Survivors (Harmony Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  And in the distance, she could hear a woman weeping.

  “I’ll take that,” she heard Sorel saying. The knife that appeared in his hand flashed close to Tomi, too close; Petra, behind her, held her with big callused hands. The scarf parted and Tomi almost fell, but Sorel caught his ankle just before he hit the ground and swung him up again. Tomi roared his displeasure at this careless handling.

  Jillian twisted, bit down on one of Petra’s hands, got free and sprung for Tomi. Kallan caught her around the waist. “Don’t hurt him!” she snarled at Sorel. “Give him to me!”

  “Useless mouth,” Sorel remarked with another of his chilling giggles. “I’ll deal with it, boss?”

  “Not yet,” said Kallan. “The little maggot could be of some use. You don’t want Sorel to bash his brains out, do you, woman?”

  “Please give him to me!”

  “Don’t worry. He’ll be all right… as long as you’re cooperative.”

  “You do plan to cooperate, don’t you?” Kallan’s right hand moved up and squeezed her breast.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Kallan allowed her to keep what little powdered milk was left to feed Tomi – as long as she ‘showed her gratitude.’ And so Jillian did that, in whatever perverted form he demanded. And when he told her to act as if she was enjoying herself, she did that too.

  “See what it is to have your own private holostar!” he boasted to Piter – ‘Petra’ without the mop of dark hair and the shapeless dress.

  Piter scoffed. “What, that bedraggled piece? She made you think she was a star?”

  “Didn’t need to,” Kallan said. “Some of us are cultured gentlemen, Piter. I’ve seen several episodes of Love for Living. And when she called herself Jillian, ‘twasn’t hard to remember where I’d seen her before. Jillian Lisadel, the toast of the capital, playing some uppity society bitch who wouldn’t demean herself to look down her nose at you and me. Isn’t that right, bitch?”

  Jillian was afraid to say anything that might make him angry enough to hit her, not while she was giving Tomi his bottle. She looked down and tried to make herself invisible.

  “Tell the man I’m right, ho! Tell him who you were.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Jillian said, not looking up. “I was Jillian Lisadel.”

  “And now you’re Kallan’s bitch. Go on, say it if you want to finish feeding your brat!”

  “And now I’m Kallan’s bitch.” She hated herself for cooperating in her own degradation. But Tomi was still alive.

  Presently he called for another woman to take the brat. Two very young girls came up, hesitantly. There were streaks of tears on their dirty faces. “Doesn’t need both of you,” Kallan said. He pointed. “You – put the kid to sleep. You – take care of Piter here. He’s earned something for helping me catch the great holostar.”

  Both girls looked completely, hopelessly defeated. One took Tomi with an expression of relief at being spared a worse task; the other trailed off behind Piter.

  At night there was a fire in the center of the clearing, where the bandits roasted bits of a sheep that had been hacked to pieces and occasionally threw a bone towards Jillian and the two girls. While Tomi slept between them, starfish hands and feet thrown out in complete exhaustion, they shared parts of their stories in cautious whispers. The girls had belonged to a wool cooperative up-river from here, struggling to keep going despite hunger and the epidemic that had killed half their number. Too tired to mount a watch at night, they’d been easy prey for a raid by Kallan’s men. Their families had been killed, but some people might have escaped; they thought the bandits had been more interested in girls and sheep than in a total massacre. And they weren’t quite as defeated as Jillian had first thought. They were trying to give that impression while quietly working on a plan for getting away.

  “We know these woods – well anyway, they’re a lot like the woods around our grazing lands. This time of year, you can find lots of mushrooms if you know where to look. We’ve talked them into letting us go pick mushrooms, but only one at a time.”

  That didn’t seem like much help, but the older girl – Kaytlin – elaborated. The girls thought they’d seen an abandoned rowboat at the edge of the sasena paddies. They thought it was still usable. If they could get that far, the river would take them away.

