Anticipating his move already, Ashlyn snatched at her shuriken, yanking it free of its straps, and tossed it on the downswing. The two weapons flashed towards each other in the light like rogue comets, but Ashlyn's aim was low- no no no- and the shuriken merely glanced off the sword, deterring the larger weapon only inches off-target before planting itself uselessly in the ground.
The sword gleamed once, twice, seemingly moving in slow motion as Ashlyn watched it close in on Drake. The red-eyed man had no time to draw his weapon, but his left arm moved lightning-fast, releasing the unconscious ninja and coming up to block the machete.
The razor-sharp weapon sliced across the silver glove with an awful grinding sound. For a horrible moment there was only the repetition of her own frantic breathing and the sound of Suki's hooves on the grass, and Ashlyn thought he'd done it, he'd saved himself when she couldn't- but then there was a sickening wet thud, and Drake lowered his arm, slowly, shock etched across his features.
The blade was embedded in his shoulder.
Oh gods oh gods oh gods- "Drake!" Ashlyn shrieked. Her blood turned to ice in her veins as she watched her friend fall to his knees. She was off her horse in an instant and running before her feet knew they'd touched ground.
Kou caught her with an arm around the waist, less than ten feet from where Drake knelt. "We have to leave," he said, using his opposite hand to grab Suki's reins.
"We're not going anywhere, you stupid…stupid jerk!" she screamed, and thrashed against him. "Drake! Look at me!"
She was panicking so badly that even her inherent fighting skills fled her, and if she'd had any sense she would have realized that the way she struggled futilely against Kou now was an insult to her ninja heritage. Her eyes fell on the shuriken, half-buried in the grassy soil just a few feet away. A heal stane glittered cruelly at her from the weapon‘s slots.
Drake reached up and pulled the sword from his shoulder, dropping it into the grass beside him. Then, as if the simple movement had been too much for him, the gunslinger slumped forward, barely supporting himself from falling completely with one hand on the ground in front of him.
Reality began its slow creep into Ashlyn's mind as she watched Drake, still fighting Kou's insistence on leaving, though her heart wasn't in it. The wound was not deep- at least not deep enough to kill a vampire, she hoped- but it was still her fault. Skye would blame the injury on her, and likely throw her in the airship's holding cells besides.
There was no way she could stay behind now. If she didn't leave, then there would be no way to prove herself to FLD, ever again.
Kou wisely took advantage of Ashlyn's distractedness to shove her up onto Suki’s back before jumping up behind her, clutching her leather saddlebags- which she'd dropped in her desperation- in one hand and the reins in the other. He clucked to the mare, urging her on with his heels, and Suki obediently moved forward, taking them out of the circle of light surrounding the airship and into the darkness of night.
"Is this west?" he hissed in her ear.
She didn't answer for a moment, and Kou thumped her awkwardly in the ribs with his hand, his movements halted by the heavy saddlebags he held. "Is this west?" he repeated harshly.
"Yes," Ashlyn forced herself to answer. Her voice was thin, reedy.
There was a silence. Ashlyn felt the tears start to course down her cheeks, the sharp hollowness in her chest, and she folded forward, burying her hands in Suki‘s mane, letting the sobs rack her body.
It was a long time before Kou spoke again. When he did, the tone of his voice had changed. "He was your friend," he said. There was no intonation at the end, no hint of question. He knew.
Ashlyn closed her eyes, suddenly wishing she'd never left Endro.
"Yes."
They rode on, as the sky began to brighten with the promise of dawn.
Chapter 7
Electric
During her father's reign as Elder Lord of Toryn, he had been afforded a certain celebrity status, and as a result both he and Ashlyn were regarded with wary respect, and a kind of awestruck admiration reserved only for those who were deemed royalty.
It had been different when her mother was alive.
Ashlyn harbored only a few memories from the time before Susyn Li had passed away. She held them close to her heart, loving even the vaguest recollection for the brief insight it provided into the life of the mother she'd never known. Most of her memories directly followed her mother's death - her father's emotional withdrawal, the sympathetic looks the Toryn people bestowed upon Ashlyn when she ventured outside.
Five years old and yet fully aware of what had happened, she'd struggled with growing up while her father turned his focus onto a suddenly downtrodden and war-torn Toryn.
From the beginning, Ashlyn had been alone.
Maybe it had been better that way, she reflected bitterly, brushing raindrops from her face. Growing up in Toryn and then later, fumbling along a thief's existence as a teenager, she had been too removed from people to care about how her life affected theirs. She hadn't grown close to most of her peers, because no one besides Restlyn had the courage to befriend the Li heir. She'd collected stanes with the useless, mechanical notion given to her by her father- it was for the “good of Toryn,” a faceless ambition that Ashlyn owed her loyalty to, though it had brought her nothing but loneliness.
Skye and his comrades had been her first attempt at being a part of something larger than her own petty whims and desires. For weeks she had traveled with these people, lived with them, fought and faced death beside them.
It would have been impossible not to care for them, after a full-scale immersion like the one she'd gone through.
