by Aimee Carter
Tuck, Sprout, Perry and Mac—who still hadn’t said a single word to me—all waited in the trees, shielded by the thick foliage. Even if someone did spot them, they’d have the advantage, and that calmed my nerves. The last thing I wanted was to have to escort one of them down into the Underworld. Judging by the way Perry had deftly avoided me that morning, however, I figured they all expected me to be the one who bit the dust.
I sat in a tree as well, much lower than the others, and I waited. The procession had to squeeze through the narrow pathway, the horses bumping one another and spooking, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. They were trapped. I held my breath and slowly counted. Three, two, one…
Leaping from the tree, I landed squarely on the back of the earl’s horse, and I held a piece of sharp rock to the old man’s neck. The other men shouted, and their horses reared. But despite flying hooves and the screech of metal against metal as they unsheathed their swords, I held on tight. This was the easy part.
“Can’t run me through, not without hurting your master, as well,” I said, snatching the pendant that hung around the earl’s neck. Whatever it was, it meant more to Tuck than my life—not that that was saying much, but still.
“Let me be,” he wheezed. “Take whatever you wish.”
“I already have.” I nodded to the other horsemen. “Unload your packs on the side of the trail. Don’t hold anything back.”
The earl waved a trembling hand, and one by one, the others dumped the contents of their packs into a pile. Even though they were armed and far bigger physically than I was, they sensed what Tuck clearly hadn’t—my godhood. My immortality. The natural fact that I was more than they were.
Maybe Tuck did realize it. Maybe she just clung to her leadership so tightly that she couldn’t yield to anything, even instinct. Didn’t matter, really. I didn’t want her job. I wanted the answers she didn’t know she had.
“Good,” I said once they’d finished. “The rest of you, go up the trail. Once you’re gone, I’ll let your leader go.”
The guards did as I said, disappearing as fast as they could spur their skittish horses into submission. I held on to the earl until they were out of sight, and after I waited half a minute, I loosened my grip on him. “Leave. And if I receive any word of retaliation, your neck will be the least of your worries.”
The moment I jumped off his horse, they took off, the old man clinging to the beast for dear life. I should’ve felt sorry for him, and part of me did, I suppose—it’d hardly been a fair fight. But whoever he was, he was clearly much better off than Tuck and her gang. And I couldn’t muster up an apology for helping them.
“That was brilliant!” cried Perry from far above me, and he slid down the trunk of the tree and scampered toward me. “How did you do that?”
“I think we’d all like to know,” said Tuck, and she swung down from the lowest branch, landing on her feet. “How did you manage to convince the most fearsome earl in the land to give up his most prized possession?”
“What, this?” I said, holding up the pendant. She made a grab for it, but I pulled it back, far out of her reach.
“Give it,” she growled, and I grinned.
“You said I had to steal it. You never said I had to give it to you.”
“Mac!” she said. “A little help?”
Mac, who was busy rummaging through the pile the guards had left behind, raised his head and blinked. And without saying a word, he ducked back down to examine a bag of beans. My grin grew wider.
“Tell me why you want it, and I’ll give it to you,” I said.
“It’s worth your weight in gold, that’s why.”
But the cautious way she watched the pendant didn’t make sense. She didn’t act greedy about it—instead she reeked of desperation. Like this meant more to her than air. “I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care,” she snapped. “Hand it over, or I’ll change my mind about you joining us.”
She wasn’t getting rid of me no matter what she wanted to think, but I needed her cooperation. And she didn’t handle teasing very well. Dangerous combination.
“All right, you win,” I said, and I offered her the pendant. She snatched it from me, cradling it as if she was holding her heart in her hand. What could possibly be so important about a necklace? “Just do me a favor from here on out.”
“What?” she mumbled, turning the pendant over in her hands. She wasn’t admiring it or appraising its worth—she was inspecting it for damage.
“Trust me. Or at least try. I’m on your side.”
“No one’s on our side but us,” she said, and she finally looked up, her fingers clutching the pendant. “No one.”
“Then let me be one of you. I can help hunt, I can gather, I can do whatever you need me to do, and I will be your subject, not the other way around. I promise.”
“Yeah? What’s in it for you?” said Tuck. By now the boys had finished packing up the loot, and Mac lumbered toward us, carrying a good two-thirds of our take. “You could survive in these woods for the rest of your life without any help from us. So why bother sharing?”
I hesitated. Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because my answer was too close to the truth for me to swallow. But it was either that or lose everything. “I’ve been alone for a long time, and I’m sick of it. I won’t take advantage of you or rob you blind or ditch you, I promise. I help you, and in return, the lot of you won’t give me the cold shoulder whenever I do something wrong. Which will be as infrequent as I can manage,” I added. “That’s all I want. Friends. A family. Somewhere to belong.”
