by Ted Dekker
For a long time she stayed like that, and for a long time she didn’t know what he was doing. A minute passed. Two. It occurred to her that he might have left. The thought terrified her.
She jerked her head around and looked for him.
He was gone!
But what was this? Someone else was there. A small boy was pacing in front of a large boulder twenty feet away. The boy was crying. His arms hung limp by his side and he was naked except for a loincloth.
Samuel? No, it wasn’t Samuel. The sickness was taking her mind. The boy was weeping, beside himself. Sympathy spiked through her heart. But she knew this had to be a figment of her imagination. Yet the boy looked so real. His cries sounded terribly real.
The boy!
This was the boy!
She closed her eyes, opened them. The graying sky was blurry, and she blinked rapidly to clear her vision. The boy was gone.
Justin stood not ten feet away, with his back to her, hands on hips, head hung. Was this also a hallucination? She blinked again. No, this was Justin. But what she’d seen had unnerved her to the core. An image of Justin sweeping the little girl off her feet in the Valley of Tuhan ran through her mind.
The warrior lifted his head and stared at the cliffs. This was the man who had defeated Thomas in battle. Who seemed to be able to have his will with any opponent. It was no wonder that the women and children and fighters from the Southern Forest were so taken with Justin. He was an enigma.
And she’d yelled at him.
But why wasn’t he helping her? “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m going to die here. Please allow a dying woman her liberties.”
“You’re not going to die,” he said softly. “I have too much riding on you to let you die.”
She’d heard that before. Where had she heard that?
He faced her. “You think a few arrows and some torn flesh have much to do with death? I will take your pain away, Rachelle, but it is your heart that worries me.”
“How can you take away my pain? My skin is gray and there are still arrows in my body. I’m dying and you’re just standing there!”
“You’re as stubborn as Thomas. Maybe more. And your memory is no better than his either.”
He was talking nonsense. A shot of pain traveled through her bones, and she grimaced.
“I want you to listen to me very carefully, Rachelle.” He knelt on one knee and clasped her hand in his. He was making no attempt to help her or tend to her wounds. He knew as well as she that there was nothing either of them could do.
“We have brokered a peace between the Desert Dwellers and the Forest People. Qurong will go with Johan and me to the village, where we will offer our terms for peace.”
The Council would never accept any terms for peace; didn’t Justin know that?
“Thomas will stay in the Desert Dweller’s camp as a guarantee for safe passage. Mikil is with Qurong to ensure Thomas’s safety. When the Council understands that a second army, twice the size of the one to the east, is camped on the other side of the forest, they will agree to peace. What happens then must happen for the boy. Do you understand? Because of the boy’s promise.”
“Thomas is in the Horde camp? They’ll kill him!”
“Mikil will have Qurong and Johan in trade. It must happen this way. No matter what happens, remember that. No matter how terrible or at what cost.” He paused. Then he put his other hand on her head, leaned over, and kissed her forehead. “When the time comes, remember these words and follow me. It will be a better way. Die with me. It will bring you life.”
Rachelle closed her eyes. She wanted to scream. Her heart felt like it might break free from her chest, and she understood none of it. Not what he said nor her own emotions. “I don’t want to die.”
“Find Thomas. Your death will save him.”
“I can’t die!” she cried.
“They’re waiting for me.” Justin stood. “I must go.” He strode to his horse and swung into the saddle. The steed snorted and stamped.
He was leaving her?
“I don’t understand,” she cried. “Don’t leave me!”
“I have never left you. Never!” His eyes flashed with anger, then filled with tears. “We will be together soon and you will understand.” He spurred his horse and the stallion galloped into the canyon.
She was too stunned to speak. He was leaving her?
“Remember me, Rachelle! Remember my water.”
“Justin!” she screamed.
“Remember me!”
This time his voice echoed long as he pounded down the canyon. The echo of his last word, me, seemed to dip into laughter. A child’s laughter.
