by EM Kaplan
“Don’t move,” Malga told her. “You haven’t yet recovered.”
Mel felt a firm hand on her shoulder and was relieved to feel the pain in her head subside. Fighting the urge to look inward to examine her own injuries, Mel lay still, as the woman had requested. If she went back into herself, she feared she might not wake up for a long while. Years. Decades. She was too tired to ponder it.
Several more Masks attended her over the next few hours, each sharing strength with her. Though not known for their ability to heal others, some Masks were more talented at the skill than others. Mel was glad just to escape the pain. Her skin knitted itself back together, as did the bones of her legs. Her chest expanded as the breath filled her lungs, filling them out where they had collapsed. Still, they left her lying where she had awoken on the cold, hard ground, which made her think that her wounds had been dire enough that she could not be moved. Or else that the entire settlement, including the infirmary, lay in ruins. But it was nighttime, and she couldn’t see in the darkness, despite the torches that flared around them.
When she could move enough to speak, she asked, “Where is Ott?”
“He’ll be here soon,” Malga told her, which made Mel fear the worst. The woman wouldn’t lie to her. Malga was incapable of telling an untruth. Ott wasn’t dead—Mel would have known that, would have felt that, she thought. She breathed hard, thinking that he was still trapped underground in a dark, crushing grave similar to the one in which she had lain.
Another face came into focus. Rav’s dark gaze held her own. Her friend’s thin, dark-skinned face was smooth, all concern masked. Yet, Mel knew the worry was there underneath. Tightness marked the corners of Rav’s eyes, and her neck and shoulders held tension. Yet no wounds or dirt marred her face.
“You’re all right,” Mel said, her voice raspy and broken, partly from sheer relief. Though she had never had a true sisterhood, this woman had taught her the meaning of it. The unconditional support. The unspoken trust. Rav’s friendship was a precious thing. “Bookman and your baby? The others?”
“They’re fine. All unharmed,” her friend said. Mel appreciated the fact that Rav didn’t tell her to try to keep silent. Her need to know precluded silence, especially her need to know where Ott was.
“Was it trogs?” She didn't needed confirmation…yet she did. Mind whirling, she couldn’t fathom trogs invading her childhood home. She’d played on the the same steps of the meeting hall that now lay buried under thousands of shovelfuls of earth.
Rav nodded. “They arrive here, even. In this place so many people consider sacred.” She fell silent after that, but the weight of unspoken questions lay between them. What did they trogs want? To destroy all people aboveground? When would they stop? Was no place safe?
South of them in the red desert, the earth was made of sand. Would the trogs be able to tunnel their way through that ever-shifting ground and endanger Rav’s sisters? Mel was able to calm her racing heart—though not her thoughts—a telling sign that the trogs had retreated, at least for now.
“I need to get up.” Mel struggled to push herself off the ground. Coughing, she managed to get into a seated position, but her head swam. Black spots appeared in her vision as she paused to take gulping breaths to ward off the pain and nausea. The Masks around her placed their hands behind her for support, and she felt a rush of strength come into her. Blood rushed to her head in a sudden euphoria, but it subsided as she guided the added strength to her injuries. Something inside of her was bleeding, so she staunched the flow of it first.
Then Malga was back. “They’ve found Ott and brought him out.”
At that, Mel gathered the strength to stand. The smaller cracks in her lips and face stung—one of her eyebrows was split—but they were insignificant enough to be left as they were while she concentrated on her more serious injuries. Rav was by her side, a strong hand supporting her arm. On wobbling legs, she asked Malga, “Take me to him?”
“Of course.”
But Ott found her first, and she was soon gathered up in his strong embrace. “I’ve had more grime on me this week than during the entire course of my childhood,” he said into her hair. Then, feeling the blood on her head, pulled away on a sharp intake of breath. His gaze scanned her face, taking in the rips in her skin, the unevenness of the line of her nose. All of that could be fixed later—at least she was alive and drawing breath at a normal pace now.