Tuck’s expression softened, and her grip on the necklace loosened a bit. Silence hung between us, but before things got too awkward, Perry moved beside me and slipped his hand into mine. “We’re all family,” he said in a shy voice. “You can be part of it, too, as long as you don’t eat too much.”
I managed a chuckle. “I’ll do my best to gather enough game so none of you will ever have to worry about portions again.”
He beamed, and all four of us looked at Tuck. For a long moment, no one said a word, and at last she sighed. “Oh, fine. As long as you hold up your end of the deal, you can stay.”
The boys burst into cheers, and I gave her a pat on the shoulder. “You won’t regret it.”
“I better not.” She slipped into the woods, leaving the four of us to trail after her. I grinned. No matter what she wanted me to think of her, I knew the truth: she wasn’t nearly as bad as she pretended to be.
* * *
We spent the rest of the day in camp. I showed Mac how to make sure a cooked rabbit stayed juicy; Perry and Sprout tidied up in between wrestling matches; and Tuck examined our bounty, though her hand was never far from that pendant.
It was nice—almost domestic, something I’d never had before. The council rarely spent time together in groups of more than two or three, and the way the boys laughed and played—it really was a family. Tuck was more an older sister than a mother, but they all deferred to her regardless, and while Perry occasionally called for her to join them, she stubbornly remained sitting.
There was something different about the way she held herself, too. A secretive smile danced across her lips, and she was more relaxed, more confident, not as nervous as she’d been before. Almost as if she’d conquered the unconquerable. I slid closer to her.
“You look happy,” I said, and her smile vanished. “So how do you know that earl?”
“What’s it to you?” she said.
I shrugged. “Just curious. You don’t seem to like him much.”
“Not many people do.”
“So what’s your reason?”
She sighed. “You’re obnoxious, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told. You still haven’t answered my question.”
She tugged on her braid, staring into the fire. It was twilight now, and if I’d wanted to, I could’ve gone back to Olympus. But as far as I was concerned, I was staying right here for the foreseeable future.
“He killed my mother,” she finally said. “And he’s the reason their fathers are dead.” She nodded to the boys, who either were ignoring us or couldn’t hear her soft voice over their own laughter. “That’s why we all banded together.”
“How did he do all that?” I said, and she gave me an odd look.
“The war? Weren’t the men of your village recruited? Weren’t you?”
I frowned. “Why do you assume I lived in a village?”
“Well, you weren’t raised by wolves, were you?”
In a manner of speaking. “So this man—this earl, he sent all of your fathers off to war?”
“And killed my mother,” she added. “That’s important.”
“So what does the pendant have to do with it?”
She stared down at the necklace, brushing her thumb almost wistfully against the blue jewel. “I already told you. It’s—”
“Worth more than I could possibly imagine,” I finished. “I still don’t believe you.”
“Too bad.” She glanced into the purple sky. The stars were just beginning to appear. “Can you keep an eye on the boys? I have somewhere I need to be.”
“Yeah? Where’s that?”
“I know a guy who will buy the loot we can’t use.”
“Like your pendant?”
Her fingers tightened around it. No way was she letting that go anytime soon. “Yeah, like the pendant.”
“Let me come with you. You shouldn’t go on your own.”
Her eyes flashed. “Why? Because I’m a girl, and I need your protection?”
I snorted. “The day you need my protection is the day the sun rises in the west. I’m good with trade, that’s all. I could make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.”
She mumbled a curse under her breath. “If I let you come, will you stop asking stupid questions?”
“Only if you promise to be honest with me from here on out.”
“When have I not been honest with you?” she said. I nodded to the pendant.
“Right there.”
Tuck stood. “I’ll think about it. Are you coming or what?”
Leaping effortlessly to my feet, I gave her a grin. “You won’t regret this.”
“I already do. Mac, you’re in charge,” she called, trudging into the woods. I gave the three boys a wink and followed.
For most of the journey, silence hung between us. Tuck looked about as willing to talk as Hades did most of the time, and I tried to come up with a way to ease her into it. There was a reason I’d wound up here with her, and if she wasn’t willing to talk to me, then I might as well accept the imminent death of my entire family.
Right. Not gonna happen.
I cleared my throat as we worked our way over a fallen tree. “It’s great of you to take care of the boys like you do.”
She shrugged. “We take care of each other.”
“What’s your plan?” I said. “I mean, are you going to be robbing the wealthy when you’re eighty?”
Tuck let out a hoarse, almost violent laugh. “Please. At this rate I’ll be lucky to see twenty. In three years,” she added before I could ask.
“How long have you been out here on your own?” I said.
“Six months. We make do.”