  “Um. There’s not much downstream,” Jillian said, “I’ve come up from the city. And you definitely don’t want to go near Lost Maples.”

  Kaytlin sagged. “I thought they – ”

  “No. They kidnapped my man. They’re as bad as this lot, only with better plumbing.”

  “Well, at least we can use the boat to get across the river. I don’t think any of these bastards can swim.”

  “And they won’t feel like swimming,” Felisha whispered, “after we…”

  Kaytlin pinched the other girl’s arm and she stopped abruptly.

  The meal broke up then; Kallan told Kaytlin to put Tomi in her lean-to and then to go with another one of his men. Felisha was ordered to another. “And this one,” Kallan said, winding his fingers in Jillian’s hair, “stays with me. And you’re grateful for the attention, aren’t you, Jillian Lisadel?”

  As she stumbled after him, the men still seated round the fire made hilarious jokes about how giving her a bone to lick from their meal was good practice for her next task.

  In the morning, the bandits mostly slept late. After Jillian fed Tomi, a yawning Piter told the women they might all go and look for mushrooms – “but the brat stays here.”

  “This is our chance!” Kaytlin whispered as soon as they were out of sight. “We won’t even have to…”

  “No,” Jillian said.

  They turned astonished faces to her.

  “We’d let you come tool”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe,” Jillian allowed. “But I won’t go without my baby, and I won’t let you go without us. If you run away from me, I’ll – I’ll scream until Piter comes after you.”

  “Kallan was right,” Kaytlin said bitterly. “You are a bitch. I thought we could trust you!”

  “You can,” Jillian said wearily, “if I can trust you. Swear to help me escape with Tomi, and I’ll do anything I can to help you.”

  “I heard it wasn’t even your baby,” Felisha grumbled, “’s why you can’t nurse him yourself.”

  “He’s all I have,” Jillian said. “Well?”

  After some more grumbling the girls agreed to revert to their previous plan, this time including Jillian. “But it’s not our fault if you can’t grab the baby and get away when we do run.”

  “Tonight?” Jillian asked hopefully as they returned with their skirts full of mushrooms.

  Kaytlin shook her head. “We don’t have enough of… the right sort of mushrooms.”

  The girls stopped just out of sight of the clearing and buried the mushrooms they’d given Jillian to carry. Then they went on in and laid out the rest of their gatherings on the ground. The bandits watched while Kaytlin ate one of each kind of mushroom; then they allowed her to throw the rest into the soup of boiled grain and meat shreds that was their evening meal.

  “One more day,” Felisha whispered to Jillian.

  “What are you bitches whispering about?” Piter snapped.

  Felisha sagged. “Just said, we got through one more day.”

  “Anybody would think you don’t appreciate our hospitality,” Kallan said silkily. “Piter’s feelings are hurt. After he eats you can show him how happy you are to be here, all safe and well fed.”

  By the time Tomi was full and ready to be put down for the night, Jillian was all but asleep on her feet. She stumbled through obedience to Kallan’s commands, but she wasn’t responsive enough for his tastes.

  “Look at me when I tell you to, bitch!” He lashed out with his braided leather belt; Jillian tried to duck but only succeeded in taking the blow on her cheek instead of across her eyes. The pain woke her up enough to satisfy Kal
lan. She could feel blood on her face but his demands kept her too busy to check the wound. After he fell asleep she used the last water in his cup to wash off the crusted blood. She could feel an ugly welt running from her temple almost to her chin, and a raw line where the skin had split. If he’d succeeded in striking her across the eyes she might have been blinded.

  “One more day,” Jillian thought, and wondered if it was really worth humiliating herself just for the chance to keep breathing at Kallan’s whim. But, Tomi. And those girls had a plan…

  The next day, when the three of them were out of earshot, they told her the rest of it. Some she’d already guessed from their actions the previous day: they’d been secretly hoarding and setting aside three kinds of mushrooms that they knew were poisonous. “The little red ones only give you a belly-ache,” Kaytlin said, “and the ugly lumpy ones aren’t much better, but the white pleated tops… well, don’t lick your fingers if you pick one of those. But we’ve only found one deathcap so far.” She chewed a handful of leaves and spat out the mess.

