Defy (14 page)

“The danger hasn’t passed,” Tiege argued,
waving a hand in agitation as he paced. “Tate isn’t safe yet.”

“No, but she could now be d—”

C.K. sprang over to Ini-herit and pressed her
hand against his mouth before he could finish the statement. The
glare she gave him had him swallowing the last word.

“It’s possible she’s just resting,” Quincy
said thoughtfully. “If she’s recovering from something as intense
as the pain Tiege projected, her body will need to restore itself.
She’ll have a strong desire to sleep more than usual.”

Sophia nodded. “Now
that
makes sense,”
she said, earning a second glare from C.K. She shrugged. “Sorry,
cuz.”

“So what do we do?” Tiege asked, finally
coming to a halt. “The longer we stay here, the more likely we are
to be found.”

Ini-herit agreed. “We should keep moving. And
we should fly low, near the trees and between them whenever
possible. The Waresti will definitely be looking to the skies in an
effort to locate us.”

“Seems awfully risky,” C.K. said. “We won’t
notice any Waresti scouts until we’re right up on them.”

They paused to consider this. Then Sophia
smiled. “I think I can help with that,” she said.

Tiege felt the connection to Tate grow
stronger after only an hour or so of flight.

Relieved, he said over his shoulder to
Ini-herit, “We need to head east.” He was riding tandem with the
elder.

“Very well. We will wait for Sophia to return
and then change course.”

Tiege nodded. Although he urgently wanted to
change direction right then, not knowing how long this connection
with Tate would last before it again faded, he knew they couldn’t
leave Sophia. His cousin had assumed the form of the harpy eagle
and was flying well ahead of them, scouting for Waresti or other
dangers. With the bird’s sharp eyesight, she was a highly effective
lookout.

It hadn’t taken long for Tiege to get over
the strangeness of flying. He could admit that having to be flown
around by Ini-herit wasn’t a bushel of laughs, but the flight was
smooth and rather exhilarating.

He thought of his parents and wished there
was a way to assure them of his well-being. None of the Kynzesti
were mentally connected with their parents, something that he knew
puzzled the elders. Because his parents and aunts and uncles were
all strongly bonded and joined in thought, it had been assumed that
the entire family would be so joined.

Most of the time, he was relieved by this.
Now, however, it seemed cruel to leave them back home fearing what
had become of him.

He knew they were wondering whether they had
gone from losing one of their firstborn children to losing
both.

It took about an hour for Zachariah to reason
out how the bead had come to be on the ground in the alcove. He
supposed it was fortunate that he had developed a much-broadened
thought process over the past fifty years. Because of his chosen
lifestyle, he’d come to think of things on multiple levels rather
than just on the surface.

On the surface, he thought as he walked with
Nyx pacing him only a few feet away, it seemed he had experienced a
vivid dream about a lemon-scented, curiously-colored,
billowy-haired female, and she had somehow managed to leave one of
her many hair adornments behind.

He puzzled over this from the moment he
picked up the bead and put it in his pocket and all through his
trek in the direction opposite of where he had been headed in a
foolish attempt to track down the group of unknown Estilorians. It
was probably only a Mercesti camp, anyway, he reasoned as he
committed to his new course. They tended to keep at least one
female camp follower among them.

It had been surprisingly difficult to push
aside his instincts and abandon the hunt. To avoid thinking of it,
he instead focused on the damn bead.

Dreams didn’t usually result in physical
evidence left behind once the dreamer awoke. There had been a few
historic incidents involving the Orculesti, Morpheus, but those
stopped centuries ago. It seemed Morpheus finally learned his
lesson after he got thoroughly thrashed by a Waresti female when he
used his abilities on her. So, barring such powerful abilities,
there had to be a logical explanation for the bead.