A giggle. A boy’s giggle that bubbled like a brook.
She caught her breath. She’d heard that sound before!
The laughter suddenly grew, as if it had taken a turn at the end of the canyon and decided to rush back toward her. Louder and louder, until it seemed to swallow her whole.
Something unseen hit her hard. She gasped. Her whole body jumped off the ground and then arched. She shook in the air for several seconds, then dropped hard back to the sand.
The sound of giggling was sucked back into the canyon, leaving only silence in its wake.
Rachelle sucked in a lungful of air and trembled. But it wasn’t from fear. It wasn’t from pain. It was from a strange power that lingered in her bones.
Her world momentarily faded.
Then with a flash it returned. What had . . . what had happened?
Monique was gone, for one thing. She’d probably woken.
Rachelle jerked up. No pain. She stared at her side, shocked. Where an arrow had protruded just moments ago, there was only a bloody hole in her tunic. She pulled the garment up and examined her flesh. Blood, but only blood. No wound.
And her skin had lost its gray pallor.
She scrambled to her feet and frantically grasped at the bloody spots. Not a single wound. In fact, she felt as refreshed and whole as if she’d slept the night in perfect peace. She lifted her head up and stared at the canyon.
Remember me.
A chill washed over her skull. They were the words that the boy had spoken to her so long ago before he’d run down the bank and disappeared into the lake. Just remember me, Rachelle, he’d said.
I have a lot riding on you.
She couldn’t breathe. It was him! Justin was the boy! Only he wasn’t a lamb or a lion or a boy now. He was a warrior and his name was Justin! How could she have missed it?
“Justin!” Her call came out like a squeak. She ran. She tore over the sand, desperate to catch him.
“Justin!” This time her cry echoed up the canyon. But he was gone.
Justin was the boy, and the boy was Elyon. Elyon had just touched her. Kissed her forehead! If she had known—
She groaned past a terrible ache that had filled her throat.
“Elyonnnn!”
She fell to her knees. Sobs wracked her body. Panic. Waves of heat that flushed her face. But there was nothing she could do. He’d been within a foot of her and she hadn’t fallen to her knees to kiss his feet. She hadn’t clung to his hand in desperation.
She’d yelled at him!
She gripped her head and cried long, silent wails that washed away her sense of time. Then slowly she began to come back to herself.
The boy had come back to them. She sniffed and struggled to her feet. Dawn had lightened the sky.
Their Creator had come back to them, and he was going to make peace with the Horde. It was the day of deliverance!
Find Thomas, Justin had said.
She spun and faced the sand dunes. She’d seen the camp to the east. Thomas was being held in the camp. It couldn’t be more than a few hours away, even by foot.
She grabbed her tunic and ran into the desert, only briefly thinking about his other words. Your death will save him, Justin had said. But it meant nothing.
She was alive. Elyon had healed her.
23
; THOMAS GAZED at the eastern horizon, where the sun was just now rising over the dunes. The lieutenant of the perimeter guard, Stephen, stood beside Thomas, holding the reins of his horse. Behind them, three hundred Forest Guard waited along the tree line. Ahead of them, the contingent from the Horde waited on their horses to make the exchange as agreed. Johan, Qurong, Justin. And behind them, a thousand Scab warriors.
They were about to make history in the desert. Odd to think that at this very moment he was doing nothing more spectacular in the other reality than sleeping next to Monique under a boulder in France, dreaming.
“I don’t like it, sir,” the lieutenant said. “You’re just going to let them take you in shackles?”
“Not ‘just,’ Stephen. As long as you have Qurong and Martyn, I’m safe.”
Thomas and Mikil had spent three hours covering every possible contingency before Mikil headed off to prepare the Guard and the Council for Qurong and Martyn’s arrival as agreed. Only Mikil, Thomas, the Council, and Johan knew the truth of what was to happen.
Thomas had spent a fitful night waiting for daybreak. Not a wink of sleep. Despite his tone of confidence with Stephen, he was nervous.
