He bent and whispered something in Birdie’s ear, and then he was gone, up and over the slope, a blur that glinted in the rising sun. Freed from the threat of the griffin’s presence, Slack pounced on her hatchet and paced along the slope, weaving her way with impatient strides through the other Underground runners who had all claimed a seat. Meli and Syd fell asleep hand in hand. Ky didn’t bother setting a watch. If the Khelari were as near as Gundhrold warned, that could prove dangerous. But he couldn’t rouse himself enough to give the command.
Nor was he convinced that anyone would heed him if he did.
On her fourth pass Slack veered off course and halted before his outstretched legs. He didn’t bother lifting his head to look at her, just kept his gaze fixed on the dusty tops of her feet.
“I’m not moving if that’s what you want.”
“You know what I want.”
That brought his head up sharp. She was silhouetted against the sunrise, forcing him to squint up at her, which did little to ease his distaste for her and the whole fool situation. But he was too weary to rise and face her on equal footing.
“Up, Shorty.” She gestured at him with the hatchet. “We have a score to settle.”
The girl really was mad.
“Get up.”
Ky didn’t move. “What about the Khelari?”
“Not my concern. The challenge? Well, that’s another matter.” She tapped the blade of her hatchet against his chest. “Matters between us have gone too far to be ignored, and you know it. It must be settled in blood.”
Utterly, blooming mad.
“What will it be? Do you plan to just sit there and wait for the end or—”
“Enough.” Birdie pushed between them, knocking Slack’s hatchet aside with the haft of her axe. “Put it away. There’s been enough fighting already.”
Ky caught his breath. Numbly, he started groping for a rock to load his sling. Before, there had been a chance—slim, maybe, but a chance nonetheless—that he could have talked Slack out of it. But now, with Birdie involved and all the runners looking, she wouldn’t back down. Couldn’t afford to if she wanted to keep her place in the Underground, a place she had earned. She would attack. He was sure of it. Just as sure as he was that he’d have to intervene to keep Birdie from getting killed.
Intent on rallying for the conflict, he almost missed the uncertainty that flickered over Slack’s sharp features. It made him take a second look at the two of them. Had this been the same Birdie he’d last seen in the desert, he would have had no doubt of the contest. Slack was a fierce fighter, forged by the streets and tempered by Cade’s instruction. But there was something unnatural about the combination that this new Birdie presented with her slight form, pale and drawn face, and the bloodstained axe in her hand. She looked wholly otherworldly.
And completely deadly.
A soft humming broke the tense quiet. Five notes, low in pitch, mournful in tone. It took Ky a moment to realize that the humming came from Birdie. She sang through the notes once, paused, and then sang them again, slightly louder.
Slack stumbled back, face gone as pale as a winter’s moon, shaking her hatchet in Birdie’s direction as if to warn the girl off from the attack. “Don’t turn none of that magic music on me, witch! Just . . . just you let me be.” She flung the words out savagely, like a curse, and then ducked her head and scurried off. But not before Ky caught a glimpse of something wet on her cheek.
Trick of the light, most likely.
Because the idea of Slack as a human, feelings and all, was even harder to grasp.
Birdie dropped beside him, and Ky pulled up his legs to allow her room to set down the axe. She placed it before her but kept both hands on the haft. For a moment they just sat there, neither speaking. Birdie stared at her hands. Ky kept blinking to keep his eyelids from shutting of their own accord. Desperate for something to keep him alert, he pulled the sling from his waist and fiddled with the straps.
At last he broke the silence. “What was that? What did you do?”
He winced as soon as he said it, wishing the tone had come out less harsh, less demanding. She just shook her head, dismissing it as unimportant. Judging from the look in her eyes and the way that Slack had reacted, it was anything but.
A spike of anger burned through him, and his grip tightened on his sling, making the leather straps creak. What did he really know about her anyway? After everything they had been through together—the desperate fight in the Underground cavern, the Westmark Bridge, the battle on the beach of Bryllhyn, and then the weeks spent in the hold of the pirate ship—still he knew almost nothing about her and her strange abilities.