Zachariah’s mind was only half on his path as
he mulled it over. He revisited the dream, considering the female’s
torn and repurposed clothing as well as the bruising he’d spotted
on her upper body. She’d had faint circles under her eyes, he
realized in hindsight, but he hadn’t really noticed those under the
intensity of her blue-green gaze. He thought of the staining he’d
noted along one side of her ragged top. Now that he thought about
it more closely, it had looked a lot like dried blood. And then he
considered the timing of the dream, occurring within a relatively
short span of time after he left the cave.

That’s what had him staggering to a halt in
the middle of a grove of trees.

“Impossible,” he said.

He stood there in pondering silence as the
logic fully caught up with him. Pulling the bead out of his pocket,
he held it so that the sunlight caught it. Then he glanced over at
Nyx, who now sat on the other side of a few trees.

Walking over to her, he followed her length
to the curve of her tail. She didn’t move as he began running his
hands along her hindquarters. He did a careful scan all the way to
the tip of her tail, being sure to look under any loose scales.

When he was done, he had three colored
feathers and a handful of beads in his hands…as well as an
explanation of who the dream female was.

It took Tate more than an hour to cross the
plain. She felt so exposed in the middle of the wide, grassy area
that she ran as much as possible, most of the time crouching
uncomfortably to stay closer to the ground. By the time she finally
reached the trees on the other side, her chest was an agonized ball
of pain.

The moment she breached the tree line, she
collapsed to the shady ground and struggled to catch her breath.
Bracing herself on her forearms, she took frequent, shallow breaths
and squeezed her eyes shut to push through the pain as sweat
dripped from her temples down the sides of her face. Although she
knew she should be as quiet and stealthy as possible, uncontainable
moans issued from her throat with each breath. She truly thought
she might pass out again.

Somehow, she found the strength to stay
conscious. It was almost as though she could hear the cantankerous
male from her dream ordering her to shrug it off. Strangely, that
helped her feel less alone…even if it probably meant she was losing
her mind.

As her breathing steadied, she knelt and
cupped her hands. She brought forth fresh water with her Kynzesti
power and drank until her thirst was slaked.

Then she picked up her stick and got to her
feet to scan her new environment. The trees were fairly thick here.
There was a notable rise to the ground ahead, as well. It appeared
she would be walking uphill for a while. Not bothering to hold back
another moan, she adjusted the skirt around her neck and took one
of her nunchucks from its holster to hold in her free hand.
Although she didn’t sense anything around her and couldn’t hear
anything nearby, she didn’t want to proceed without caution.

Lord, she was hungry. And exhausted. And
hurting.

And getting rather stinky again.

Swallowing hard against her self-pity and
misery, she started walking. Her gaze moved side to side and up and
down as she sought something to eat or something to hone her weapon
so that she could hunt for food. The trees were quite tall here,
bearing very few low branches.

The fruit and leaves she came across in the
shaded woods were either poisonous or had been well foraged by
animals getting ready to hibernate for the approaching winter.
Still, she managed to find a few elderberries and ate them, even
though she ran the risk of getting sick by doing so. They were so
bitter in their raw state that she couldn’t stomach more than a
handful. She figured it was better than nothing.

Pine needles and leaves blanketed the ground,
making it impossible for her to move quietly. Every step crunched.
After another thirty minutes of steady walking, she came across
some more shrubbery that caught her interest. She moved closer to
examine the leaves.

She was almost positive it was a slayer bush.
She hadn’t ever actually seen one, but her Aunt Olivia had taught
her about them. The Scultresti had created the bushes to help
control the overabundant peryton population. The half-stag,
half-bird creatures that had transitioned with the Estilorians to
this plane had become a nuisance on the mainland. Because
Estilorians couldn’t eat peryton meat and the creatures had the
ability to reproduce, their numbers grew out of control. They
invaded Estilorian gardens all around the mainland and ate flowers,
shrubs and vegetables. They trampled vegetation that other animals
relied on to survive and even slaughtered pets and livestock if
they got hungry enough.

