Fired Page 10

  There was silence from behind him, a creeping kind of silence that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and he was suddenly and utterly convinced that Karyl was standing over him with a knife in his hand, just waiting for the opportune moment. He didn’t look back. It was an irrational thought. There was nothing he could do about it, anyway.

  “All right, Irae,” he called. “Let go of the stick.”

  There was a silent, tense moment, and then he felt her weight on the rope. It staggered him and pulled him forwards, more than he had bargained for. Irae was not a large woman, but she was compact and muscular, and she was dangling on the end of a very long rope. Thorn staggered a step or two forward before he caught himself and recovered his place.

  “We have to go slowly,” he called to her. “Just hold on.”

  “The rope is not as tight as I would like,” she said.

  “That’s probably better, in the long run. Keep your hands from getting cut off.”

  “Keeping my hands attached won’t help me if I fall down a hole and die, though.”

  “Keep your shirt on. I’ll get you up.” He steeled himself and took another step, then another. Then something in the ground roiled underneath him, his foot slipped, and he fell all the way to the ground. The weight at the end of the rope dragged him forward a few feet.

  “Karyl! I can’t pull her up on my own!”

  Still that same silence. He looked over, quickly, and saw that he was standing not too far away, hands by his sides, head down and eyes on the ground. Thorn panted, his breath not cooperating.

  “Panic, panic,” he said. “I’m quite sure I’m panicking right now. Karyl!”

  A few more feet forward.

  “The rope,” said Irae from the depths of the hole. “Thorn, the rope is coming undone!”

  “Karyl, help!”

  “Thorn! I’m slipping!”

  Thorn cast a last glance up at Karyl and saw that the man’s eyes were wounded and watering; his hands were shaking as though he were possessed. But still he did not move, and Thorn slipped ever closer to the edge of the maw. The pull of the weight spun him around headfirst and yanked him ever further.

  His head went over the edge. He saw nothing but darkness below him, around him, everywhere, nothing —

  He heard Irae’s ragged breath somewhere deep below him, and he thought, if she dies, I die.

  That isn’t good. Poetic. But I don’t want to die.

  Something had him by the ankle.

  Something with great strength and great force, something that hauled him bodily backward and wrapped two mighty arms around him as though he were nothing. Karyl had managed to move at last. He tossed Thorn away from him and caught at the rope, hauling on it with short, powerful strokes. Irae fairly sailed over the edge of the maw, so black with dirt and what looked like coal that it was difficult to make out her features. Karyl pulled her well away from the maw, which closed up behind her as though it had only been waiting for the intruder to be removed.

  Thorn crawled over to her and collapsed at her side. They laid still for a time, while Karyl stood over them, silently, not even out of breath.

  After a moment, having somewhat regained her breath, Irae managed, “Sinkholes. He says — page fifty-one — and sticks — but he couldn’t manage — to tell us — sinkholes.”

  “I’ll kill him,” wheezed Thorn.

  “Not if I kill him first.”

  Thorn looked up. The sun had slipped over the edge of the horizon at last, a longer task than normal in these low, flat lands. Karyl was a dark shape in the dusky twilight of the Badlands; only his eyes showed, glinting a little in the fading light. He looked as though he could not help what he was. His hands hung down at his sides, empty and open.

  Thorn swallowed hard.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Karyl shifted a little. “She’s safe now?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Irae. “I’m safe.”

  Thorn thought this was overstating things a bit, given that they were only part way through the Badlands, but he decided against saying anything. It didn’t seem good for morale.

  He pushed himself up, struggled to his feet, then offered a hand to Irae. Somewhat to his surprise, she took it, and was standing beside him once more. She was incredibly dirty, which seemed to distress her a little as she wiped at her face with both hands.

  “It was very dark in there,” she said.

  Thorn shook his head helplessly. “How are we supposed to avoid them? We may not be so lucky next time. And now we don’t even have a stick.”

  Irae squared her shoulders. For being on the small side, absolutely filthy, having narrowly escaping death, and a princess on the run from her own exile, she suddenly looked regal and knowing. Thorn marveled at his own confidence in her, after all this time.

  “We will just have to be cautious, and trust our gut instinct,” she said. “It’s a shame we can’t read the letters in the book. But at least we know what the chief danger of the Badlands really is.” She went to her horse, smoothing a hand down his nose. “Take a few minutes, eat, drink. We will leave again soon.”

  But how do we know that the maw won’t open up as we travel? Thorn wanted to ask. How do we know that it won’t swallow all three of us, along with our horses? He wanted to suggest to her that Karyl go first, but it probably didn’t matter what order they were in. If the maws were absolutely unpredictable, as he suspected, any one of them could be eaten just as easily as the others, regardless of where they were in the line.

  But they couldn’t say where they were.

  And they couldn’t turn back.

  She was right. There was nothing for it but to press on, and to do their best. In the meantime, the wolves were howling ever closer. He felt so tired suddenly that he didn’t even care.

  “In a little while, the moon will be up,” said Irae. “That will be a good time to travel, so we can see where we’re going.”

