Serpents Rising (Eve of Redemption Book 3)
Page 37
“She can have my cloak and blanket; it’s not like I get cold,” Danilynn said. That drew Sonja’s interest, and the half-guardian woman actually managed a bit of a smile at the fures-rir priestess’ joke. Kari was glad to see something lift Sonja’s spirits, even just a little.
They continued a little farther along another border fence that led from the road to more forested hills to the west. Sonja carried Se’sasha, and Danilynn strapped the folded litter to her pack, which allowed Kari to mask their tracks as much as possible. Kari led them a short distance into the woods, just far enough that the trees formed a fairly solid wall between them and any passers-by. Se’sasha had woken up finally, and Danilynn fed her with more of the divinely-provided food and drink. It was always amazing to Kari to see things conjured; she had always wondered where the things came from, especially in the case of food and drink.
Kari and her companions took their fill of trail rations, but when Kari took stock of what they had, she understood pretty quickly that they’d all be eating Danilynn’s provided food before they got anywhere near Anthraxis. There had been no opportunity to resupply in Sorelizar. In Kari’s mind, that was just as well: she wasn’t sure she would have trusted anything they could have gotten in Sekassus’ home city. It was possible they might find a village in Si’Dorra where they could resupply, but doing so there might be just as much of a risk. Stopping in a town or village here in Sorelizar was, of course, out of the question.
“Why don’t you let me take the first watch?” Danilynn asked. “You seem to like being up before dawn anyway.”
Kari nodded and bedded down near Sonja and Se’sasha. Sorelizar stayed warm at night, but not as much as down in the arid center. Here, the humidity was higher but still pleasant, the air was full of the calls of night insects, and for the briefest moment, Kari was almost able to trick herself into thinking she was camping out back home. She thought about her mate and her son, and how much she’d like to get back home to them. Despite the feelings of longing, she lulled herself to sleep.
She was shocked awake by a sharp scream, and had pulled her scimitars from their sheaths beside her before she was even conscious of what was happening. When her eyes took in what was before her, she saw Danilynn holding Sonja, who was sitting up and crying. Kari moved over to Sonja and put her hand on her sister-in-law’s shoulder, merely lending a touch of comfort until Sonja finally got herself back under control. Danilynn asked what frightened her, and Kari echoed the question while Sonja rocked lightly back and forth, her breathing coming in short, quick gasps.
“I’m empathic,” Sonja answered after a couple of silent minutes. Kari and Danilynn exchanged a glance, and then Sonja added, “I…I felt Uldriana’s terror when she was killed. It feels like it’s burned into my mind, along with her scream and the image of her being torn apart. I don’t know if I’m ever going to sleep well again.”
Se’sasha was watching the exchange with those wide, golden eyes, but there was no indication she could understand a word that was being said, and she offered none herself. Kari motioned for her to go back to sleep, and surprisingly, the syrinthian girl was able to do just that. Kari patted Sonja’s shoulder, at a loss for words. She rose and walked to the edge of the woods, scanning over the farmland to the east with her night vision under the light of the moon, trying to gauge if anyone had heard Sonja’s scream and was coming to investigate. After nearly a quarter of an hour, Kari was satisfied that they had attracted no attention, and she returned to the camp.
Sonja was already asleep again, and Danilynn gestured toward Kari’s bedroll. “You’ve still got a couple of hours before your watch,” she said.
“She feeling better?” Kari asked, staring at Sonja with concern. Kari was worried most because Sonja was her sister and her friend, but the practical side of her reminded her that Sonja was also the only thing keeping them hidden while they walked. If Sonja couldn’t get enough sleep and couldn’t maintain the masking spell, they would have to stay off of the farms and open fields completely, and their trip would take that much longer.
“Not really, but I soothed her with a subtle bit of divine power from the Night Runner,” the priestess said. “She settled down right quick, and hopefully her sleep will stay dreamless until it’s time to get up anyway. How are you feeling?”