To help counter the problem, the Scultresti
created the slayer bushes. Crafted to look, smell and taste like
the snake plant, the peryton’s favorite meal, slayer bushes had
long, creeping, vertical leaves. Unlike their natural counterpart,
however, the slayer bush had light green-tipped leaves. Perytons
couldn’t detect the subtle difference in coloration because their
color vision was limited, but it was enough of a warning to
knowledgeable Estilorians.

Once the plant was eaten, the difference made
itself known. The slayer bush’s leaves were designed to chemically
transform once in the peryton’s system, ultimately sterilizing the
creature. One side effect of the plant in its natural state was
that it turned into metal if it came into contact with a
combination of water and animal-based material. Estilorians and
animals on the mainland had been known to lose appendages when
being too careless around slayer grass.

Despite the slightly gruesome nature of the
plant, it brought a wide smile to Tate’s face. She put her nunchuck
in its holster and set the stick on the ground. Then she removed
her skirt-cloak and used it to protect her hand so she could gather
some leaves from the bush. Once she had her stash safely within the
layers of the skirt, she bundled it all up and tucked it under her
arm. Then she picked the stick back up and continued walking.

Pangs of continuing hunger and cramps that
she’d induced by eating the berries all but doubled her over by the
time she finally reached a stream. She hadn’t come across any other
edible leaves or berries, and thanks to the season, there had been
little active wildlife, something that worried her quite a bit. The
sight of the stream actually brought tears to her eyes.

Hurrying up to it, she was thrilled to notice
that the deeper parts away from the shore held a number of darting,
silvery fish.

“Okay, Tate,” she said with a nod. “Time to
prove you are your mother’s daughter.”

For the first eighteen years of her
existence, her mother had grown up on the human plane in Kodiak
Island, Alaska. Although she’d been a tribal dancer, she’d also had
a weekend job to earn some extra money. She’d worked at the local
market preparing fresh fish for sale, becoming rather handy with a
fillet knife. And her mother’s adopted family had been in the
fishing industry, as well, so she had occasionally ventured out on
boats to participate in fishing expeditions. Tate and her cousins
and siblings had gone fishing several times with her mother as
their guide. In the process, Tate had learned quite a bit about the
practice.

Drawing on her usually bottomless stores of
energy, Tate sat on the bank of the stream as the sunlight slowly
faded from brilliant gold to a more subdued amber and laid her
skirt beside her. After shaking the slayer plant’s leaves onto the
ground, she used her teeth to start a tear in one of the layers of
the skirt’s fabric and then ripped off a strip that ran the
circumference of the garment. The length of fabric she had left was
decent enough. She tied one end of it to the stick and let the rest
dangle.

Setting that aside, she turned to the leaves
she had left on the ground. Slayer plants were quite unpredictable.
If she wasn’t careful, she could lose a finger. After some serious
internal debate, she decided she didn’t have much choice. Using her
hunger as motivation, she gathered her resolve and took one of the
leaves as well as her fishing pole over to the edge of the
stream.

Once there, she settled the fishing pole
between her feet, keeping the fabric line nearby, and then used the
edge of the slayer bush leaf to slice her finger. As soon as her
blood touched it, half of the plant’s properties were activated.
Carefully curling the part of the leaf that contained her blood so
it resembled a hook, she leaned over the water and lowered the leaf
into it.

The plant’s fibers hardened to metal as soon
as the water hit them. Tate’s eyes again filled, and tears trailed
down her cheeks. She said a silent and passionate thank-you to her
Aunt Olivia for forcing her to pay attention to the many lessons
she’d taught about plant life on the Estilorian plane. If it hadn’t
been for her, Tate was certain she wouldn’t have been able to
survive this.

Excited about her progress, she removed the
newly created hook from the water and tied it to the length of
fabric. Then she set the pole aside and wondered what she could
possibly use for bait.

After a bit of consideration, she started
digging in the mud of the river bank. Hopefully she could find some
worms, or—totally
gross
—bugs that would work well. In truth,
she had no idea what kind of fish were in this stream and what
would best lure them. She wasn’t even sure if they were edible, but
she certainly wasn’t going to dwell on that thought.