  She sounded quite alert. In that case, Thorn thought, perhaps a little nap wouldn’t hurt.

  7

  Hometowns

  Thorn sleeping was a sight to see.

  He tucked himself up like a child, far smaller than when he was awake. His arms doubled up, his hands curled into fists beneath his chin, his long legs drew up like a spider’s. For someone so tall and lanky when awake, he looked a third of himself in slumber. Irae found herself looking at him, again and again, and though time crept on with the need to be leaving once more, she could not bring herself to wake him up just yet.

  He so rarely let her, or anyone, see him like this.

  She suspected that he didn’t entirely trust her. That he didn’t entirely trust any of them, despite the fact that he was the one who had lied, he was the one who had concealed the facts from them — perhaps it was because of that. He only knew to say what would keep himself safe, and though she didn’t like the duplicitousness of it, it broke her heart to think that he should still see the need to do that, after all that they had been through.

  But she saw again the wild panic in his eyes, as he had reached for her to save her from the maw, heard again the raggedness of his breath, the thump and slide of his body as he nearly killed himself trying to save her. Though he might still not trust her as much as she would like, he did care about her, nonetheless.

  It warmed her heart like a fire.

  The moon was well up, and the night getting along. Despite her distress, worry, and narrow escape, she did not feel tired. What she did feel was unclean — traveling wasn’t the cleanest of occupations even at the best of times, but she was usually able to at least wash her face and hands each night. In the Badlands, surrounded by desert with no certain idea of when she would come across water again, her water containers were far too precious to use in such a way.

  She sighed and put it out of her mind.

  Karyl sat at her side, back straight and strong enough for her to lean on if she wished; she knew that he was still not well, but his
ability to help at last gave her hope that he would continue to improve. He still was not speaking much, but then, he had never been particularly verbose — so that was nothing new.

  No, he would be all right in the end, she knew. She did not like to be beholden to one such as Braeve, but there was nothing to be done about it now.

  In the silence and stillness of the night, there came a slithering sound, like a snake winding its way across the sand.

  Serpents had not been in the book of dangers of the Badlands, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t exist here. It was the perfect environment for them; it would be quite astonishing if they didn’t. She knew all this, and told it to herself quite firmly and rationally, but still, something at the back of her brains whispered, Dragons.

  That was ridiculous. She refused to countenance such a thought. She leaped to her feet.

  “Please stay here,” she asked Karyl. “Keep — keep an eye out.” And on Thorn, she did not add. “I’ll go and see what the noise is and return at once.”

  “Noise?” said Karyl.

  She hesitated — but then, she told herself, Karyl’s hearing had never been all that acute. It was probably a casualty of the fighting he had seen.

  “Nothing to worry about,” she said. “I only thought I might have heard something, and it will do me good to stretch my legs a little.”

  “Stay safe,” murmured Karyl, and she smiled, and patted his shoulder. Her hand looked tiny next to his massive arm, and she wondered how she could possibly hope to save him.

  “I will,” she said, “I promise.”

  She set off into the night without a backward glance and caught herself humming in nervous excitement. Each step that she took could give way beneath her. No one would be there to save her. But she needed to know what the noise was, what the danger was — for she was certain it could only mean danger.

  What else was there, in the Badlands?

  It wasn’t long before she located the source of the sound. It grew louder gradually as she drew nearer to having it in sight, until it was something close to a hiss. In the bright moonlight, far off in the distance back the way they had come, there was something black moving slowly. She crouched as soon as she saw it, covering herself with her cloak, in case it was as watchful as she herself. It was clearly bulky and large, even at this distance; far too large to be a lone horse. She watched it approach for a moment, eyes narrowed.

  A covered cart, or a carriage, painted in black and with all lights extinguished. It was made to travel without being seen or heard in the darkness — there must be something wrapped around the wheels, for she could not even see the wood showing in the light of the moon. But such precautions were confounded on the sand, as the wheels made the hissing noise she had heard, even wrapped as they must be in muffling cloth.

  This seemed like poor foresight, given the precautions they had clearly taken to avoid being noticed as they traveled; then again, she reasoned, perhaps it didn’t matter at all, given that they were in the Badlands, where no one went. Perhaps they were lost — but it seemed unlikely, as they were traveling swiftly and surely in a definite line. It wasn’t a straight line, by any means, but it wended its way forward in a definite direction — the direction in which she herself wanted to go.

  She straightened up, quickly, and scuttled back to where she had left the others. Karyl was seated in the same position in which she had left him, still gazing straight ahead. She doubted that he had so much as even blinked. She touched his shoulder.

  “We should go,” she said, and moved immediately to Thorn, letting the information sink into Karyl’s mind. She bent over Thorn, hesitating only very briefly, a second or two, before putting a cautious hand on his shoulder. He leaped awake at her touch, eyes wide, and she just barely resisted the urge to clap a hand over his mouth before he shouted. He reined himself in, thankfully, and was on his feet in a blur of movement.

  “What is it?”

  “Other travelers,” she whispered. “They’re close now and moving quickly. They’re going our way.”

  “Should we avoid them? Do we need to hide?”