“I’m healed,” she was quick to reassure him. Her cough said otherwise, and she felt fresh blood run from the cut on her lip.
He had turned pale, as if he might lose the strength of his legs and drop to his knees. Staring at her, a wealth of expressions flew across his dirt-smeared face—the sharp-cut jaw line, the dusty bristles of his beard, and the dark green eyes she knew so well. With a grimace, he said, “I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to know how bad it was—if this is so much better. I don’t think I can take it.”
She didn’t bother to ask him if he was all right—she’d already scanned through his body searching for injuries. Looking into him now was much easier than the first time she’d done it. Now it was habit, and he didn’t seem to notice. Did he feel it? He was smiling down at her, the silvery line underneath his chin evident, a scar made her remember the first time they’d been locked in an embrace, hiding from trogs in the forest surround Cillary Keep.
“I’m fine,” he said. Maybe he had felt her invisible intrusion, the sweep of her mind through his body. As he thumbed some dirt from the corner of her eye, she tried to determine the state of his mind, but all she could sense was relief at their reunion. Or maybe that was her sentiment, overwhelming all other thought and feeling.
“How did they get you out so quickly? How did they find me?” she wondered. She’d been lying underground for so long in the trog-tainted earth, her thoughts were muddled. If she hadn’t been able to use her abilities to her utmost, how had the other Masks faired better?
“Not they,” Ott said. “Her.” With a tip of his head, he indicated Treyna. The thin woman stood off to the side of the greater part of the activity of Masks coming and going and the moving of injured bodies to steadier ground. Seeing them watching her, Treyna lifted her chin up in defiance, on the defensive by instinct.
Mel frowned. Earth? Terrata. What were the chances that three of the keepers of the elementals would come from the northern lands? The odds seemed highly unlikely. Maybe it was more reasonable that more than one person could handle each of the tokens, but that some were more skilled than others? She remembered her own brief and failed handling of the Tooran medallion. The fire elemental had taken over her mind as it flashed over the city’s buildings, consuming everything it encountered—an elemental without a keeper?
“Her dagger?” Mel asked, as her eyes traced the movement of Treyna’s hand to the hilt at her waist.
“I think so. She had it from a trog, she says. One with blue eyes.”
Mel’s gaze snapped to Ott’s, and they exchanged looks. She’d long before told him how Jenks, the Mask shifter—and her blooded father—had become a trog to live among them and to learn more about them. Jenks often had blue eyes. There couldn’t be another blue-eyed trog in the world…could there? That made one coincidence more too many in a series of strange intersections of fate.
Mind churning with this latest information, Mel sagged against Ott, who held her up. A night wind had picked up, and while no scent of trog tainted it, more than one person among them sniffed to test the air—a clear show of uneasiness. Mask cloaks brushed the dirt lane in the darkness, as Mel adjusted her eyes for the dimmer night sky.
But then her thoughts moved to other pressing issues. “We need to leave the settlement. The trogs could come back at any time. Or they could move south.” Which would be even worse. Masks could heal themselves. Normal humans could not. How many people would die in the next attack?
“Rav’s sisters,” he said in agreement. “Are you well enough to go? Can we wait two o
r three days until you heal more?”
His concern warmed her, and she felt the urge to spend one more night’s rest in a soft bed alongside him. Never mind that she knew she needed rest to continue healing, she wanted to bathe in the comfort of being close to him. Her head throbbed and she tasted the blood on her lip.
No more innocent people needed to die. And if something were to happen to Rav’s sisters before they could get to them? Unthinkable.
She shook her head. “We must go as soon as possible. We don’t have a choice.”
Chapter 51
“My sister is the Great Mother’s breath. She is the wind. You’d better do what I tell you, or she will blow you away into the desert. She will, because she won’t let anything bad happen to me.” Yanna’s head bobbed on her neck—Zunee had once seen a peeyatcok do the same, its garish tail feathers fanned behind it as it strutted in front of its hen.
