Alexandria (22 page)

“I think, if anything happens, you should probably just hide behind me.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’m good at hiding.”

They ramble on gently for a time, hopping streams and treading up and down the rolling terrain, talking casually and letting the morning sun warm their tired skin as the dense forest recedes behind them. He doesn’t know where they fit on the scale of the little map they carry, but he’s sure they’ve a very long ways to go yet, and he feels vulnerable and exposed without the thick canopy to shield them. His paranoia deepens as they progress farther into the open territory, and he keeps constant vigil over his right shoulder and slides the knife out of its sheath.

“Did you see something?”

“No,” he says, “nothing. Just keep an eye out.”

The day cycles on—high midday sun burns off the fogbank and brightens the landscape with deep vibrant greens and a sky of cerulean blue. They traipse across a vast rolling field, surrounded by waist high grass billowing in the breeze, polkadotted with spright yellow butter cups and golden violets. The whole world looks to be in bloom and they gawk around, breathing it all in.

A plump brown snake whips through the grass at Lia’s feet and she clutches onto Jack and squeals.

“Snake.”

Jack tilts his head back and laughs.

“It’s not funny,” she says, crossing her eyes at him.

“It’s kind of funny.”

“It’s not.”

“He’s not the kind with poison. He can’t hurt you.”

“Well, I didn’t know that.” She lets go of his arm and purses her lips.

“You don’t like being laughed at, do you?” She says nothing, but gives him a look that clearly says
no
. “Oh, I see. Of course, you have no trouble laughing at me, though.”

“When did I laugh at you?”

“You used laughed at me all the time.”

“And your feelings are still hurt after all these years?” She gives him a smug little grin.

“Sorry,” he says. “If you see another snake, just kill it with your knife moves.”

“I’m not talking to you anymore.”

“There’s no one else to talk to.”

She shoots him a sideways glare, the softness underneath betraying her, then she looks off to the west, catching thin glimpses of the faraway ocean from time to time.

“Are we going the right way?”

“I think so,” says Jack. “Still mad?”

She laughs, her gold-flecked brown eyes twinkling in the sun. “Of course. I’m furious.”

Speckled monarchs flutter capriciously across the field, wobbling from one wildflower to another like drunken fairies. A slick little waterway rushes through the cleft below and Jack sets his sights on it.

“We should hike up a ways and cross over, like before,” says Jack. “When we get to the stream lets—”

His heel catches a loose rock and he flails backwards, landing with a hard thud, and slides down the gravelly slope on his rear, bouncing over boulders and ricocheting off the dry shrubs. Pulling his bow around front of him, he reaches out with a free hand and tries to gain purchase and fails. He skitters all the way to the bottom and finally scrapes to a stop.

He stands up and dusts off, then grabs his aching rear end and stiff-legs around in a circle. She’s still halfway up the incline but he can already hear her laughing. He looks up and sees her doubling over, barely able to climb down herself as the hilarity has nearly crippled her.

“Okay,” she calls, “that was pretty good.”

She leans back and sort of crab walks the rest of the way down, snatching up the blade that he dropped in his fall, laughing the entire way. Jack stands sober-faced and watches her antics. When she reaches the bottom, she stumbles around and ogles at him.

“Are you okay?” she asks finally.

“I’ll get by… Are you?”

“Mmm. Better now. Okay, so what were you saying before you—” She loses it all over again before she can even get the words out.

Jack eyes a little bent stick nestled in the grass and he steps coyly toward it. He raises it up a bit with his foot and hooks the end of the bow around it. “I said, I think we should walk down this stream a ways and—
Snake! Snake!”
he cries, and flings the curvy stick out of the grass toward Lia. She squeals again and falls backwards onto her rump.

“Don’t
do
that,” she scolds, pulling herself to her feet and marching straight up to him. “That was mean.” She slaps his shoulder as hard as she can. He just smiles at her and she hits him again, realizing awkwardly that he is not the slight little boy she used to pick on so mercilessly. She pokes around on his chest and stomach with a funny, quizzical expression, then lifts her face to meet his gaze and they stand toe-to-toe and admire each other in warm silence.

“Don’t panic.”

“What?” she giggles.

“Turn around slowly and don’t run.”

She does so, and her smile drops clean away. A lean and rangy mountain lion springs down from a rock ledge and stalks toward them, honing on them with desperate eyes. The lion’s shoulders are hunched up and the fine hairs on its neck and back bristle straight up as it sets one paw deliberately in front of the other, advancing steadily.

Lia shrinks back and clings to Jack.

“Give me the pack,”
he whispers.

She hands it around from behind and he fetches out the two rabbits he stowed and throws them out as an offering. The lion yawns its mouth wide and hisses, shiny fangs glistening. It shirks back, then clips forward at an angle and hisses again, shunning the dead rabbits for a larger feeding of live prey.

Jack shouts and hollers, trying to startle it into retreating, but it continues to advance, hunting them with feline grace. He sneaks a hand up and grabs an arrow and aligns it across his bowstring and takes aim. Lia’s trembling hands clutch onto the back of his shirt and she whimpers as the lion circles around, fixating on her specifically. Jack counters and the lion pounces.