“Hurt. Angry. Scared.”
“Well, if it helps you sleep at all, you can consider that Sekassus feels the same way about now,” Danilynn said. Kari was surprised, but the priestess managed a half-smile and went back to watching and listening to the woods around them.
It felt as though Kari had barely closed her eyes before Danilynn woke her back up to take a watch. Kari yawned and stretched, and moved to sit where Danilynn had been keeping her vigil. Her endurance was being tested to its limits between the constant walking, carrying Se’sasha now and then, dragging the litter, and staying up half the night on watch – all while pregnant. When she added in the thought of eating rations that were really only enough to sustain herself while on the road, Kari simply hoped she was taking enough care of the little child growing inside of her.
Dawn came quietly, but it didn’t stay that way for long. Danilynn ended up rousing herself, and she came to join Kari near the edge of the woods. Sonja followed soon after, and the women beheld the scene before them with no small amount of alarm. Two armored erestram were questioning the syrinthian farmers nearby quite roughly, and before long, one of them grew frustrated and struck a syrinthian with the haft of its war scythe. The other syrinthian fell over the prone form defensively, but the erestram walked past them and split up, approaching the woods where Kari and her companions took cover.
“You really did beat one of those in combat, right?” Danilynn asked, half-jokingly.
“Yea, but not quite the way everyone thinks,” Kari returned. “We do not want to get into a fight with two of them. Let’s get packed up and move; we don’t want them to smell us and find us even through Sonja’s masking spell.”
“Gods, I hadn’t even considered that,” Sonja said. “Did Turillia not smell us, then? I’ll see if I can modify my spell to keep scents from escaping it.”
“Get packed up, and fast,” Kari said. They returned to the campsite, and after gathering up their things, Kari hefted Se’sasha across her shoulders and headed back east. Danilynn and Sonja both hesitated. “We’re not going to outpace them; you remember what walking with King Morduri was like. Our best bet is to go past them the other way and hope it’s a while before they double back or we run into more of them.”
There was little time for debate, so Danilynn and Sonja fell into step behind Kari. They made their way cautiously out of the forest, and Kari picked along a path that would avoid taking them right past the erestram or disturbing the surrounding vegetation that might give away their position. They skirted around the erestram at a good distance, and stayed downwind just to be on the safe side. The two massive wolf-demons – or wolf-people, whatever the case may have been – passed by quickly and made their way into the woods.
“Should we stop and help the syrinthians?” Danilynn whispered once the erestram were out of earshot.
“Better not,” Sonja answered before Kari could. “He’s alive, just hurt, and not too badly. If we try to help them, the erestram might come back and decide to finish the job.”
“This is bad,” Kari said. “We’re still days away from the border, and they’re already getting close to finding us. The next time Sonja has to sleep, we might be out of luck.”
“Worry about that when I have to bed down,” Sonja said evenly, and she strode past with a determination Kari had never seen from her sister-in-law before.
Kari called after Sonja quietly, and she passed off the syrinthian girl. They made their way to the road, but things looked clear for a couple of miles in either direction, so they decided to chance using the litter again. Surprisingly, Se’sasha stood on her own and waved away the offer to ride on the litter. Her steps were slow but m
uch surer now, and she was able to keep up a halfway decent pace. She set their speed throughout the morning, which wasn’t optimal, but thankfully, they didn’t run into any more erestram patrols before lunch.
They found a grassy spot to sit down and have a quick meal, and to let Se’sasha stretch out her legs, which probably hadn’t gotten very much exercise in the last decade or so. When they finished, Kari gestured toward the litter again, and though she was obviously ashamed to do so, Se’sasha nodded and climbed on it. Danilynn and Sonja took the bulk of the time dragging their syrinthian companion, but Kari took turns now and then as well to stretch out their stamina and traveling time. They encountered another patrol of erestram, but Sonja’s modifications to the masking spell seemed to work well: the erestram looked around when they found the litter’s tracks, but they headed westward toward farmhouses, and Kari and her friends were long past them by then.