  “We should follow them.”

  He looked at her as though he didn’t quite believe that the words had come from her mouth. She hastened to explain.

  “They’re not the least bit cautious about how they go. I think they know how to get out of here without getting caught in the maws, Thorn. They seem to follow a path.”

  “How are we supposed to follow them without them seeing us?” asked Thorn. This was a reasonable question.

  She shook her head. “We’ll have to keep well back and travel as quietly as possible. It’s not going to be easy, but I think it is our best chance of getting out of the Badlands.”

  He hesitated for a long moment, then nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “If that’s what you think we must do.”

  She moved away from him to ready her horse and assist Karyl, and he stopped for a moment to stare up at the sky.

  “The moon’s well up.”

  “You’ve been asleep for hours.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” he said, defensively, and she cast a glance at him over her shoulder as she strapped on her pack.

  “Very well,” she said, “you weren’t asleep for hours. Get on your horse, Thorn. We need to move.”

  He got on his horse. They moved.

  They came within sight of the black carriage quite quickly, and Irae heard him suck in a startled breath.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s familiar,” he said, quietly. They sat for a moment, still in the shelter of the little patch of brush, watching the cart draw a little further out of sight and earshot. “I saw it, or one quite like it, the day that you came and asked me to follow you. The day I left my woods.”

  “You never said.”

  He gave an awkward shrug, tugging at his hair with one hand and fiddling with the reins with the other. It was such a conglomeration of nervous tics that it made her itchy.

  “I didn’t know how to say it,” he said. “You were sleeping, the cart came, it threw a rabbit out onto the road, it left. I turned the rabbit into a weasel.”

  “You did what?”

  “Not on purpose,” he said, on the defensive again. He seemed to be on the defensive most of the time, and she wondered if there would ever come a time when he did not see everything she said as an attack. “My power is unpredictable. That’s why we’re going to see the alchemists at Keler, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she murmured. She was still uncertain as to what his main motivation was; but she trusted him enough to believe that it wasn’t entirely selfish. She wished he would give the same trust to her. “I wish you would have mentioned what you saw, though.”

  “I didn’t know it was important. I just knew it was strange.”

  “Perhaps we will say that all strange things are important, then.”

  She saw him glance at Karyl, but he said nothing. She shook her head.

  “They stopped and threw a rabbit out onto the road? Really?”

  “Really.”

  “And that was all.”

  “Then they left. They were headed towards Deen, and I thought I might find out more about them there, but then —” He shrugged. Both shoulders this time. “Then things happened, and I forgot.”

  “Well,” said Irae, as gently as she knew how, “if you want to find out more, perhaps this is your great chance.”

  She nudged her horse with her heels, and the three of them fell in line, traveling once more, through the midnight moonlit plains of the Badlands.

  Lully found that the traveling was easier, somehow, without Irae and Thorn with them. She didn’t know why this was, and she would of course never admit to it — but it was true. Perhaps it was because there wasn’t so much talking.

  It was also going more quickly than they had thought. She and Graic, with the bard in tow — for reasons she still did not quite understand — were approaching the li
ttle village by early the next morning, even with a decent amount of sleep. She had taken the first watch, which gave her a little bit of an edge of Ruben, who was obviously suffering from his own lack of sleep. Perhaps it was the fact that they could only break the night up into two shifts, since Graic wasn’t exactly the most alert of night watchers. Whatever the cause, he was subdued as they came towards the village, perhaps even a little bit grumpy.

  Lully decided to be diplomatic about it.

  “What is your problem?” she said.

  Ruben heaved a sigh then replied, “Lack of information. I like to be well educated about where I’m going.”

  “You’ve scarcely ever gone anywhere,” objected Lully.

  “If I ever did go anywhere, I would like to be well educated about it. I don’t even know what the name of this place is, everyone simply keeps calling it the little village near the Pluron Woods!”

  Lully looked over her shoulder to Graic, behind her on the horse.

  “Graic,” she whispered, as a prompt.

  “Lovesick,” said Graic, immediately.

  “Really?” said Ruben.

  Lully shrugged. “It’s as likely to be true as anything else, isn’t it?”

  They could see the outline of a few small houses through the woods as they approached, and smell the smoke of cook fires, but the village was curiously silent from this distance. They passed through a small glade, barely more than ten feet long, and the silence here was even more pronounced, as though they were in a little bubble that kept all the noise outside, away. The trees arched over them, silver-barked and old, though not as ancient and impressive as some that she had seen, in the travels she had gone on over the last month and a half, following her queen loyally. It still staggered her a little, to think of the enormity of what she had done — and so she didn’t think about it. She didn’t like to be staggered.

  Here in this silent little glade, there was a young tree. It stood on its own as though the rest of the forest had drawn away from it, as though it were something strange or frightening — or, perhaps, she thought, it was more a mark of respect. Lully was not given to flights of fancy, and the thought took her by surprise. But there was no doubting that it was odd for the tree to be on its own like that. It was a pretty little tree, well-formed, and she thought maybe it was an oak. She didn’t know a great deal about trees.