She had never wanted to hurt anybody, certainly not her friends, and least of all Drake, who had already suffered enough pain and betrayal to ruin a dozen lifetimes.
Ashlyn's mind at the moment was a jumble of emotions and accusations, a mirror image of the fickle sky above them, which alternately churned with rain clouds and collected itself to spew forth harsh, unforgiving sunlight.
She wanted to be angry with somebody, anybody. Skye for not trusting her, Drake for following them, Kou for throwing that stupid sword- but she knew that in the end, when it was all sorted out, laid on the table and glaring up at her, presumably with a typically annoying I told you so look plastered on its face, the fault was hers and hers alone.
She had forsaken her birthright to travel the world, avoided her responsibilities to gain independence. Devlyn was the Elder Lord of Toryn because of her rash behavior. Assassins had come to Cosmea because she was there.
And Drake Lockhart, her friend, one of her only friends, lay bleeding because she hadn't been able to protect him.
Kou shifted behind her, slowing the horse to a walk with an easy pressure on the reins. Ashlyn remembered worrying that he might not ride well without a saddle- ha! From what she'd seen so far, he was far more adept than most. Not her, of course. But most, especially the hopeless ones like Aaron, who Ashlyn remembered as clinging fiercely to the saddle with a look of sheer horror on his face, curses spilling out with the same chattering consistency as the machine guns on the airship‘s hull, their rhythms nearly the same (rat-a-tat-tat and "Damn-useless-horse-slow-the-hell-DOWN!").
She was startled out of her reverie by Kou's hand on her shoulder. He said nothing when she turned her head to look at him, simply pointed ahead. Ashlyn followed the line of his arm, and her gaze fell on a mountain range in the distance. Even this far away she could see the colorless plains surrounding the jagged hills, the foliage, rock and even bare soil taking on an unwelcoming grayish tint as it drew closer.
Eastern City, Eastern Mountains and Eastern Canyon were actually on the western side of the continent. The moniker was amusing to most, but few knew the reason for the name- it had once been part of the Toryn kingdom, before Lord Angelo had taken the land from the Toryn elders and made it part of his domain. In relation to the island of Toryn, the Eastern City was east, b
ut to the rest of the world, it was just a backwards name for a western city that always seemed to have snow, no matter what time of year.
"The Eastern Mountains," Ashlyn said. Her voice was raspy from disuse; the last words she'd spoken had been many hours ago, long before they had crossed the river that divided the Cosmea and Eastern areas. It was two days' travel on foot, but Suki had cut that time in half with her exceptional speed and endurance. Ashlyn had a feeling that they could reach the Eastern City just after sundown if they kept the pace.
Kou’s hand tightened almost imperceptibly on her shoulder before he dropped it to his thigh. "Eastern City is north of Cosmea. You said we were going west."
"We were. We are. Well, northwest. More north than west, really-" Ashlyn could feel the onslaught of a nervous babble building behind her words, and made a conscious effort to quell it- "but we'll be past Industry before we turn to cross over to Toryn. We're still heading in the right direction, don't worry."
"You know this area well, then?"
Well didn't even begin to cover it. She could find her way from Eastern City to the town of Industry blindfolded. Granted, for the past decade she'd stayed away from Industry for the most part, but she had traversed these hills and plains more often than she cared to admit.
Even though Eastern City gave her the absolute worst case of spine shivers, Ashlyn had made an effort to go back every now and again, partly to make sure that Drake hadn't reclaimed his oh-so-broody coffin of doom, but mostly to check if Skye had finally made the move back to his hometown.
He never had. Ashlyn wondered why; she supposed that there were too many memories, both real and imagined, keeping him away from the cold city.
"Yeah, I know this place pretty well," she said, and frowned, suddenly realizing that while Kou seemed to have basic geographic knowledge of various cities, he was completely clueless about their physical location and direction.
"You haven't been here before, have you." She phrased it as a question but spoke as though it were a statement of fact.
"Until a few weeks ago I had never left the island of Toryn," he answered, his tone defensive.
Ashlyn, though, didn't see anything unusual about his lack of travel. Most Toryn youth were restricted to the island until they came of age at eighteen. Ashlyn had been the exception, of course. She had ached to see what the world held in store for her and had left the island at fifteen. She had gone alone, as her peers had seemed fairly content to limit themselves to Toryn and its various surrounding tribes.
"Where'd you manage to get on Aaron‘s airship?" she asked, running her fingers through Suki’s mane. It shone white in the sunlight, almost silver, the same color as Drake’s metal glove.
"We were transported on a flying machine to the plains," Kou said. "To a stable by the marshes."
She was vaguely surprised that he'd answered her so easily; perhaps he trusted her more than she'd thought. "So…from Toryn to the plains, to Storim- did you get off the ship at all in Storim?"
"No."
"And then I found you in the ship's galley, before we could go anywhere else," she said. "You haven't really been anywhere yet."
"I've been to Cosmea," he replied tersely. Ashlyn almost smiled, then stopped, horrified that she could even think of such a thing after what had happened.