When twilight came, Kari was dismayed to see that there were no forested areas nearby for them to hide in for the night. Traffic had remained light along the road, with few travelers out besides the erestram patrols. Still, Kari was sure the erestram would have figured out by now that the women were headed north, and things were bound to get much more difficult in these last few days of travel. She wasn’t sure if they would actually assault or accost Kari and her friends in some way, or if they would just try to delay them somehow. With Sekassus, it was hard for Kari to know what to expect.
The most important thing at the moment, though, was finding a spot where Sonja could get enough sleep to make sure she could maintain her masking spell when they got underway again. With no hope of reaching a forested area, Kari turned to the next best option: a barn or stable. Most of the farmland consisted of crops, but there was the occasional one with livestock, so Kari pushed her friends into the deepening twilight until they found another of those.
They crept down near a fair-sized barn under Sonja’s masking spell, and waited tensely while the syrinthian farmers did the last of their evening chores feeding and bedding down the animals. Once the snake-folk left the area, Kari helped Se’sasha climb up into a cramped hay loft, followed by Sonja and Danilynn. To Kari, it was strange to find the syrinthians raising cows and goats, but she suspected the snake-folk might be purely carnivorous. The chickens and geese lent a false sense of normalcy to the farm scene, but Kari had a hard time forgetting that it was run by syrinthians and located in Sorelizar.
There was little conversation: the women ate their fill of Danilynn’s divine sustenance, and then Se’sasha and Sonja went to sleep without delay. Danilynn took first watch again, but Kari had slept what could only have been a couple of hours before the priestess shook her to rouse her. Kari glanced at Danilynn, who was peeking through her fingers, no doubt to keep her glowing blue eyes from giving away her position. The priestess gestured down toward the farmhouse, and Kari’s breath caught in her throat.
There, illuminated by pale moonlight and a lantern hung outside the front door was the syrinthian farmer, speaking with another of the armored erestram. It could’ve been coincidence that the erestram had arrived at this farm, but Kari never put a lot of faith in coincidence. There were no gestures from either the farmer or the erestram toward the barn or its hay loft, and they also didn’t look in the direction of where the four women were hiding.
Kari’s mind raced through their options. They could try to run preemptively, but that might actually give their position away more noticeably, especially with geese nearby. They would also have little chance of outpacing an erestram while they were fully rested, let alone while they were tired. They could stay put and hope the entire incident was just a coincidence, but Kari had a hard time believing that was the case. The worst option, and yet the one that seemed like it might be the only one when the erestram made its intentions known, was to kill the giant wolf-creature, and hope the syrinthians neither interfered nor told anyone of the fight.
“We may have to kill it,” Kari whispered.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Danilynn answered. “We’re not going to get away from it, so if it comes this way, we’d better kill it. If not, we’d better be well away from this farm by the time dawn comes. We may need to head further west before we turn north again.”
Both women gasped in surprise when the erestram ducked and entered the farmhouse. If it was just asking for a place to stay for the night, then the coincidence theory would make a lot more sense. On the other hand, it made Kari thankful that the erestram had neither requested nor been referred to stay in the barn or hay loft. After waiting for nearly a quarter of an hour to see if the erestram came back out, Kari allowed herself to fall back asleep, and she was able to rest pretty well despite her tension. She was still tired when Danilynn woke her up for her watch, but at least she was going to have the luxury of laying down while she watched the farmhouse and the road beyond it.
Kari woke everyone up nearly an hour before dawn, and the women got underway again. Se’sasha was walking again, and her pace was a little better than it had been the day before. The divine food Danilynn was conjuring was clearly doing just as she said, reinvigorating even the malnourished syrinthian girl enough to lend her walking strength. The sun came up, bright and hot again, and Kari wondered when the farmlands saw rain. The companions pushed onward, but had to avoid another erestram patrol before midmorning: this one came from behind them, headed farther north. Kari understood they were getting pinched, and it would only be a matter of time before Sonja’s masking spell was discovered and pierced.