Zunee listened to the high-pitched voice of her youngest sister taunting the young Chok boy as he brought another armload of wood into the camp. Despite her sister’s silly posturing, Zunee didn’t have any such self-delusion. She knew she wasn’t the wind—no more than Deni was the string of fish he carried on his fishing rod. No more than her skin and bones were made of sand and scrubby desert trees. She had merely borrowed the wind from the Great Mother, and when Zunee was finished annihilating her family’s enemies, she would give it back.
She never thought to question why her? The need had arisen, and she had been the one in place to assume the mantle of responsibility. It was her duty.
Standing now on the bank of the river where it emptied into the Great Sea, Zunee watched the waves break in a powerful crest on the river’s shore. They had not seen the water’s current reverse itself, but had heard the story from several of the half-starved men and women who had arrived at its shores shortly before Zunee’s family. Here, the river met the Great Sea, and the clash of the two waters caused a rhythmic, foamy churn of waves, as fresh water, which they could drink, mixed with the salty ocean. What had the waters looked like before the river reversed? Did the salt enter the river, along with the strange, dark creatures she’d glimpsed swimming in the distant sea waters? She didn’t know anything about rivers or oceans—but she kept watch every time one of her people entered the surf to make sure the great whaleri stayed far away.
Her family seemed to have amassed a small wandering city of followers—strays and add-ons—people who had seen the whirlwinds and who now watched Zunee with expressions of awe that made her uncomfortable. The scattered and few remaining members of the three feuding warlords had dropped to their knees before Zunee and her sisters that day that she’d flung Lantus Chok and Brakah Ashonti into the desert. They’d sworn fealty to her as if she herself were a tribal lord.
She’d scoffed, not wanting any part of it.
But yet…her sisters were safe now. If stragglers wanted to kow-tow to her, she would let them. She would remain silent and say nothing, not wanting to jeopardize this momentary sense of peace, a calm that had stolen over her sisters that she had not felt since before their father died.
The calm was a temporary one, she knew.
She watched them as they moved about their new camp. Deni had chosen a spot pushed back from the water’s edge—there was no telling how far the waves would roll in if, perchance, something upset the river again. Lena directed the younger ones to set up their new camp. The younger Chok and Ashonti males had pitched in with a feverish willingness that Zunee found hard to stomach. Had their fathers been such hard slavers that they’d demanded absolute subservience from these young boys? She didn’t doubt it. Would they resort to their former loyalties the moment her back was turned? She didn’t want to find out.
Turning her back to the rapidly forming camp, she found Deni near the water but staring away from it, back at the desert—not in the exact direction from which they had come, but farther north.
“Are you pining for your old pillow and rug?” she said. Neither of them had mentioned his ceremonial swaddling blanket since her humiliation. But at least she had the clasp somewhere in her gut, she thought with a rueful shake of her head. The pin didn’t pain her—she couldn’t feel it, but knew it was there all the same. The sandstone and agamite clasp was a part of her now. She couldn’t lose that even if she wanted to—not unless some Chok swine rose from the desert plain and carved it out of her belly.
She thought he’d have a snappy comeback in return, but instead, he said, “You brought it with you. Something that held so much meaning for me.”
Zunee felt her face grow warm, but she couldn't find any words to say.
“Are we finally at peace? Will we have time for you and me?” His voice was soft, so low that it reminded her of a night breeze that stirred no sand.
Taken off guard because he’d spoken his thoughts on what she’d always assumed was in her mind alone, she floundered for a response. To her shame, she grasped querulous words and a teasing, unkind tone. “Peace?” she at last managed to ask with a laugh that bordered on scoffing. “Do you mean you and me or us against the other tribes?”
When Deni didn’t answer her chiding question, she scanned the horizon with a questing gaze to see what held his attention better than she could. Though there were still a couple of sunlit hours left in the day, the air near the river was much wetter than she was used to and blew across her skin, cooling it. But it made her smile now—she felt it as if it were an embrace, a familiar touch—as if it were a stroke from the Great Mother’s hand herself.
“My eyes are sharper than yours,” she said. “Let me see.”