  “You might have mentioned that yesterday,” said Jillian. “Are those leaves edible?”

  Kaytlin gave her a disgusted look. “No, stupid. They’re for your face, and you can chew the next poultice yourself, they taste terrible.” She slapped the wet mess over Jillian’s throbbing cheek. Most of the leaves immediately fell to the ground. “Yesterday we were considering giving you a White Deathcap. But Felisha thought you could be useful. Even though you’re stopping us getting away peacefully. Before we got permission to both go out foraging at the same time, she was going to distract the guys while I added the poisonous ones to their stew. Now we have to do it that way. You can distract them while the two of us fix the stew.”

  “I don’t want to get away peaceably,” Felisha hissed. “I want to see them clutching their bellies and trying to vomit up the poison.”

  And if Jillian provided the diversion, she reflected, she would be the one running the risk of being beaten or killed for disrupting the meal. She and Tomi.

  It was likely the best deal she was going to get.

  Unfortunately for their plans, another silly sheep had mired itself in the sasena paddies while they were looking for White Deathcaps. The bandits hacked it apart and gorged on roasted meat, giving the girls no chance to add to the meal.

  Jillian fought down panic while she fed Tomi. The powdered milk was almost gone. Could she mash up other food into a puree? Would he choke on it? She felt a despairing certainty that using up the milk would be his death warrant. Kallan was barely tolerating the baby’s existence now, when it wasn’t any trouble for him, because it gave him a hold on her. Now that he’d enjoyed hurting and humiliating her for a few days, he probably thought she was beaten down enough that he could dispose of Tomi.

  That would, she vowed, be his last mistake. He was already dangerously confident around her; last night he’d made her service him while he was still half dressed, still had that wicked curved knife stuck in his belt. If he killed Tomi… She clutched the baby in her arms until he wailed in protest. What would she have to live for then? Ruven might yet escape Lost Maples, but he would be looking for her up-river, not in this nightmare forest so far from the river bank. Anyway, she couldn’t imagine going back to him after the way Kallan had used her. He deserved someone less damaged.

  But Tomi was still alive, and there was still a slim chance that Kaytlin and Felisha would succeed in their plan… and a slimmer one that they’d honor their promise to include her. “One more day,” she crooned to Tomi, “one more day, my princeling.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The next day seemed to offer everything they’d wished for, even hope. There was nothing for breakfast but boiled grain without salt; the bandits all but chased the women out into the woods with instructions to find something to eat. There weren’t many edible mushrooms left near the camp, but Felisha found two large White Deathcaps under a rotting log where Jillian had seen nothing but needles and leaves. And the sky was clear, and there would be a moon late that night, Kaytlin whispered to Jillian.

  She’d already decided what the diversion would be. She usually gave Tomi his bottle while the bandits were dining, before they tossed scraps to her. If she gave him only half a bottle, he would be unhappy, and if she pinched him after taking the bottle away he would raise the roof.

  Had there been a roof to raise.

  Tomi performed perfectly and on schedule – and was harder to pacify than Jillian had expected. Kallan cuffed her and told her to take the brat into his shelter and shut him up. She didn’t dare look towards Kaytlin and Felisha as she meekly followed orders. Either they had taken advantage of that distraction to poison the stew, or they hadn’t. Either she would get Tomi calmed down in time to follow them, or she wouldn’t. She rated her chances as pretty good. Surely it would take some time for the mushrooms to act. And once reunited with his bottle, Tomi eschewed howling in favor of gripping the bottle with both hands and sucking as fast as he could. She’d better let him finish before she made a move.

  Then Kallan swaggered in, chewing the meat off a bone from last night’s feast, and Jillian’s heart sank. What if he hadn’t eaten any of the stew?