He lets his arrow off and it sticks lamely in the left haunch, doing little to slow its headlong charge toward Lia. Its powerful forepaw slashes across his chest, tearing open three fresh red stripes, and he tumbles to the ground. Lia screams and swivels to run and the immense cat crashes into her and sinks its fangs into the soft meat of her shoulder and drags her roughly to the ground. She shrieks in terror. It sets its full weight on her thin body and stretches its jaws wide and fierce and rears back to tear into the back of her neck and dislodge her vertebrae.

Jack scrambles forward, pulling his knife, and lunges onto the back of the attacking lion, sliding his arm around, underneath its foreleg, and plunges the blade in all the way to the hilt and twists sharply. The lion jerks violently and belts out a high warbly yelp and rolls off of Lia. Its paws twitch in the air and its jaw hinges open and shut, slower and slower each time until it is still and dead.

Lia lies curled in ball, struggling to breathe through her hitching, ragged sobs, and Jack crawls to her.

“It’s over,” he says. “It’s all over. Let me see your shoulder.”

She sits up and hugs him tightly.
“Jack, your chest.”

“I know. Let me see your shoulder.”

She leans away and pulls back her torn nightgown. Her shoulder is so covered with blood that Jack can’t make anything out of it. He fishes the waterskin out of their pack and douses it with cool water. There are two nasty puncture wounds on her upper back, streaming blood, and a third on the front of her dainty shoulder, and as soon as he rinses them out, the little divots fill back up with thick warm crimson.

“Can you move it?” he asks. She rotates her arm around in a circle and nods meekly. “Okay. You’re going to be okay.”

They sit for a moment, catching their breath in a quiet daze, then Jack stands and starts to pull everything back together. He dusts off the discarded rabbits and packs them away then takes up his bow and tests it a couple times. Before long, Lia is on her feet helping him drag the dead lion to a rocky niche and cover it.

“So much for my knife moves,” she says, plucking the weapon from the grass.

They shamble down to the edge of the water and plunge in, letting the shallow current pull them downstream. It winds them back toward the coast. They float along the deeper parts and slog through the rest on foot. They exit the water before it curls around toward a steep cascading drop-off, then lie on the bank wringing out their drenched clothing. Lia tears some strips off the bottom of her gown and does her best to patch Jack and herself, and the rags soak through immediately. They pull themselves up, looking bloody and torn, and continue moving south.

The looming tree line looks like salvation and Jack is happy to leave this little parcel of open country behind. The rest of the day is long and tense. There are no more jokes—only quiet determination to find a place to hold up for the night before they both collapse.

The trail they’ve hunted since morning dissipates, and toward evening the search brigade loses track over the windblown hills.

At dawn they separate and branch out in a widening arc from the last known traces. Cirune and his men ride along the ridgeline and sniff out old mountain trails, while Feiyan and the rest head south in the general direction of their travels, hoping to catch up to them or cut them off.

The sun has barely crested the mountaintops before Feiyan’s team comes upon tumbled down rocks and bloody ground. The wolfmongrels at their side bay hysterically.

“Over here,” he calls.

He rides east and lets the horse clop its way down into the gulch and they follow the scent around in loops. The riders dismount and search the area on foot, and soon they strike upon a stiffening lion carcass tucked away beneath a cool ledge.

Jarrik lifts the dead creature’s paw and holds it up for the others to see.

“Blood,” he says, nodding at the dried crimson coating the lion’s sharp claws, with more smeared on its snout and whiskers. “They’re injured.”

They mount up and cross the gushing waterway, diverging on the opposite bank to search upstream and down. In due course the mongrels fix on their scent again. The track is clear and strong and when they reach the ridge bordering the gulch they spark a quick fire, tossing on fistfuls of green grass and fanning out the thick white smoke to call back the other horsemen and hasten their pursuit.

Jack consults the map. Never in his life has he seen one so precise, just the Temple’s crudely drawn maps showing only rough approximations, and the farther they press into the south country the more he realizes that every single crooked line and angle represents something in the natural terrain. He surveys a hooked fissure extending into the ocean and the range of mountains way off to the east.

“I think we’re here,” he says finally.

“How do you know?” Lia asks, nibbling on a scrap of tough rabbit meat.

“I think
this
mountain is
that
mountain,” he says, pointing to the corresponding subjects. “And look up ahead… it looks like this spot right here.”

Lia nods and her face darkens. It looks like they’ve barely moved at all, the little star at the bottom is so hopelessly far away. She takes stock of their situation and starts to feel uneasy—as rended as they are thus far she can’t imagine what will be left of them if they ever reach their destination.

They plod along, Lia in her ragged nightgown, shredded at the shoulder, high leather boots too big for her dainty feet, and Jack in his thin shirt with the front ripped away and a coarsely assembled bandage strapped across his chest, dappled with blood.

The wind whips around them, seeming to come from all directions at once, blowing strands of Lia’s hair in her face and fluttering their tattered clothing. They work their way up the side of a low, grassy berg and Jack checks over his shoulder, scanning the northern horizon. Puffs of white smoke rise skyward and disperse in the gathering tumult.

“They’re coming,” he says, “and they’re close.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I’m not sure, yet. For now, let’s keep moving.”

“I’m not going back there,” she says, giving him a hard look that seeks to convey a deeper meaning.