The stocky, powerful, mule slams both front hooves between roots and dips his hindquarters in a spectacular halt. He flexes his neck around, flat teeth seizing the dazed soldier’s shoulder close to the throat, and swings him into the air as if playing with a grain sack.
I liberate the soldier’s carbine and try not to flinch when I hear the soldier scream as the mule dashes his helpless body against the roots with enough force to easily crack the helmet.
“Holy sh—” The Midlander swings his rifle around for a clear shot at Nigel.
Instinct takes over. I twist to face the soldier, bringing the rifle up, and pull the trigger.
One shot and he’s down. The twitching stops in seconds, leaving him draped over the roots like he was a victim of the forest and not me. My hands tremble. Sweat beads on my brow, the tremble turning to a full-out shaking at what I’ve done.
“They would have killed you first,” Tracker’s stern words echo from memories to a terrified, trembling blue-eyed child holding a rifle almost too heavy for her thin arms what feels like so long ago.
That doesn’t make this right. I force my eyes shut, trying to quell the shaking, moving my hands over the stolen carbine’s stock. The clip disengages. Both fingers relinquish their hold on the weapon. It falls into the roots with a soft clatter. My right hand comes up, waving the mule off his unfortunate target.
Hot breath from flared nostrils drifts over my shoulder. Nigel rests his head on my shoulder, quiet as if understanding what he did was wrong too. It’s not his fault though. I asked him to do this.
Drawing a long, shaky breath, I send up a small, silent prayer begging for forgiveness. Nigel continues to stand as if sharing in the guilt. I give his neck a soft pat. The ammo clip slides into the wolfskin satchel on Nigel’s saddle.
“They were going to kill us both,” I whisper to the mule. “Let’s go, boy. People need us alive right now.”
Those words don’t stave the regret gnawing at my soul. I hate this. Everything about it. Stealing. Being forced to put on the bold act of actually liking my role as a rustler and then take their lives to survive. Matthew had it right. Maybe someday, I won’t have to be a rustler anymore, and can live a quieter, gentler life.
I retrieve the Damascus, swing it over my shoulder and do my best to pretend that nothing happened here.
“I have a better offer.” Colton sits on a root, arms crossed, looking at the dead soldiers. “Anyone who can do what you just did shouldn’t be dinking around in some nobody wilderness settlement like Rondo. You should be sitting with us at Hyperion’s table in Adonis collecting a generous wage.”
I swing onto the mule’s back and don’t even try to hold back the bitter scowl.
“Seriously, Frost Flea, hey—” He hurries back to Tamblin and climbs into the saddle. “Will you just listen to me for two seconds?”
“I don’t want his Kingdom’s riches.” I swivel back and place a hand on Nigel’s rump, frigid eyes meeting his. “I want to keep the ones I still have.”
I don’t like the marks on these trees and I sure as hell don’t like the K. C. sniffing around this close to home. Where there are two, there are more.
“That’s a perk to this deal. You can. I’m sure we can work out a more-than-generous bargain. You join us. Henny stops shooting at you and instead shoots alongside you. It’s win-win for both sides.”
“Except for Rondo.”
“Minor details, but I’m sure we can figure something out. I mean, still, Hyperion won’t change his plans for it of course, but—”
“I’m not going to switch sides because it is in your best interest. It doesn’t work that way.”
“But it could. I don’t think you understand what I’m offering you here . . .”
Nigel roars to a stunted “hee-haw” as his muzzle is jerked back in anger by the reins.
I grit my teeth. “I know exactly what you’re offering, luresman.”
It only takes a few seconds for me to drop Nigel’s reins, grab the left jacket cuff with my right hand and pull both it and the dark-brown sweater sleeve a couple inches up past the goatskin glove. “This is what you’re offering.”
A section of unnatural paler flesh, about an inch wide, bands the skin just above the wrist like a bracelet. Faint pink traces the scar’s edges where iron shackles rubbed from the moment I learned how to crawl as a baby until Tracker cut them off in Rondo three years ago.
