully, preventing the motion.

“Marcus.”

Teriana’s voice. But she was gone. Had gone to do something. To … check something.

He was imagining things.

“Marcus?”

He ignored the sound of his name. A trick of the wind. A trick of his fear.

“Gods-damn it, Marcus! Look at me!”

His body was shaking. It was being shaken.

“Look at me!”

It hurt to lift his head, the muscles and tendons in his neck fighting the commands of his brain. But he did it.

Teriana was in front of him on her knees, her hands on his shoulders, only her eyes