“They have a thousand warriors; you have no one,” the man said.
“Are you telling me you and your men can’t deal with a thousand warriors in the forest, where they will be lost?”
“No, I’m not saying that. It just strikes me as disproportionate.”
“I’m willing to take that chance. Remember, this is a mission of peace. Unless you hear differently from myself or Mikil, no harm to them.”
“So Justin has done what he promised,” the man said. “He’s brokering peace and you’re in agreement.”
“Justin is brokering peace. For the moment I am in agreement.”
“The Council will never accept.”
“They will. You will see; they will.”
Thomas left his lieutenant’s side and walked toward the waiting contingent. The truth, of course, was that instead of brokering their peace in front of the Council, Johan would accuse Qurong of plotting betrayal with Justin. He would tell the congregation that Qurong and Justin were planning to ransack the forest as soon as the Guard had accepted peace. Mikil would step forward and tell the people that on her word, Thomas of Hunter concurred. Qurong would then be convicted and executed, and Justin’s fate would be left up to the new leader of the Horde, Johan.
That was the plan. Thomas and Mikil had considered it a dozen times and agreed it would work. It would spare the forest a terrible battle. Just as importantly, they weren’t conspiring with the Horde, which would be treason. No, they were conspiring against the Horde leader, Qurong, by using Johan—a Scab, yes, but also Johan. Enough of a technicality to assure the Council’s approval, surely.
Gravel crunched under Thomas’s feet as he walked. He was the only one not on a horse and armed. For all practical purposes, he was naked.
He reached the midpoint between the two small armies when Justin suddenly dismounted and walked out to meet him. There had been no mention of this, but Johan and Qurong didn’t object, and so neither did Thomas.
Justin met him halfway. “Good morning, my brother.” The warrior dipped his head.
“Good morning.” Thomas returned his gesture.
For a moment they just looked at each other.
“So,” Justin said, “it’s come down to this after all.”
“I guess it has. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Peace?”
“I told them that you would come.”
The revelation caught Thomas off guard. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“I knew it when I looked in your eyes at the challenge. You don’t understand what’s happening, but you want peace. You’ve always wanted peace. And this is the only way for peace, Thomas.”
“How did you know that I would come?”
“You taught me to judge my enemy well. Call it a lucky guess.” His eyes twinkled. “Johan refused to believe that you would offer yourself as a guarantee for Qurong’s safety, but when I saw you ride in yesterday with Mikil, I knew we had won.”
Justin had told Johan that he was going to offer an exchange? Johan had known? The general had smiled at the suggestion—perhaps because of Justin’s accuracy in predicting it.
But Justin couldn’t know the whole truth.
Thomas felt a pang of remorse for his offering up the man in exchange for Qurong’s death. But it was the only way.
“Then you’re a better tactician than I am,” Thomas said, glancing at the Scabs. “If you know so much, tell me this: Will I be safe in their shackles?”
Justin hesitated. “Let’s just say that I think you’ll be safer in their shackles than I will be in the hands of my own Council.”
He stretched out his hand. Thomas took it, and Justin bent to kiss his fingers. “Take courage, Thomas. We are almost home. I’ll see you in the lake.”
Then Justin turned and walked back to his line.
Thomas hesitated, wondering at this latest exchange. But the die had been cast. He walked to the boulder they’d agreed on and stood tall. Justin remounted and led the Horde contingent forward. As soon as Qurong was within slaying reach of the Forest Guard, a dozen Scabs rushed Thomas and fixed shackles on his wrists.
The Horde army vanished into the trees and Thomas was led away on a horse, hopelessly shackled.
24
MONIQUE BOLTED up, wide awake. Twigs hung in her face. She was in the forest? She’d been wounded by the Desert Dwellers and then Justin had healed her!
No. She was in France. Sleeping beside Thomas. It had been a dream.
