by Ann Denton
She could hear him only a few feet away. She desperately needed him to jerk her out of this pain, like he had earlier. Mala tried to call out for him, but in her agony, all she could manage was a slow, foreign wail. It sounded wrong even to her ears.
Lowe edged closer and scanned all the bodies in the water. Mala met his eyes for just a second. But her limbs wouldn't work.
Lowe dove beneath the water. Mala waited. There was a splash as he kicked off. She waited. He didn't come back.
Chapter Seven
In the predawn light Mala awoke, shivering, her right hand a shriveled prune. It had slipped into the water as she slept. She gave a cursory glance around, checking for Lowe, checking for Erlenders, and trying very hard to ignore the bodies floating around her like debris; she didn't want to see glazed eyes, swollen faces, or Bara's blackened husk.
The water was still but for the rustle and swoop of carrion birds fighting over delicacies washed ashore. The boats were gone, save for Bara's. Raiders like the Wilders didn't leave good boats to waste.
With no alternatives, Mala decided to swim. But where? Based on the body count, Bara's guard had been eliminated. Her mother was dead.
She's dead, Mala repeated to herself. The words had no effect. A strange numbness had settled over her. It made her limbs feel heavy. She had to force them to move. To swim. Go. Just go, Mala.
Sonne Pointe. The hidden cove Lowe had mentioned floated into her brain and settled there. At least there, she'd be hidden from the Erlenders. If that coward even made it there, she thought bitterly. He could have reached out a hand. He saw me, I know he did.
She focused on her bitter thoughts as she propelled herself through icy water. They proved a good outlet. They lessened the numbness without opening her up to pain. Or guilt. So long as she didn't let the anger turn inward, so long as she didn't think about how if she had only resisted her stupid impulses ...
That mucking idiot! If it weren't for him, I might have been off frog gigging. I might have seen them coming. I could’ve warned her. I could’ve gotten her out of there. But he wouldn’t let me go. He had to be all gallant and puppy-dog eyes. If it weren’t for him, we would have left already. We wouldn’t even have been there. And that flooding jerk just left me in the water.
Mala let herself work up a furious wrath during the hours it took her to swim back to the river and up to the Pointe. That might have been why she didn't notice the figure bobbing in the water behind her.
She dragged herself onshore just as the sun reached its peak in the sky, still muttering under her breath. The rocky bank was torture on her ankle as she limped to cover, but she made it, and collapsed under a group of trees to rest her weary limbs. But resting turned her mind toward her mother. So she vocalized her rant at Lowe to fill up the silence.
“Mucking coward. Couldn't stay around for a minute. And people call me a bullet dodger.” She tossed aside her sopping blue skirt and rubbed her ankle to soothe it. “Don't know what I was thinking, following him. I should have hid Momma, swam to my boat. I could have come back for her myself. Never should have followed that idiot. He had no clue.”
A twig cracked behind her. Mala jumped up, and the dagger tied to her leg stabbed her slightly. She quickly brandished it.
Lowe walked out of the trees. “I hope you weren’t just calling me an idiot.”
Him. She pressed a switch to release the trident points and her dagger suddenly brandished three deadly blades instead of one. “You left me!” She jabbed the knife in the air accusingly.
“I did not.” He stole her seat under the tree, irritating her further by ignoring her dagger. “I couldn't find you.”
“Then you must be blind, because I was right there in front of your face!”
“You weren't. I swam the whole perimeter.”
“I was. You looked into my eyes. Then you were gone! You left me there for damn Erlender target practice,” Mala raged.
Lowe was struck silent and she took the opportunity to get in all the furious lines she'd come up with during her swim. “I mean, what the hell kind of stalker just leaves someone stranded like that? I'm in total shock, I can't move. I look right at you and you leave. You're a flooding coward! I mean, I know we just met—or I just met you, but you have got to be the world's most disappointing psychopath. You probably have a collection of my hair in your pocket or something, but you just left me?”
“Mala?” he asked very quietly.
“What?” she threw down the knife in frustration and pinned a beetle to the earth. He wasn't responding at all to her very justified rage and she really, really wanted to smack him.
“Where were you when you said you saw me?”
“On the lake, duh.”
“But where? What side were you on, my right or left? What was behind you or around you?”
“I don't understand the point of this,” Mala said, frustrated. “I was probably three whole feet away from you. In the lifeboat.”
Lowe was silent for a few seconds. He waited for her to calm down. “Mala?” he asked.
“What?”
“I'm not sure I saw you. Just stick with me here ok?” He held up a palm, trying to calm her. “I saw someone in that boat, but I didn't see you …”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“No … hear me out. I saw a little girl—six, maybe seven years old.”
“There was no one else in there.” Mala sank down on the rocky ground in confusion. Maybe the chaos had made him hallucinate. She hadn’t been able to move. Maybe the Wildes used some kind of gas ... Bara had told stories of the old days when soldiers had used mass poisons. Maybe they'd put something in the lake. Maybe it had made him crazy.