Maybe Slack was right to be afraid.
“Gundhrold will be back soon.” Birdie spoke so matter of factly that Ky wondered if she did so in generalities or if she actually knew where the griffin was at the moment. It wouldn’t have surprised him. “He’ll know where we should go.”
Sure enough, the griffin glided into their midst a moment later, settling in a patch of heather with a crunch. “Everyone up. We must move out.”
Birdie sprang to her feet, hefting the axe in both hands. “Did you find a place?”
“Indeed. It is well sheltered and safe beyond the reach of the Khelari. Now hurry.”
She leapt into action, moving quickly from runner to runner, shaking them awake and giving instructions. Stifling a groan, Ky rolled up to his feet and moved to join her. There was plenty of grumbling, a few muttered curses as well, but in a matter of minutes the runners had collected themselves and their bundles and formed a sleepy, shuffling line.
Taking Syd and Meli by the hand, Ky placed himself in the lead, just behind the griffin. He gave a quick scan for missing runners then signaled their readiness. “Where are we going anyway?”
“Not far.” The griffin folded his wings across his back. There was an unmistakable hint of smug satisfaction in his voice. “Do try to keep up.”
4
Slack’s shouting woke him.
Ky shot up into a crouch, shedding the borrowed dwarf cloak he had been using as a blanket, and reached for his sling and pouch of sling-bullets. He always kept both close to hand. Even hampered by the half-light filtering through the mouth of the cave, he still had his sling loaded and another four stones in hand by the time he realized what Slack was shouting.
“Don’t just stand there gawkin’. Get your lazy self movin’. There’s work to do.”
Work. Not an attack.
Ky released a shaky breath and fell back onto his discarded cloak, letting his sling and spare sling-bullets drop beside him. Flat on his back, he stared up at the low, pitted ceiling, trying to summon the willpower to rise. Hours of sleep had still left him drained. It might not have been a far walk to their new hiding place—not as the griffin reckoned it—but by the time they arrived, Tauros had fallen past noon and every one of the runners was only too happy to collapse into oblivion on the cold floor of the cave. Walking half asleep as he had been, Ky couldn’t recollect much of the cave’s surroundings. But it had seemed safe enough, nigh impossible to see from any distance away, with room to hold all of them. Though judging from the stillness now, he was the only one left inside.
After the helter-skelter pace of the past months, he relished a moment’s stillness. He tugged the cloak out from under himself and up around his shoulders. A rock poked into the small of his back, and he debated expending the energy to remove it. In the end he just hitched his body clear of it by rolling onto his side and then let his eyes drift closed. Every muscle thrummed with the pain of ill use, and his nerves felt as taut as a fiddle string.
As evidenced by his response to Slack’s shouting.
He could still hear her going on outside the cave, really laying it into some poor fellow who hadn’t moved fast enough to suit her. From the sound of it, she was organizing the runners to set up camp and prepare an evening meal.
Duty called.
Groaning, he rolled up to his
feet. His head nearly brushed the shallow ceiling, which meant that most of the other runners would be forced to stoop. He scuffed his bare feet across the cold floor, intrigued by the dull gray stone, so lifeless compared to the rich, reddish-brown rock that formed the Underground caverns and the walls of Kerby. He replaced the sling-bullets in his pouch. His supply was woefully light. He would have to use them sparingly or go back to making do with stones. Odd the luxuries a fellow could grow accustomed to. Time was he would never have thought of plucking up a rock from the ground as “making do.” With a nod to Migdon and his gift, Ky wound the sling around his waist and looped the pouch through his belt.
He planned to make each sling-bullet count.
