New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG) (19 page)

Guts sat down next to me. “Wot ye make of this soldier business?” he asked.

I just glared at him, my teeth clenched together. And not from the cold.

“Wot’s yer problem?” he asked.

“What’d you attack me for?” I yelled at him.

“Tryin’ to make me look stupid! Nosin’ in on her!” he yelled back.

The two kids stopped beating out our clothes and turned to watch us argue.

“I wasn’t!” I told him. “I don’t even like her!”

“Tell the other one!”

“I don’t!”

“Prove it!”

“Oh, come on!” I lowered my voice. “You know how I feel about Millicent. I don’t care about anybody else.”

He thought about that. “Promise?”

“I swear it.”

We were both quiet for a minute. The kids went back to beating out our clothes.

“Right then,” Guts said finally. “We’re square.”

“Aren’t you going to apologize?”

“Fer wot?”

“Beating me in the head!”

“Had it comin’! Shouldn’ta made me look stupid.”

“I was telling the truth! I
told
you not to name that hook!”

“Still.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

There was another minute of silence while I tried to tamp down my anger. I felt like the whole thing was his fault. But Millicent was still mad at me, and I didn’t know what to make of Kira. So if I wasn’t at least on good terms with Guts, I wouldn’t have anybody.

“Sorry I made you look stupid,” I said, trying not to sound resentful.

Guts nodded. “Sorry I beat yer head.”

That was a start, I guess.

“She says she’s marrying someone else,” I told him.

He shot bolt upright. “Who is he?! I’ll strangle ’im!”

“Not Kira! Millicent.”

“Oh.” He relaxed again. “How’d
that
happen?”

I told him what I knew about this Cyril fellow. Guts considered the situation as he used the side of his hook to scratch a bug bite on his arm.

“No worry. Get out o’ this mess, ye can go kill ’im.”

I sighed. “I’m not going to kill him.”

Guts shrugged. “Fine. I’ll kill ’im for ye.”

It was a ridiculous thing to say, but it made me feel good about Guts again.

WHEN THE BOYS
returned our clothes, they were damp but clean. We put them on and walked back to the middle of the village. Kira and Millicent were waiting, looking clean-scrubbed and fresh. They’d both swapped their dirty clothes for Native cotton leggings and tunics, and Millicent’s still-wet hair was tucked behind her ears.

She was so pretty it hurt a little to look at her.

There was a long final conversation between Millicent and the village elder. At one point, he took out a stick and scratched a map in the dirt. The girls nodded their heads like they understood, but I couldn’t make any sense of what he’d drawn.

Then the elder presented Millicent with a thin strand of rope that one of his warriors had been busy knotting in dozens of places along its length.

At Millicent’s direction, we all bowed to the Flut. They returned the bows. Then the same warrior who’d taken us to the village led us out in the opposite direction.

“Wot’s with the rope?” Guts asked as we walked.

“It’s a message,” said Millicent. “To give to the other Flut villages. So they’ll let us pass through, and sell us food.”

Guts looked skeptical. “Can’t say all that with a piece o’ rope.”

“Yes, you can,” said Kira. “It’s how the Flut write. With knots on string.”

“Stupid,” said Guts.

“No,” Millicent told him. “Stupid is not writing at all.”

“Shut up, ye
saca
!” Guts snapped at her.

“I wasn’t talking about you,” said Millicent.

There was an awkward silence after that. When I glanced over at Guts, he was red-faced and twitching.

I felt sad for him. Until just then, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might not know how to write. But now that I thought about it, considering what little I knew about his past, it made sense.

The Flut warrior led us to a trailhead just outside the village. He left us there with a few final instructions in Cartager, and we set off down the trail, which led west along the bank of the stream where we’d bathed.

“So what about these soldiers?” I asked Millicent.

Once again, she didn’t answer.

“Is it true? Why on earth would Rovia invade the New Lands?”

She was walking in front of me, and I couldn’t see her face, but I heard her utter a short sigh.

“You’ve got to tell us what you know, Millicent,” I said.

“There’s some kind of plan afoot,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t know anything specific. But, yes. It’s going to happen.”

“Is your father involved?” I asked.

“How else would I know about it?”

“But how could he get the troops to—”

“That’s all I know,” she said sharply. “I’ve no idea how, or where, or when—just that they’re planning it.”

“If Rovians invade the New Lands, it will start a war with Cartage,” said Kira.

Millicent shrugged. “I suppose so.”

“Wot’s this mean for us?” asked Guts.

“It doesn’t change a thing,” said Millicent. “Still got to get that map translated. And we’ve still got to find the Fist.”

“What do
you
want with the Fist?” Kira asked her.

“Who says I want it?”

“If you don’t, why are you here?”

“Because I fancy the outdoors,” said Millicent.

I figured that would set Kira off, but she let it go. Something seemed to have changed between her and Millicent. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they liked each other. But between her bartering with the Flut and her new willingness to threaten Kira with violence of her own, Millicent seemed to have earned Kira’s respect.

I waited until we’d been walking for a while and were spread out along the trail before I fell in close to Millicent and quietly pressed her for more information.

“Tell me more about this invasion.”

“There’s nothing more to tell.”

“You’ve got to know more than that,” I insisted.