He grimaces.
“Nice try. But you’re not getting me that easily.”
The sleeve covers the scar before he can say anything. I face forward. “And if you or your K. C. buddies ever pull a stunt like that again, I promise it’ll be the last one you ever pull. Got that?”
Chapter Thirty-One
The gully is worse that it was yesterday. Muddy tracks blend the snow into a thick, boggy frozen swamp, and the river at its heart runs dark with oil and mud. Smoke from the industrial backhoes paints the piles of felled trees and broken branches black. It’s quiet, no animals daring to fill the gully with hope.
I draw a sharp breath and stare up at the shiny new, ten-foot-tall, chain-link, razor-wire fence that wasn’t here a few days ago. They got this up fast. And from the looks of it, there are no breaks in it.
Sliding from the mule’s back, I loosen the satchel’s ties and rummage for a small pair of tin snips. The rubber handles are bent and the bolt constantly needs to be tightened, but they get the job done. Twirling them around in my left hand, I approach the fence and listen for the low, steady electrical hum.
Silence.
I touch the rounded metal point to the chain-link, watching for even the smallest spark.
Nothing.
The woven metal splits as the tin snips clip through the fence, bending and twisting the sharp edges back. In less than five minutes a large-enough hole for our animals to walk through appears.
Colton dismounts and leads the big white horse closer. He examines my handiwork, looking from the tin snips to me.
“I’m sorry,” his words struggle through the accent. “About the Kingdom thing. I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just offering you a very possible solution to your problem. You know, something other than this suicidal mission you seem determined to go through with.”
I drop the tin snips back into the satchel and draw the rawhide strings taut in a smooth, but tighter than normal knot. “Assuming I wasn’t an escaped Crops child for a second. Do you even know what Hyperion’s K. C. does to rustlers nowadays?”
Those awful images come rushing back—the blood, the cheering crowd, the sheer bloodlust in the people who took joy in their cruel deaths.
“He has them killed. But this would be different.”
“Oh, so his men would at least slit my throat first, then skin me, hang my hide on a fence, and leave my carcass for the wolves. How thoughtful.” And terrifying. I try to fight back the fear and bury it so Colton can’t see it scares me.
“You’re not listening to me.” He runs a hand through his ginger hair. “I am offering you protection—a chance for this all to go away. Complete and total immunity from a rustler’s or even a Crop’s fate. All sentences past and future dropped—no questions asked.”
I lead the mule through the break in the fence, swing my leg over his back and settle in the saddle. He wades into the grimy stream water and tosses his head as it sloshes against his legs, painting the white splashes black from the oil slick.
Colton follows on Tamblin. “I know you’re pissed at me and everyone else making your life a living hell right now. I’d be too if I was in your situation. But I’m not them. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“No, you’re just trying to gain our trust,” I growl. “And will screw us that way.”
“It’s not like that.” He grits his teeth and draws a long breath. “If only you knew how much I am trying to help you.”
“You want to help me, then help me find Henny’s base.”
He sighs. “Fine, I’ll show you his
base. Maybe if you see what you’re up against you’ll realize why I’m trying to help.”
He takes the lead. Climbing the broken hill from the gully takes us deeper into the South Ridge where several large winter pines stand guard over a sunken deer trail. Their shaggy, dark-green branches form a tunnel with just enough room to ride through without brushing the frost-shielded needles. The trunks sport distinct rub marks from the winter bucks and peel where pregnant does have stripped them.
If you listen, you can hear a mountain stream trickle through rock piles uphill. Or the faint plop of a fox jumping into a snowdrift after a rabbit.
Colton halts the mare and points to a break in the trees. “Through there. You can see everything. Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”
I dismount. Powdery, almost crystalline snow swirls across my boots at the sharp ledge jutting out from the hill. Drawing a long breath, I drop Nigel’s reins and part the branches, kneeling down and slinking out onto the ledge.
Holy hell . . .