A square patch of light extended from the low mouth of the cave. Ky paused in it, letting the warmth chase away the chill that had settled beneath his skin, and surveyed the Underground’s new hiding place. The griffin had chosen well. It was a good location, sheltered between two narrow arms of the mountain, shielded by a copse of trees from prying eyes. It lacked a good vantage point if it came to an attack, but scouts on the slope above could deal with that. There was a creek nearby too, if he recalled the journey aright. Fresh water was a necessity for any safe hideout.
In between the cave and the copse of trees sprawled a small clearing carpeted with new spring grass and dotted with small fallen boulders. No sign of Birdie or the griffin, but the rest of the runners bustled through the clearing, all busy at some task or another. Here a group split deadwood into kindling for fires. Just beyond them, another group worked with bundles of leafy boughs that others collected from the woods, while yet another group rummaged through the limp supply sacks for food.
It was good work.
Work that Ky should have been up and leading instead of lazing about.
“Where you want the green branches, Slack?” One of the runners, a fellow named Gull who was about a year younger than Ky, dragged a hefty bough out from beneath the trees. Gull wasn’t his true name, of course. The others had just taken to calling him that because he had a long, thin neck and lanky limbs and eyes the gray of a receding wave. That and he could whistle better than any bird Ky had ever heard.
“Front of the cave mouth.” Slack’s voice came from somewhere to his left. He had to step out from beneath the shadow of the entrance to see her. She stood atop a fallen boulder, gazing out over the clearing like a general surveying her troops. Arms crossed over her chest, shoulders back, stance firm and commanding. “Give them to Dor for weaving the screens.”
“Right-o.” Gull practically saluted her as he marched off.
Ky gritted his teeth. Didn’t take a magician to figure out what she was up to. If it had been anyone else stepping up and taking the initiative to protect the camp, he would have been the first to applaud. But with Slack, it wasn’t about ensuring the Underground’s safety. It was about undermining his leadership.
It was about being in charge.
And that rankled him.
He ducked back inside the cave. The way he saw it, he had two options. He could march out there and demand to know why she was doing his job, berate her for doing good work . . . and wind up looking a lazy, no-good fool or getting drawn into that fight he had been trying to avoid. Or he could ignore it. Simply stroll out and pitch in alongside the others, acting like nothing had happened . . . and wind up letting her steal the reins out from under his nose.
Two options. Neither good.
A thought pricked the back of his mind. Hardly an idea yet. Not much more than the faintest whisperings of a notion. But if it could work . . .
“No! Not there, you nitwit.” Outside the cave Slack heaved a sigh, and her voice took on that infuriatingly loud, slow, exaggerated tone most folks reserved for those deemed witless. “Look, just because you haven’t got the smarts to speak doesn’t mean you can’t work like the rest of us. Or are you going to pretend you can’t even hear me now too?”
She was talking to Syd.
The realization dashed itself against the forefront of his mind and started his blood boiling. Before he quite knew what he intended to do, he had gathered himself, brushed the matted strands of hair out of his eyes, and stepped out into the clearing. He spotted Syd instantly. The boy made a pitiful sight, standing at the base of Slack’s boulder with his head bowed and his shoulders slumped and a bundle of green boughs escaping his feeble grasp. Each time he bent to pick up one fallen branch, another slipped from his arms. Slack made no move to help, just rolled her eyes and opened her mouth to scold him again.
But Ky had heard more than enough from her. “Oi, Slack!”
Her head shot up, eyes darting to locate him. He marched toward her, and she straightened, somehow managing to make herself appear even taller than usual. Her hand strayed to her hatchet. Not quite a blatant threat. But near enough.
Easy . . .
The warning hammered through Ky’s head just in time to keep him from drawing his sling. He did allow himself to palm a sling-bullet from his pouch and clench it in his fist. Somehow the feel of the cold metal against his skin helped clear his thinking.
“It’s all right.” He patted Syd’s shoulder in passing. “I’ll get the rest. You go along now.” He paused at the base of the boulder to meet Slack’s glowering gaze and then scrambled up to the top. She didn’t yield so much as an inch, forcing him to crowd in beside her with his heels hanging off the edge. Not a good position if it did come to blows. Then again, he was close enough that if he started to fall, he could reach out and take her with him. A fair incentive to keep things pleasant, as far as he was concerned.