"Yeah…you saw the entrance, the tavern and my bedroom, and you saw it in pitch-black with nothing but the Eternal Flame to light your way," she said heavily. "Sounds like a raw deal to me."
They fell silent for several long moments.
"I have longed to travel since I was a child," Kou spoke up at length. "Though I have not witnessed what lies beyond the marshes, or even the sight of Cosmea in the daylight, I hope to see a great deal before the gods take me. I wish…"
He trailed off for a moment, then continued, "I wish to see these things of which I have read. I have seen paintings of the plains of snow-fire that span the northern continent. I have heard stories of powerful stanes in hidden caves. I long to see the ruined town of Landi, to enter the Heavenly City and see how the Angels lived."
There was a raw yearning in his voice that reminded Ashlyn of herself at the same age, so eager and innocent, so bold and yet completely awestruck at the same time. She too had longed to witness the cities she had read of in the scrolls of her ancestors, and she had seen them all in her adventures- the snow plains blazing with sunlight outside North Camp Inn, the reveal stane glittering facets of orange and ember in the cave on Hidden Island. She had spent many nights at the Heavenly City, and looked into a lake so perfectly clear that she imagined she could see Jenn's spirit smiling at her from beneath its gleaming surface.
It was ironic, after all these years. She had traveled the world over again, yet no place had claimed her heart so completely as her homeland.
The air was chilly. It still amazed Ashlyn how greatly the climates differed between cities. With only two days’ journey to separate Cosmea and Eastern City, she always expected the temperature change to be mild. But nothing was warm in the Eastern areas…snow was common in summertime.
She told herself that when they reached Eastern City, she would buy new clothes. The clothes she was wearing would be practically indecent even in a dry heat. With the threat of rain overhead she figured that she'd soon be regretting the skimpy outfit more than ever.
She felt another sudden, intense wave of shame that she could be shallow enough to think of something like clothing when she'd all but thrown the sword at Drake. Ashlyn swallowed hard, drawing a hand across her eyes as if the motion could wipe away her guilt along with the raindrops that sprinkled her face.
The first outcropping of the mountain range came up on their right as dusk began to fall. Despite her usual misgivings, Ashlyn felt miserably content in the gray-tinted light. The color seemed fitting.
She pulled the horse to a lazy halt outside Eastern City. "Should we go in?" she asked skeptically, wondering if staying at the inn would just make it that much easier for FLD to find them.
"We need supplies," Kou answered. He swung down from behind Ashlyn, his soft boots making no noise on the grass. Looking up at her in the darkness, his gaze went from her wet face- tear-stained or rain-streaked, she wasn't sure which one was more accurate- to the saddlebags draped across her thighs. "You haven't got anything else to wear, have you?"
Ashlyn smiled, tremulously. "Nothing any different than what I'm wearing now," she said. "You're right. We do need supplies." Neither of them had eaten anything all day, which could have contributed to the super-intense emotions she was suffering at the moment.
The rain chose that exact moment to pick up, droplets spattering Ashlyn's face and bare arms deliberately, a chill weaving its way through the damp air.
"Great," Ashlyn said, to no one in particular. "I hate rain."
"It will wash away our tracks if it continues," Kou said.
He reached up a hand to help her down, but she ignored it, swinging her leg over Suki's back and dropping to the ground. Suki nickered and moved away, eagerly reaching down to nose the ground for grass.
"I think they could find us if they really wanted to," Ashlyn told the other ninja. "Rain or no rain." Though if Drake was hurt badly, it probably would have slowed FLD in their efforts to find her.
Kou looked at her keenly. "You may be right."
They were suddenly flooded with white, an obscenely bright light overwhelming them in the darkness of the storm. Ashlyn flinched, her hands automatically flying up to shield herself. She glanced over and saw that the illumination was coming from a hand-held torch. She couldn't see who was holding it, her vision obscured beyond the circle of light that was nearly blinding her.
"I knew you'd come here," a voice rang out. Clear and cynical, it was familiar to her, Ashlyn only knew one person with that same rough, blue collar accent.
"Vargo?" she exclaimed.
"The one and only, babe." He set the torch on the ground and advanced, the battery-powered cylinder th
rowing him into silhouette as he walked closer.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded furiously. "Are the others with you?" She wanted to, was dying to ask about Drake, if only to know for sure, but she couldn't bring herself to confront the reality of what she'd done. What if the red-eyed gunslinger was seriously injured…or worse?
Blinking back tears, Ashlyn realized belatedly that her eyes were adjusting a little in the dark.
She could see that Vargo was dressed in jeans and a white shirt that was nearly transparent from the rain, and he carried his baton expertly in his right hand, poised and ready for defense. He was soaked and shivering, his wet hair plastered to his cheeks. But somehow he managed to summon the courage to smirk at Ashlyn.
"You'd like to know, wouldn't you," he said. "You thought you'd be able to get away, but you forgot that the airship is a hell of a lot faster than any horse."
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