Canvas military tents, thousands of them, sit pole to pole in an easy fifty circles across the entire frozen surface of a lake formed during the ashfall. From up here it looks like a huge, reinforced bulls-eye with elaborate cross hairs carved through it. The tiny paths serving as makeshift roads are uniformed and lead deeper into the circle, complete with wire gates like a complete settlement.
This wasn’t here last week, that’s for damn sure.
Soldiers swarm from all angles—hundreds of them. Maybe even a couple thousand or more. And trucks. There are at least fifty supply trucks moving about. The tents are so tightly placed together you can’t even sneak through them from the looks of it. Dogs, so small from this angle, bark at the sky and respond to whistles from their handlers.
He’s built an entire city down there . . .
At the center, black smoke rises from several open fires and something silver glints. I can’t really see what it is from here but it kind of reminds me of a metal crossbow-like contraption on large wheels from the castle book Tracker read to me. A large, metal catapult. It slowly moves into formation alongside another. And another. Five. Ten total.
I watch their buckets drawing back. A deafening crack, followed by a loud sizzle pierces the air. In a split second, molten light rolls over the ridge, sending me scurrying back into the pines.
Nigel rears onto his haunches, pawing the air as Tamblin shies wildly to the right. Colton sits deep in the saddle, struggling to keep the mare from bolting while I grab for the mule’s reins as the blinding light pours through the trees, making them shake and shiver.
A sharp whistle follows. I hold an arm up to shield my eyes, bracing against the snow and trying not to get pulled off my feet. Nigel’s hooves dance and he tosses his head back, the whites of his eyes showing with loud, rattling snorts ripping from his nostrils.
What looks like molten metal glows bright as it falls from the sky well out over the lake, glittering and spinning like fireworks at a Hydra-celebration holiday.
This is bad. Really, really bad. Nigel stops rearing for a few seconds, tense and damp with sweat.
“Whoa boy.” I stroke his neck. “Easy.”
He turns his nose back, burrowing it into my elbow with a snort as if I can hide him away from the terrifying thing we all just witnessed. Keeping as calm as my rattled nerves will allow, I manage to get a leg up over his back.
“Frost Flea?” Colton calls as the mule spins on his haunches and bolts, bucking and twisting in terror as another flash fills the sky.
“We have to go.” Heart pounding, I work the reins like Matthew taught me, managing to hold the mule at a fast jog and weave through the pines in frantic attempt to get back to Rondo. My feet press hard against the stirrups and I struggle to settle the mule and not fall off. Colton is having even worse luck with Tamblin, the mare doing everything she can to knock him off her back and bolt.
He holds his own, though.
That was too close—way too close.
Those contraptions weren’t even close to us. And that shrapnel. How did they even make it do that? It was like the metal itself was too sharp and cut through itself a million different ways all at once.
I’ve never seen anything able to do that. No light ever felt that hot either. So much power and force behind those catapults on the ground.
They had treads. My heart sinks. Treads make things move. If they can move, they can reach Rondo.
And if they reach Rondo, it’s over for us.
“To be fair, this is where I get to say, ‘I told you so.’ Now let’s go back to Rondo and negotiate a surrender.”
If they reach Rondo . . . My thoughts drown his yammering out. They can’t reach Rondo. There’s got to be something I can do. We don’t have a prayer against those things. Or that many men.
But how do you stop thousands of rabid wolves when you barely have a twig?
You don’t. Those words send a shiver through me. We can’t beat something like that.
Snowflakes tumble across our bodies. Storm clouds blacken the western horizon. Night won’t be far behind. It’s over. Henny, no, Hyperion will win. My home, my family—everything will be destroyed and purified.
I feel the tears burning but manage to hold them back. They can’t fall. Not here, not ever. I can’t cry now.
“Frost Flea?” His voice holds a hard edge to it. “You still with me?”
I fix my eyes straight ahead as if he doesn’t exist.
