Remnants: Season of Fire (10 page)

The village chief, Latonia, gestured to blankets folded into squares in a large circle among the trees, and Niero helped lower Kapriel to the first one, then settled wearily on the one beside it. We quickly followed suit, and when we were all seated, Latonia’s man helped her sit, then settled beside her. It was clear then, just how late in her pregnancy she was. I looked around the circle as other villagers took seats that we left vacant. Tressa was gazing in an oddly intent manner toward Latonia, as was Chaza’el. But then shallow wooden bowls, still sticky with pitch underneath, were passed, and in each was a thick slice of meat, a spoon, and a chunky stew beneath. It smelled rich and savory, and my mouth watered.

But we all had to wait as some ceremonial liquid was poured into wooden cups. Latonia lifted hers when all were served. “We welcome you, sisters and brothers. Long have we awaited this day.” She lifted her cup with both hands to her lips and we did the same.

I nearly choked as the thin, bitter berry wine seemed to pucker my tongue and burn all the way down my throat. I had obviously taken too big of a sip. But Latonia and the Aravanders weren’t done. Together, we took two more sips, and I was careful to make them the tiniest possible. Would it be considered rude to leave the rest in my cup? I was dying for water, but no one was pouring from the earthen jugs. My eyes returned to my stew and meat.

“Please,” the chieftess said, setting aside her cup and lifting a hand. “Eat. And then when your bellies are full, we shall have your story from beginning to end, yes?”

“Gladly,” Niero said. He nudged Kapriel, who looked glassy-eyed and slack-jawed with weariness, and bent to whisper something in his ear. I saw Kapriel rouse and bring the
meat to his mouth with a leaden hand. He bit off some and chewed slowly, but it was obvious it took a supreme effort. I knew he was far more tired than I felt, which seemed impossible. But again and again, Niero whispered encouragement in his ear, and I could almost sense what he said to Kapriel, or moreover, the feel of what he would say, as if he were saying it to me. An arrow of jealousy and bitterness shot through me. A week ago, he had looked after me. Us. But now it was all about Kapriel?

Niero looked sharply in my direction, as if he had felt my jealousy. So did Vidar.

I felt the deep blush of my guilt rise on my neck and dug more zealously into my stew, hoping they would think they’d misinterpreted me. Niero had always seemed to sense me more clearly than I could read him — but Vidar’s scowl troubled me more.

As I ate, I told myself that it was just the exhaustion, and the relief of finding Niero alive, but then sorrow that he couldn’t be with us, directly, in the face of Kapriel’s weakness and more intense need. I told myself that he knew I had Ronan, and Vidar had Bellona, and Tressa had Killian, and therefore, he was concentrating on those who were without guardians. And yet I couldn’t deny it. I missed Niero. Missed his attention, his focus, his favor. It had always been mine, it seemed, from the day of our Call.

But maybe those days were over, I brooded.

I, apparently, was only a means to an end. We all were. And apparently, that end was Kapriel.

They’d used me. And now they were tossing me aside.

I swallowed hard, my throat closing around my last bite of meat, making me choke.

Ronan cast me a worried glance, but I shook my head and lifted a hand. “I’m fine,” I managed to say, my eyes watering.

“No. You’re not,” Niero said. He was standing in front of me. “Will you accompany me for a moment, Andriana?”

Ronan began to rise, immediately on defense.

“No,” Niero said firmly. “Sit and finish your meal, brother. I need a moment alone with Dri.”

My heart skipped a beat when I heard the nickname on his lips, even as cold dread filled me. His black eyes were hard, demanding, searching. And just as much as I’d felt the chasm of missing him, I now fought the urge to flee from him.

“Niero, she’s gone through a lot,” Ronan tried again, rising with me. “I would like to stay with —”

“We’ve all gone through a lot,” Niero returned. “Just to the edge of the clearing, Ronan. You can keep your eyes on her the whole time.” He took hold of my elbow, and I felt a shiver run through me. Because it felt more like the grip of someone who thought I might run than the hold of a friend. Was there a reason to run? Had something changed in him that I should fear?

“Not in me,” he said under his breath as he turned me and pulled me along. “In you, Dri. Something’s changed in you.”