Six months—so the spring and summer. Persephone’s seasons. “What about the cold months?”
She slipped in the narrow space between two trees and said nothing. I walked around them to rejoin her.
“Have you thought that far ahead yet?”
“I’ve let you join us, haven’t I?” she snapped. “How do you survive the winter?”
I shrugged. I’d never actually spent one this far north. “Guess we’ll see.”
Without warning, she grabbed my elbow and spun me around to face her. “If you turn us in or abandon us or do anything to hurt them, I will hunt you down, carve out your eyeballs, feed them to the dogs and flay you. Got it?”
“Is that all?” I said lightly, and she glared at me. “Tuck, I’m on your side. Believe me. I meant what I said this morning, about family and all.”
“Yeah? What’s someone with your skills doing anyway, running away from yours? Aren’t they starving without you?”
“Hardly.” The idea of Zeus wanting for anything was laughable. “They know how to take care of themselves.”
“I bet,” she muttered. “Still, you know why I ran. Why did you?”
I didn’t know her reason why, actually, but it didn’t seem like the time to correct her. Not when she was finally talking. “How do you know I’m running from anything?” I said, and she rolled her eyes.
“You’re not nearly as mysterious as you think you are.”
I set my hand over my heart. “You wound me.”
“Not as badly as I will if I find out you’re a spy. No one walks around in the middle of these woods without so much as a satchel or a skin of water.”
“I’ve already promised to show you how I do it,” I said. “This would all be a whole lot easier if you at least tried to trust me.”
“The last time I trusted someone I didn’t know well, my mother wound up dead.”
I was quiet for a long moment. “How did it happen?”
Tuck shook her head, her gaze distant. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Come on, it’s just up ahead.”
She changed her angle, as if she was circling around something, and I followed. Right—she didn’t want anyone to know which direction she was coming from. She was smart, smarter than the rest of the council would give her credit for, but I still had no idea what answers she was supposed to give me. And it wasn’t as if I could come right out and ask. She’d think I was crazy.
So for now, all I could do was watch her. Not that that was the worst job in the world—there was something inherently pure about her, despite her sharp edges. She cared for those boys more than Zeus had ever cared for me, and the thought of staying here with them in the woods sounded a hell of a lot better than returning to Olympus.
I still had to find the answers—no matter how my family treated me, I couldn’t walk away from them. But in the meantime, I could enjoy this life, too. I could enjoy being part of something, being appreciated, being needed. Being more than the one who constantly made mistakes everyone else had to clean up.
We arrived in a clearing alive with chirping crickets. Tuck lingered on the edge, cloaked in darkness, and I remained behind her. Together we waited, letting the forest drown out the sounds of our breathing.
At last something rustled in the trees, and a weedy young man stepped out from the other side of the clearing. He was older than Tuck, but still gangly, as if he hadn’t adjusted to his long limbs yet. Or maybe he was just too thin.
“I know you’re here,” he said. “I haven’t got all night.”
Tuck held her finger to her lips, and we remained still. The young man paced up and down the length of the cleari
ng, sighing often and dramatically.
“I heard ’bout your job this morning. The whole bloody village has. I’ve got buyers, so how about we stop all these games and get down to business?”
Even in the darkness, I saw Tuck’s posture change. Crooking her finger at me, she stepped into the clearing, her shoulders square and her blue eyes bright in the moonlight.
“What kind of buyers?” she said, and I followed a few paces behind.
“The kind that pay with anything you want,” said the young man with a gap-toothed grin, and he trained his focus on me. “You must be the thief I’ve heard so much about. Seems you gave our dear earl a right scare. I don’t see it, personally.”
“Yeah, well, wait until he has a knife to your throat, Barry,” said Tuck. “Now let’s talk price.”
I stayed quiet as the two of them bartered. Tuck only accepted food that would keep and things we would need to survive in the forest—clothes, weapons, the essentials. Anytime the young man, Barry, mentioned gold or silver, Tuck shook her head and steered him back toward useful trades.
There had to be something I was missing—something the Fates needed me to see—but what was it? A thought nagged in the back of my mind, but every time I tried to get closer, it moved just out of reach.
Perfect. Wasn’t as if the entire fate of my family was on the line or anything.
At last they seemed to reach an agreement, and Tuck moved back toward the trees. “Meet me back here at dawn with the goods. I’ll bring the loot. If anyone follows you, I’ll hang you from a tree using your own innards.”
Barry grinned, and there was something unnerving about it. “Couldn’t possibly turn you in, m’lady. That wouldn’t be at all chivalrous.”
He slipped back into the darkness, and as Tuck and I headed through the trees—a hundred and twenty degrees in the wrong direction—I realized what felt so wrong about this whole thing.