Kari’s hackles rose when they saw an overturned wagon on the road before lunch. A pair of draft horses stood indifferently while a syrinthian male tried to pull a female from under the overturned vehicle. Kari’s first instinct was to help, of course, but with the victims here being syrinthians, the fact that the wagon was covered, and the fact that Kari and her friends were being hunted, there was no reasonable way for Kari to do the right thing. She sternly ordered the others to stay on the far side of the road from the accident, and urged them to keep walking.
Danilynn was the first to stop, and while part of Kari was glad to see it, the rest of her still fought staunchly against foolish nobility. “Danilynn, we have to get away from here. If this smelled any more of a trap, we’d be able to taste it, too,” she whispered.
“I don’t want to go back home wondering if we left someone to die,” Danilynn said. “I’m sure you don’t, either. We’re getting slowly discovered by all these patrols now; they know we didn’t go south, and it’s becoming pretty certain we may have to fight our way out at some point. But they’re still not supposed to touch us for four more days, even if they find us. I’d rather do the right thing and take our chances now, than do the wrong thing and take our chances in a few days anyway.”
Kari sighed, but the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile anyway. She couldn’t have hoped for a better argument from Danilynn, and Sonja was clearly eager to follow the lead on this issue. Kari nodded to her sister-in-law, who let their masking spell fall after checking the road north and south, and they approached slowly and as non-threateningly as they could. Then, something fortuitous finally happened: Se’sasha found someone she could speak to.
There was a short and hasty discussion, and then Se’sasha turned wide eyes onto her companions. Before Kari could even ask what was wrong, the wagon suddenly righted itself, rising off of the prone form of the female syrinthian, who rose to her feet and dusted herself off. From around the other side of the wagon came the ten-foot form of an armored erestram. Kari blew out a sigh, drew both of her swords, and got ready for yet another fight-of-her-life. She was surprised, however, when the erestram didn’t pull forth the weapon on its back.
The erestram spoke quickly with Se’sasha, who shook her head. The wolf-creature then turned to Kari and her companions and addressed them in infernal. Danilynn and Sonja’s eyes went wide, and the priestess turned to Kari. “He wants us to follow him! He says he’ll lead us bet
ween the patrols and get us to the northern border without getting caught.”
“How long?” Kari asked, and after hesitating to figure out what she meant, Danilynn put the question to the erestram.
“He says a few days, but the king’s hunters won’t be able to track us,” the priestess relayed.
“But if they do, they’ll be free to capture or kill us,” Kari argued, hating to have to use an intermediary to have an argument.
After speaking with the erestram again, Danilynn told Kari, “He knows that. He says his people have been looking for us for two days, but we kept evading them along with the king’s hunters. There’s going to be a patrol coming down this road soon, and he says we don’t have much time to get out of sight. Apparently, they know we’re using a masking spell, and they’re getting close to shattering it.”
Kari looked at Sonja, who nodded. “We have to go to ground,” Sonja said. “I’m pretty sure it’s what Aeligos would do in this situation. We’re not going to lose anything by trusting him, at least not for four days.”
“What about these two?” Kari asked, gesturing toward the syrinthians, who watched the exchange curiously, but remained silent.
“They’re helping their high priestess’ daughter escape,” Danilynn answered. “That’s the only reason I believe a word any of them have said. It’s your decision, Kari, but I think this is the smart thing to do.”
“I think I’ll trust your instincts on that. All right, tell them to get us moving,” Kari said.
The erestram barked a command, and Sonja put her masking spell back up quickly. The wolf creature then began making his way west through the grazelands of another farm, and the women fell into step behind him. When Kari looked north, she saw what his concern was: two more armored erestram had appeared on the road, headed toward the wagon and the syrinthians. Their erestram guide strode purposefully as if following a lead, and Kari and her friends worked to keep pace with him, Se’sasha stumbling along as quickly as her weary legs would allow.