As close as he was, there was no mistaking the glint of challenge in her eyes, but he thought he could detect a hint of wariness too. She didn’t know how he was going to respond to her authority games any more than he did. It wasn’t an advantage, but it could be. It gave him pause, just long enough for his anger to cool slightly and for common sense to start whispering in his ear again. “So . . .” He cleared his throat. “Making screens, huh?”
Mentally, he kicked himself in the shins. It wasn’t what he’d meant to say. It just somehow slipped from his lips. He couldn’t help it if he was truly curious.
She blinked at him. “What?”
On the bright side, his move seemed to have caught her off guard, and that was worth it. “The screens you’re making. What’re they for?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Shielding the cave. Hiding it from sight. What else?”
“Makes sense. You know where Birdie and the griffin are?”
“Scouting.”
Clearly, talking wasn’t going to work. Ky felt a fool for trying. Even a fight would have been better than this uneven wrestling match, each tripping over each other, neither yielding an inch. His hand slid toward the sling at his waist, but he turned it aside and fidgeted with the straps instead. Surely there had to be another way, a better way, to run the Underground. Slack was savvy, full of clever ideas when she wasn’t threatening to bash someone’s head in. If she could just see sense and stop fighting him every step of the way.
Was this how Cade had felt about him?
That brought his line of thought to a painful stop. Seemed like the more he thought about Cade and the way he had run the Underground, the more he understood. His leadership hadn’t been perfect, not by any standards, but he had kept the Underground afloat and provided the stability and challenge they all needed to survive—just like Ky was trying to do now. Maybe he had been a bit like Slack, too caught up in his own ways to see the bigger picture of what Cade had been trying to accomplish.
And maybe he was still too exhausted to be thinking straight.
Either way, he wasn’t going to crush Slack like Cade had tried to crush him. He swallowed hard and forced the next words out. “It’s good work, Slack. All of this.” Meant it too. Honestly, he did. But it was still hard to bring himself to say it.
Her scowl eased slightly. “Won’t fool a trained scout, but it might conceal the
cave from anyone happening by—if they get that sort of thing out here. Dor’s building a framework to hold the branches. She’ll change them out every few days, keep them fresh.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
She snorted. “Yeah, well, it needed to be done.”
Meaning he wasn’t likely to have done it. Always the feinting jab before the cross. Ky squeezed the sling-bullet, forcing himself to think before responding. Maybe she was right. What did he know about fortifying a camp in the wild? Cobblestoned streets, tiled roofs, blind alleys—those were his domain. But if he recalled right, Slack belonged to the woods. Her family had been hunters in the foothills east of Kerby before the arrival of the Khelari compelled them to enter the city. This was her territory.
Ky ran a hand through his hair, squinting at the tree line, trying to think like Slack. Like Hawkness. The clearing around the cave extended a good fifteen yards before the copse of trees began, shielded by a thicket of sedge and heather. On the streets, a fellow scouted for good cover before launching a raid. Stood to reason that the same tactics applied in the wild too.
“The screens are good. Worried about the perimeter though. Reckon we should clear out the underbrush—it’ll give us a clear line of sight and keep others from sneaking up.”
Slack cast a sideways glance at him. He could see the calculations running through her mind, weighing whether he was mocking her or just trying to trick her into something. Then she shrugged and stepped off the side of the boulder, landing in a crouch. Without looking back, she stalked away. “You should.”
Well that hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped.
Or as bad as he’d expected.
He slipped the sling-bullet back into his pouch and dropped off the side of the boulder. Back on the ground, he pulled a handful of runners from wood gathering and led them in clearing the underbrush along the tree line. As his body fell into the welcome rhythm of hard labor—sore muscles loosening, sweat cooling his heated neck—the scattered workings of his mind also eased into a steady pattern of thought.
Song of Leira Page 5