He keeps talking but I tune out every word. Home. I just want to go home. Maybe Tracker will take the news well. Maybe Jericho will have a plan.
Anything but sit around and wait to die, even if it is already over.
My face flushes, anger surging past the tears. Damn the Kingdom. Damn Henny and his men. And Hyperion can go screw himself. He and his razor-wire Kingdom.
Colton brushes snow from his clothing. “You’re not going to talk to me now, are you?”
Nigel jogs past him. The mule flicks both ears back and opens his mouth to bite.
“Just because things aren’t going your way doesn’t mean you have to take it out on me, you know.” He tries to follow.
Buy them some time . . . The rustler within refuses to just give up. I have to at least try.
The saddle shifts and I adjust my weight for the ride home. I root through the satchel. Nigel jogs into the falling snow, one ear toward me as if understanding the nature of the clumsy plan and relaxes his pace as we enter the gully.
“Come on. You knew this was going to happ—what the hell are you doing with that?”
I hold the large hunting knife up, examining the serrated edges. This’ll do nicely.
“Put that down right now. I know you’re angry and upset. But there’s no need to go to extremes here. We can talk this out rational—”
I slam both heels against the mule’s sides. He surges into a lope.
Colton cusses and struggles to wrangle the mare in pursuit.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I ride through the gully with one hand on the hunting knife’s scabbard, the other on the hilt. It’s Jericho’s blade, an ornate stag carved deep into the darkened leather, surrounded by a dark, green-and-blue embroidered, intertwining tapestry-like pattern. Stained leather fringes hang down, black beads mixed among them.
It belonged to his father, he said once, who got it from his grandfather and so on and so forth. Jericho never did say why he gave it to me of all people two years ago. Only that it was a belated birthday gift one cold winter day.
Today I’m thankful for it.
“This is ridiculous.” Colton drives the mare after me. “Give me the knife. Now.”
Nigel splashes through the stream bed, stops long enough for me to dismount and lead him through the break in the chain-link fence, and then moves into a strong lope once I’m back aboard for the forest surrounding Rondo.
I swat aside the branches and flip my right leg over the tiring mule’s rump.
Tamblin�
�s nose raises straight up as she blocks my path. Colton twists the reins around his wrists and looks down at me. He opens his mouth to speak but I dodge under the dancing mare’s arched neck and make my way to the nearest tree.
Steel slips from its metal prison.
He draws a sharp breath and swings from the saddle.
I drag the blade across the thin surface in one quick slice. Sticky sap seeps down over my gloves.
He freezes.
The blade slices back and catches another tree. A thick, ragged mark like the ones from earlier carves into the flakey bark.
“I’ll be damned.” He watches me move from tree to tree, my fingers parting branches and deer-hide boots slipping over the snow-covered roots. Six. Seven. Twelve.
Millows rush by in a dance with the snowflakes.
Sap coats steel. Bark sticks to my gloves. Twenty. Thirty. Trees on all sides begin to look the same.
South to the gully. West to the ridges. North to the mines. Everywhere but to Rondo’s snowfield.
I continue leaving marks on any and all trees I can reach until I’m surrounded by a natural labyrinth. Who knows how many in all I got, but the K. C. backdoor into Rondo is buried deep within.
I wipe the flat of the blade across my thigh and return it to its scabbard, tying it to my rawhide belt. This won’t be enough to save us. My legs tremble and buckle into the snow. Both hands sink into the wet flakes. Exhaustion hangs over me. If those machines are even a few miles off course from flanking us it may buy precious little time.
Colton sits on a root beside me.
“I don’t understand you,” he says and gestures to the trees. “You’re up against the most sophisticated, technologically advanced military in existence and you obviously know you can’t win. And yet . . . even Henny would be hard-pressed to not be impressed by all this.”
I look up to the darkening sky signaling late afternoon but don’t look at him. “Please just leave me alone. If you want the horse, take her and go. Go back to your Kingdom and tell them everything. I just want to be left alone with my family, in peace.”
The Bone Roses Page 19
