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The grasses outside—they were afraid of the fire.
Then we both heard a distant shout: “Find them!”
I grabbed Shayla’s hand and we ran for the trees.
“You wereright about Frenel’s father,” Shayla panted out. “He’s not a good man.”
She couldn’t run as fast as I could—and I would’ve taken the baby from her, only the time it took to do so would’ve slowed us both down.
“Not now,” I told her. We needed to get to the tree line, and the cover they’d provide.
“No, you need to know. So you can tell him.”
That made my head whip around. She’d already gotten Frenel loose from his wraps and was handing him over to me, presumably to sacrifice herself somehow behind us.
I took him in one arm, but I grabbed her wrist with my free hand, just as solidly. “I did not just get you back only to lose you again. Run with me!” I shouted, and she did.
We stumbled into the kaorak forest together, not on a trail, which was good, because it’d make us harder to find—but it was rough going, me sweeping branches out of our way with my free hand, without bending them enough to give away our path.
“He was highborn,” Shayla went on, clambering over a fallen tree trunk. “He met me at the leather smith, and he was nice at first.”
I gritted my teeth, listening to her tell me the story of how she came to be with child.
“I’d feel his eyes on me any time I went to the town square, looking down from the window of his home...I can’t say I didn’t want it, because I did—but the second I started to show, he changed on me, and then when I birthed a boy, he wanted us gone. So I wrote to Xelrim,” she said, now gasping out the words, totally out of breath.
I turned around and handed her Frenel. She took him without question, then squeaked as I picked them both up. I was going to carry them to safety if it killed me.
“Xelrim bought off the other passengers in the carriage, and the carriage man too, so they’d all say I was dropped off further along its trail,” she said, curling into my chest. “To hide us.”
All of that explained why she hadn’t gone into town yet, to catch up with her old friends. “It doesn’t matter right now,” I told her, because it was true. I could hear the men behind us baying to one another like hounds, and feel them, on some strange level, sluicing through the field after us—the stems they broke, the blooms they tossed, and the encroaching fire, that all of the surrounding greenery was terrified of. “I’ll keep you safe.”
She had the kindness not to ask me how, as I kept moving us forward, as fast as I could—but I knew it wasn’t fast enough.
The men gave one last shout—presumably when they reached the tree line—and then after that, were quiet.
“They’re coming, Val,” she whispered. “They only want me and Frenel. Go. Save yourself.”
“Is that who you think I am?” I looked down at her and asked.
“No,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “I just wanted one of us to get out.”
I leaned forward and briefly set my forehead to hers. I wanted to send her onward, but I knew the men coming behind us were surely more agile, and we might already be surrounded—in fact, I knew we were—I could feel another strange wave of movement sweeping through the ferns beneath the kaorak trunks, coming up from ahead.
So the best place for her to be was here, with me, even if the three of us were to die shortly.
I set her down, placing her back against a kaorak’s rough bark. “Keep directly behind me, and stay so close I can feel your breath on my neck. Do not give them a clear shot at you or the baby.”
“All right,” she swore and nodded frantically, while silently crying.
And that was when Frenel finally lost his composure—having been jostled as we ran, probably hungry again and needing to be changed.
His noises made the men surrounding us cry out too, crowing that their success was at hand. I could feel all of them circling, their positions translated to me by the vibrations through the dirt that touched roots as they strode, and I knew they were coming closer.
I turned to face her, willing to shield her and the baby with my back, planting my hands on either side of her shoulders against the kaorak wood, and I did the only thing I could.
Please,I begged it.Listen.
And instead of speaking to it as a man, with words, I opened my heart up to it instead. I let how I felt about Shayla and Frenel pour out, and also the danger we were in, and how closely it was circling.