“Well, I don’t! And it doesn’t matter. We’ve still got to find this stupid tribe and figure out what that map says.” She looked back at me with narrowed eyes. “You haven’t forgotten any of it, have you?”

I felt a little pang of worry.

Dash dot feather cup two dash dot firebird…

“No! Course not!”

“Well, don’t. It’s the least you can do,” she said bitterly.

“You know, I really am—”

“Quit saying you’re sorry!”

“I wasn’t going to!”

I was, actually. I couldn’t help it. I still
felt
sorry.

Not that it was doing me any good with her.

THE VALLEY WAS ENORMOUS.
We spent the whole rest of the day walking, and judging by the position of the mountains to the north, by sunset we hardly seemed to have made any progress at all. Partly that was because of the route we were taking. The Flut had told Millicent and Kira that the easiest way across the mountains was over a pass on the far western shoulder of the Gran, the tallest peak in the range.

The Gran looked almost as wide as it was tall, and it stood well to the west of where we’d started. So the route the Flut had sketched out sent us nearly as far west as north.

All of it was through farmland and pastures held by the Flut, who kept a close eye on their territory. Every few miles, we came upon another tall, slender lookout post. By the time we saw them, they were usually empty because their sentry had spotted us first and scrambled down to spread the news.

Within minutes, a hostile clutch of Flut warriors would approach us. They didn’t always speak Cartager, but they all recognized the knotted rope Millicent carried. After examining it, one of the warriors would escort us through his fields before sending us off in the direction of the next territory.

After the time we’d spent running from the slavers, the sentries were a comfort. As long as we stayed in Flut territory and minded our manners, we didn’t seem to have much to fear other than sunburn and sore feet.

In the late afternoon, we reached another village, twice as big
but otherwise identical to the first one. We bought a day’s worth of food from them after an epic negotiation, during which Millicent made us pretend to walk away three times.

This time, we took the food with us. Half an hour before sunset, we came upon a lightly wooded stretch of high ground that some Flut shepherds must have used for camping themselves, because there was a pit already dug with the charred leftovers of multiple fires. We gathered some wood, then built a fire using the flints Kira had brought with her. After watching her pray to the sunset, we ate a quick dinner and fell asleep around the fire.

I woke up in the middle of the night to muffled sounds that at first I thought were coming from a wounded animal. I looked around the smoldering rim of the fire and saw just two bodies asleep on the ground.

I got up and walked toward the noise. About twenty yards away, I came upon Millicent, sitting hunched over on the hillside with her knees tucked to her chest, sobbing into her arms.

When she heard me coming, she tried to pull herself together.

“Leave me alone,” she said in a scratchy whisper.

“What’s the matter?”

“I said leave me alone!”

I sat down next to her.

“No,” I said.

She started sobbing again.

“I don’t want the others to see me like this,” she said miserably.

I put a hand on her back, figuring she’d pull away. But she did the opposite, shifting closer and pressing her head against my chest. I put an arm around her and ran my hand back and forth across her shoulder until it grew warm from the touch.

Eventually, she stopped crying. She nuzzled my chest a little, but I wasn’t sure if she meant it, or if she was just wiping her runny nose on me.

Then she sat up straight and stared out at the moonlit pasture with a wrung-out look in her eyes.

“It just gets worse,” she said. “Every time, I think, ‘That’s it. It can’t get any worse.’ But then it does. It never stops.”

I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. But opening my mouth hadn’t been working out too well for me lately, so I kept it shut.

She started to cry again. “The whole silver mine,” she whispered, her voice quavering through the sobs. “They’re all slaves up there. They always have been.”

I gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “It’s okay,” I said.

“No, it’s not.” She buried her head in my chest and really let go. Her whole body shook with grief, and as I held her, I finally understood why she hadn’t wanted to talk about the slavers, or even admit they existed.

She’d spent her whole life rich and happy and carefree. But all that happiness had been paid for with other people’s pain. And knowing it was too much for her.

Eventually, she cried herself out. She straightened up and took a few deep breaths. Then she let out a long, shaky sigh.

“I’m not a bad person,” she said.

“I know you’re not,” I told her.

“I had no idea! Nobody on Sunrise does. They say they’re paying them. And it’s not like anyone goes up there to see for themselves. Mother doesn’t know, I’m sure of it. I mean, she’s beastly, but she’d never put up with
that.
”

Millicent sighed again, wiping her eyes. “And he’s
such
a good liar…When I’m with him, and he looks me in the eye, and turns on all his charm…You should have heard Daddy on the way back from Deadweather. When we first got on that boat, I didn’t even want to speak to him. But he was
so
kind, and he seemed so sorry about the whole mess…

“He told me it was all a terrible misunderstanding. That he’d just asked Birch to lean on you a bit, like businessmen do. But that Birch misunderstood. Daddy said it’s because of the way he manages employees—he gives them too much leeway, and some of the more ruthless ones go overboard trying to impress him…He said the same thing happened with the lawyer, and the legal papers. And when Birch went over the cliff, he completely misread the situation, and didn’t realize the truth till he got to Deadweather—but now that he knew it, he’d leave you be.

“And he
did
—I mean, first thing when we came back to Sunrise, he had all your wanted posters taken down, and I heard him tell Birch’s brother and the garrison commander you were innocent, and not to be bothered if you showed up.”