I did a double take and glimpsed Vidar padding behind us. His face was still a mask of concern. I swallowed hard, bile rising in my throat that he was welcome to join this little chat and Ronan wasn’t. And why was I in trouble? What had I done besides freeing the prince? Hadn’t I given everything I had to the effort? More than almost anyone . . .

The villagers chatted on nervously, but I could feel every pair of dark eyes on us as we passed. I reached out to try and sense their mood, their feelings, but all I could feel was my own gathering dark despair. Separation.

“Niero,” Vidar growled.

“I know,” he said. He pulled me around a huge pine tree and pushed me back against it.

“What? What are you doing?” It took everything in me not to knee him in the groin for his mistreatment. I was furious. Black with rage.

“Fight it, Dri,” he said. “Fight it. I think Sethos must have cast some spell upon you. The darkness of the Sheolites is in your head, in your mind again. In your heart.”

“What?” I sputtered. “What’re you talking about?”

“The bitterness. The jealousy. If you let it take root, flourish within, they will
sense
you, like one of their own, just as the Ailith sense one another. They will find us.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. Beside me, Vidar put his hand on my shoulder and began to whisper urgent prayers.

And then Niero folded me in his arms. “You’re exhausted. Weak. But your dark thoughts have opened the door again, Dri,” he whispered. “To the dark ones. Maybe in ways you didn’t recognize. But their ways — their dark moods, their dark thoughts — do not belong here. Not in you, Andriana. Not in you. We already draw them, being together in such numbers. Their scouts might sense us. But if you allow the dark to have its way within . . .” He put his hands on my shoulders and closed his eyes. I felt my arm cuff kindle with warmth. “In the name of the Maker, be gone from her.”

His words seemed to suck the very air from my lungs, and with it came something so big, so vile, so huge, that I choked and fought to breathe, fought to try and remember how to breathe, in the face of something so monumentally frightening.

“You are a daughter of the light,” Niero was whispering in my ear, pulling me in and against him, holding me so close
that it somehow felt as if he covered every inch of me. His warmth seemed to fill me and spread outward, filter through me, driving out the darkness.

He gripped my shoulders and pulled back, staring at me. But I couldn’t take my eyes off of his lips and the words emerging from between them. “This one is a daughter of the light. Darkness, be gone. You have no place here!”

I took a staggering, gasping breath.

And then another.

And in that moment, I felt freedom. Lighter. Warm, for the first time in hours.

And once I was free of it, I realized what my brothers had sensed.

Somehow, I’d brought the darkness of Sheol with me. My time with Sethos . . . I hadn’t known, hadn’t sensed anything creep inside me, or the door I’d learned how to close cracking open. Had I?

“Dri,” Ronan growled, standing behind Vidar, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“It’s all right,” Niero said, not turning toward my knight, but still concentrating fully on me. His hands moved to my elbows, and he helped me sink to the ground, as if he knew my legs now felt like sludge. And yet even in my weakness, I felt stronger than I’d felt since Keallach had made me his prisoner.
Keallach . . . still with Sethos.

“He likes to weave his way into your mind,” Niero said.

Kapriel was there too, then. “They are rather good at it,” he muttered. He knelt beside me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

I managed to nod. I felt empty. But at least I was feeling at peace, too. “Just . . . tired. So tired.”

“I think we all are,” Kapriel said. He looked to Niero. “What if we propose sleep first, to the chief? And all the information she could want, come morning. We’ll be much more coherent after some rest.”

Niero nodded. “I think we should stay in Aravand for a while, actually. To regain our strength and wait on the Maker’s direction. I will stay up and speak with Latonia for a while. But you,” he said, looking at me with those dark, intense eyes that missed nothing, then to the rest, “go and claim your rest.”

CHAPTER
8

ANDRIANA

I
awakened in the morning to the same bird call the captain had made, but recognized these sounds as the real thing. The birds moved overhead and I sat up, wishing I could see them.