  “Put the brat down,” he ordered her. “I’ve got something better for you to fondle.”

  “He’ll start crying again if I don’t let him finish his bottle.”

  Just at that moment, Tomas let go the empty bottle and pushed the nipple away. Kallan laughed. “The guy’s on my side. Aren’t you happy? Tell me how happy you are, Jillian Lisadel, to put the baby aside and concentrate on a real man instead. And if you’re really good,” he promised with a wink, “I’ll let you have the rest of this bone to suck on afterwards.”

  She should wait until she knew the poisoning had worked… But he could hear anything outside as well as she could, he’d know there was something wrong when men started getting sick. And he was happy, relaxed, leaning back with his eyes closed…

  There was so much blood. And he wouldn’t die! Even with the knife stuck in his belly, he was leaning forward, making a terrible coughing noise. Jillian put a bloody hand around the hilt of the knife, pulled it back towards her and stabbed blindly, again, again…

  She was stabbing a thing that no longer moved or bled, a thing fallen sideways on the ground, with terrible staring eyes that never blinked.

  Jillian never knew how long she knelt there, holding the blood-smeared blade and watching to see if the thing moved again. Hoarse shouts from outside woke her to herself again. Men were vomiting and screaming. There was no water to wash herself with. She bound Tomi to her with the rag that had once been a shawl and crawled out of Kallan’s shelter. No one noticed her; the men in the clearing were too occupied with their own troubles. The woods closed about her, so dark that she had to feel her way from one tree to the next. The carpet of dried needles rustled beneath her feet.

  “We thought you were never coming,” Kaytlin hissed in her ear, startling her.

  Jillian tried to conceal her surprise that they’d waited for her.

  “Come on, then! Felisha, stop dawdling!”

  “It’s dark,” Felisha whispered.

  “You want to wait for moonrise? Huh? You want to take a chance anybody didn’t pig out and poison himself, wait for them to come after us?”

  Felisha gripped Jillian’s hand, and she began to understand why the girls had waited. They were still very young.

  They managed a shuffling, mostly-quiet progress through the darkness. “Kallan didn’t eat the stew, did he?” Kaytlin asked after they’d been under the trees for some time.

  “He won’t be coming after us,” Jillian said.

  As they reached the path along the rice paddies, the moon rose. Jillian could see that her hands and arms were black with dry blood. She felt as if she were covered in the stuff. “I… didn’t have a chance… to wash off the blood.”

  “Eeew,” said Felisha. “Is that why you’re all sticky?” />
  “Sorry….”

  “I’m sorry it’s not Piter’s blood,” Felisha declared with a sob in her throat. “I’d bathe in it.”

  Now that they could make out the path, Kaytlin hurried them along it. Jillian was confused. They seemed to be going the wrong direction. “I don’t think this is the way we came.”

  “I don’t care how they brought you,” Kaytlin said. “They took us this way, and that’s how we get back to where Felisha saw the boat.”

  Jillian started to worry. “I thought you both saw it.”

  “Felisha doesn’t make things up!”

  Jillian wasn’t so certain. What the girls had endured would have justified great colorful hallucinations. It seemed possible to her that Felisha had dreamed a boat, or wished it into existence.

  When they finally reached the river bank, and Felisha pointed triumphantly to the shape she’d glimpsed while being dragged from her home, Jillian almost wished it had been a dream. The thing rode so low in the water, it seemed as if a shadow falling over it would be heavy enough to sink it.

  “It’s sound enough,” Kaytlin insisted, “just full of water.”

  Jillian wrapped the shawl round Tomi and laid him in the center of the path. The three of them scooped water out of the boat with their cupped hands until Jillian’s shoulders ached. But it had risen several inches – well, maybe a couple of inches – out of the water. And Kaytlin, groping well below the surface of the water, had triumphantly retrieved a long pole that broadened at one end.

  “Haven’t you ever seen an oar before?”