Now he rolled his eyes at her and stepped back with a grand sweep of his arm, as if he were some great northern lord, holding his arm out for a simpering lady. She snorted. In her world, there were no ladies in gowns and veils—none outside the occasional foreign tales her father had told her. Perhaps her sister Rav had met some fine ladies at Cillary Keep. For now, Zunee preferred her worn but now-clean zari that left her legs free to run and cleared the way for her keen hunter’s eyesight. In truth, her vision was clearer now than it had ever been. Now she had the grace of the wind to reach out and feel what lay before her, to lick the surfaces near and far with a breath and paint them in her mind.
She followed the wind now as she searched the horizon across the shifting red sand that became dotted with rocks to the north. Amongst them, she found the anomaly that Deni had spotted—a wide clearing in the scattered rocks. No, not just a clearing, but a basin—a crater with one collapsed side. Where the rocks speckled the landscape in a haphazard fashion, here in this indentation, the stones were smooth and placed in a pattern. Certainly not by the scattering of time and wind, she knew instinctively. The stone platforms lay in the rough shape of a wheel—four keystones marked the four earthly directions—north, south, east, and west—and a larger stone lay in the center, a hub at the center of the spokes.
In all the tales from travelers who had passed through her father’s tents, she’d never heard of anything such as this. Surely one intrepid explorer should have had a tale to tell? Or were these stones a more recent construction? She didn’t know what to think.
She and Deni looked at each other, and as was often the case, exchanged identical looks of curiosity, speculation, and suspicion. He sighed, knowing that she would not be satisfied until she’d examined the formation more.
Then he nodded and spoke, saying a simple, “Tomorrow, then.”
Chapter 52
In the morning, Mel licked the blood from her lip as she stood before her mother’s house on weak legs, surveying the settlement. Buildings lay in ruins, mere piles of dusty rubble. Every single structure in the Mask town had sustained noticeable damage—some irreparable—except her mother’s house. The small cottage sat intact—not a book upended—at the end of the land, not far from the pile of stone that had been her father’s house.
They had not left immediately, as she would have liked. Though they could take Harro,
he needed more time. He was seated in a wheeled chair now. She’d had the chair modeled after the one she had seen in Tooran, the one that Wells had used, and a talented woodworker among the Masks constructed it with startling ease—she’d wanted to speak with the Mask more about his gift for assembling the parts she’d described, but there was no time. Harro was acclimating well to the movement of the chair. They would have to carry him over rough terrain and stay closer to the river where it was smoother. Though when Treyna was by his side, the path in front of him seemed to smooth out and ease his way. Not a coincidence by any chance, Mel knew. The girl was good with manipulating the earth. Terrata. She did it with relative ease, perhaps motivated to make things easier for the man, her chosen partner.
Coughing from the morning dust, Mel turned and made her way in pain into her mother’s library, which she had offered up to Malga and some of the other more influential Masks. Shaking her head, she couldn’t help but marvel at how this house of all of them had remained untouched. Could a message lay in this pattern of destruction? The entire settlement destroyed, trogs inexplicably retreating while they were at their most vulnerable. Had the trogs intended to kill them all…they could have. Masks were not warriors. They would not have been able to fight off the powerful beasts. Scholars versus warriors—not an even match.
Though Mel’s body was still injured, her mind worked through the possibilities, churning like an agile bird, fluttering and hopping from one option to the next. As she entered the room, moving with care to avoid further pain, Malga looked up from the desk where she was ensconced in deep conversation with several other Masks, whose heads were bowed together.
“Come here,” Malga told Mel. The Mask closest to her approached and placed his hand on Mel’s arm as she drew close. A stinging sensation flooded her face as he realigned her nose with a sharp crack. She winced and gasped, caught by surprise. But her breathing immediately improved, so she thanked him. He looked away, ignoring her gratitude in typical Mask fashion. She hadn’t expected otherwise. But still, it would have been nice to know that her thanks had been received. The trogs had receded, and with them, the anomalous emotion in the Mask settlement that had caught Mel so off guard.