The early pink light of dawn illuminated the silhouette of Ronan, asleep on a low palette a few feet from mine. Bellona and Vidar were on the other two in the hut. I eased back the covers and slipped my feet to the dirt floor, shivering in the chill of morning and drawing the brown robe of pelts more closely around me before rising silently. I tiptoed toward the door and glanced back, grimacing a bit at Ronan’s swollen and battered face. It looked little different than the night before, when Tressa had tended to all our wounds again before we slept, aided by the Aravander healer. But he had to be seriously weary to not awaken to my movements. As long as we
had been on this journey, it seemed all I had to do was breathe differently and he was alerted to the change. I looked at Vidar and Bellona, both still deeply slumbering too.

But as exhausted as I’d felt the night before, I felt wide awake now, and the birds drew me again. I bent low, wincing as I felt my leg wound pull and tear a bit, and pushed through the door and outside, the campfires long cold, the red embers of last night now a cold gray ash. I stared around the clearing of the camp in confusion. Branches had been strewn about. Young saplings, cut and tied together, had been placed here and there beside the huts in haphazard fashion. A method of disguise?

I spotted a flash of blue in the dawning light and my eyes widened in delight. Two massive bluebirds swooped from one tree branch to the next. One chattered at the first, as if in complaint, and the other chattered back, as if telling him to mind his own business. My smile grew and I ambled below them until I’d reached the edge of the last huts. I looked back, and knew I shouldn’t go any farther.

There, I knelt and turned toward the eastern horizon, growing a pale yellow with the rising sun. I stretched out my arms above my head and prayed that the Maker would bless our day, praised him for bringing us here, to a forest sanctuary, and thanked him for the gift of Kapriel’s freedom and our own.

When I sat up, I glimpsed him, down the path. Niero, moving toward the river.

I hurried forward, feeling a silent permission to leave the village if he was, and yet resisting the urge to call him, knowing I’d likely awaken others. Besides, I coveted this chance to
speak to our leader alone. To find out what had happened to him. And what, exactly, might have happened to me.

Niero disappeared over a rise on the path and I doubled my pace. But at the top, I spotted legs dangling from the branch of a tree, and as I came around, saw that it was Chaza’el. He was chattering at the bluebirds, mimicking their call with surprising skill. Perhaps it was a talent cultivated among those of his village too. I remembered the hunters who had found me and Ronan at the mountain’s edge and how they had made sounds of the forest.

Chaza’el looked down at me and grinned. “Good morning, sister.”

“Good morning,” I returned. “I’m surprised you didn’t greet me in the language of the bluebirds.”

“Give me a few more days with them and I shall.” He gripped the branch and swung down and over to the trunk as easily as if it were second nature. Gripping the trunk between the palms of his hands and using his feet, he shimmied down the trunk, slipping in places, but always regaining his hold.

I winced, wondering if he was tearing up his palms, but he leaped the last bit to the ground, crouched and then rose, brushing them off as if there was no pain in them at all.

“So you can see the future, talk to birds, and climb trees as easily as a squirrel,” I said to him as he neared. “You might be our most gifted Remnant yet.”

He shrugged and tilted his head to one side, grinning as if embarrassed. “Comes with growing up in a bedroom among the redwoods.”

I gestured back toward the camp. “Do you know why they cover so much of the camp with branches at night? Anyone who came here would clearly make out their huts.”

His smile faded as he glanced back up the path. “They are afraid of the mechanical birds that come, I think.” He pointed to the sky. “Not ground troops, but spy birds. They are said to patrol every few days, buzzing past. Tiny mechanical contraptions, disguised as birds.”

It was my turn to frown. “What?”

“I don’t know what the Pacificans call them. But the villagers call them dark birds. They live in fear of them. But so far, they’ve been . . .” His voice dribbled to a stop as his eyes grew wider and his pupils dilated, so big that his brown irises disappeared.

I swallowed hard and grabbed his arms. He wavered, as if not with me. “Chaza’el? Chaza’el!”

But his mouth dropped open and he stared upward with eerily blank eyes. I noted my cuff warming. It was then that I knew he was having a vision, something of our future.

I grew silent and waited. After several interminable minutes, his mouth shut and he started, looking at me as if he wondered what I was doing there. What he himself was doing there.

“You had a vision?” I asked, giving up on letting him speak first.

He nodded, and I was relieved to see his eyes come back to their reassuring brown.