A dream! She closed her mouth and swallowed, but her throat was parched and tacky. Beside her, Thomas slept soundly, chest rising and falling. Her hand was in his. She pulled it free and wiped the sweat from her face.
She’d dreamed that she was Rachelle, and yet she knew that it was more than a dream, because she knew that as Rachelle she’d dreamed of being Monique.
Monique stared past the leaves that made up the lean-to, stunned by this change in her perception of reality. She had shared Rachelle’s life.
Her bladder was burning. Was it this that had awakened her or the trauma of her dream? Either way, she had to relieve herself. And when she returned, she would wake Thomas and tell him what had happened.
Monique slipped out of the lean-to as quietly as possible and stood. It was only then that she felt the damp spots on her leg. She looked down and saw that her clothes were wet.
Blood! She gasped involuntarily.
The arrows! She touched then pushed on the spots. No pain, no wounds. The dark splotches spread out from where the arrows had struck her. The bleeding hadn’t been terrible because the arrows had stopped up the wounds.
Monique felt tremors overtake her body. It had really happened. This was beyond her. She swallowed and headed, weak-kneed, for the trees just beyond the quarry.
The moon had fallen into the horizon when Carlos stopped near the edge of the clearing and took stock of his situation. Through the trees, maybe three hundred meters down the valley, a farmhouse stood in darkness. He was approximately halfway between Melun and Paris, headed west toward the capital. It was midnight.
Thomas and Monique were somewhere within a hundred meters of him, to the southeast, according to the small screen in his palm. He studied the clearing ahead, careful not to expose himself beyond the tree line.
The quarry. Yes, of course, it would be a natural place to stop. Seventy paces ahead and to his left. They were in the quarry. Unless the woman had discovered the tracking device and discarded the transmitter.
Carlos slipped the receiver into his pocket and worked around the perimeter of the clearing, toward the quarry.
He heard a rustle and froze by a large pine. A rabbit?
The quarry lay just ahead, a depression in the ground that was partially overgrown with stubborn tufts of grass.
Carlos withdrew his pistol an
d chambered a round. He now wished he’d thought to bring the silencer—a gunshot might disturb whoever lived in the farmhouse, although the lay of the quarry would absorb much of the sound.
He stepped around the tree, crouched down, and walked toward the edge of the depression. Gravel scattered, knocked by his boot, and he stopped. He let the sound clear and then eased slowly forward.
The moment he saw the branches set against the boulder, he knew that he had found them. It would be different this time. He would either kill or be killed, and he was certain it would be the former.
Monique was standing by a log, ten meters into the forest, but her mind was still in another forest, in another world altogether.
Monique closed her eyes and clenched her jaw to clear her thoughts. Reality, Monique. Back to reality.
But that was the problem—the other was reality. The smells, the memories, the sights, the feelings in her heart. All of it!
She pulled the pale blue slacks completely off and hung them from a dead branch that jutted up from the fallen trunk. She could barely see by the starlight, and she didn’t want her only clothes to end up with leaves or, worse, bugs in them.
She stood by the log dressed only in her muddied tennis shoes and a cotton blouse, which hung loosely past her underwear. She wouldn’t remove her shoes, not with critters under the leaves.
The sound of skittering gravel reached her ears. She froze.
But it was nothing.
He could hear their breathing. Carlos crouched by the edge of the quarry and peered at the dark shadow beneath the branches they’d leaned against the boulder. On the left end, Hunter’s boots. He would slip around to the right and put the first two bullets into Hunter’s head before turning the gun on the woman. It would have to be quick. Best for both to die in their sleep.
They had what they needed from Monique. Fortier and Svensson might question the events, but they wouldn’t second-guess his decision to kill them, despite their desire to keep her alive. They had chosen him for his ability to make such determinations, and they knew enough to leave security in his hands. If Carlos decided that Hunter had to die, then Hunter would die. End of issue. There was too much at stake to quibble over his judgment now. Killing them would ensure that what they knew would never leave France.