“Did you see things, too?” she asked in a small voice.
“See things?” Lowe gave a small grin. “I’m not crazy.” Mala flinched.
“But I think I might know what happened to you.”
A clatter of rocks down on the shore broke the awkward silence. Lowe shot up, grabbing Mala's abandoned dagger. He edged behind a tree and peered around, squinting at a small shirtless figure making its way up the shore. He stiffened and sucked in a breath. “Mala,” he whispered.
“What?”
Lowe nearly jumped out of his skin. She had come up right behind him.
“We have to run. Now.”
She peered past him. Then she burst into laughter. He clamped a hand over her mouth and glared furiously at her, eyes flashing.
When he removed his hand, she muttered, “You can't be serious? Run from a kid? He can't be more than eleven.” She gestured at the boy onshore, who was clambering toward them, his downy blond hair and stick-thin arms nearly blown away by the breeze. “He's just—”
“Have you ever seen this before?” Lowe pulled aside his collar. On his chest, just below his collar bone, his skin had been burnt, branded in a perfect circle. Her eyes widened and she instinctively cringed.
“You're Kreis?” A quick series of images ran through her head. Bara let him join the guard, no explanation. Garon backed off. No Senebal denied a Kreis. The Kreis were honored, prized, worshipped. It was the Kreis who had saved DasWort from destruction. The Kreis had killed one Erlender king. They infiltrated enemy territory and picked off Erlender generals one by one. And for the first time in fifty years, a Kreis had come to Bara's guard.
She gaped at Lowe as he answered. “Yes. I'm Kreis. And that little boy you're laughing at was one of our best assassins. Blut. He's gone rogue.”
They heard hacking, as the boy tried to clear his throat of river water. Instantly, Lowe's arm was at her back and he was half-carrying Mala up the hill.
Mala couldn’t think of Erlenders without hearing the bitter edge to Bara's voice or seeing the pallor had swept over her mother's face whenever they were mentioned. She couldn't imagine anything other than bile seeping into one's throat at the thought of them. She couldn't imagine anyone turning traitor. “But how?”
“Now is not a good time for thi
s discussion. I'm trying to come up with a plan.”
“Well, you're Kreis. Why don't you just kill him?” It seemed simple enough to Mala.
“Oh! Really? Novel idea. You're a genius. Wish I had thought of it myself.”
“You're older. You're bigger. Shouldn't you be better than him? I mean, how good can a kid be?”
Lowe laughed gruffly, cruelly. “Mala. You have a lot to learn about being Kreis.”
“I don't understand. Can't you just throw the knife at him or something? Aren't Kreis the most deadly warriors out there?”
“We aren’t warriors the way you think. We’re either spies or assassins. And my specialty is poison.”
“Oh,” Mala suddenly felt self-conscious about her lack of knowledge. “What's Blut's specialty?”
“Hand-to-hand combat,” Lowe said gruffly. “I’m serious,” he muttered when Mala snorted. “Appearances can be deceiving …” He glanced back. His eyes widened, and he doubled their pace. “We have to stay as far ahead of him as possible.”
Several minutes passed in silence as they tramped rapidly through the woods. The birds overhead seemed to have no idea of the danger they faced, and twittered loudly.
Behind them, Mala could hear the steady crack of twigs as Blut came nearer; each crack made her heart jump. She hoped Lowe was coming up with a plan, because she'd never gone on the raids with Bara's team. Mala had never even gone to their practice sessions. She had avoided all of it, afraid that seeing someone die at her hands would turn her stomach turn into a raging inferno and bring on the hallucination that wouldn't end. It was out there. She knew it was. It loomed over her like a thunderhead. The only question was, when would it burst? When would she lose reality forever?
“Why do you have this thing anyway?” he twirled the dagger in his hand as he held aside a tree branch and pushed her ahead of him.
“I was going to go frogging.” Last night seemed like it was years away. The simple idea of frogging, juxtaposed with every gut-wrenching moment since then, seemed almost foreign.
“You throw this at frogs?”
“Yeah.”
“How good's your aim?” Lowe stopped walking suddenly and spun Mala around so he could stare her right in the face.
“I can usually catch two of five.”
“Forty percent? Our lives depend on a forty-percent chance? Well he's bigger than a frog, so maybe that’ll make your aim a little better.” He tugged her wrist to get her moving again, craning his head to check on Blut.
This time it was Mala who stopped short. “Wait. I don't ... I don't think I can do that.” The very thought of watching the agony in some boy's eyes as he died made her stomach churn. She counted out loud to get it to recede.
“What are you doing? We have to move!” Lowe jerked her roughly. Reluctantly, she followed; this time his pace was nearly a run. “I don't want to make you kill anyone, but we don't really have a choice.”
“I don't think you understand!” Mala said, becoming frantic despite her breathing techniques. “I'm crazy. I see things. I'm ... I'm cursed.” The words came out despite her effort to say something else, anything else. Damn it. But she couldn't take them back.
“What?” The disbelief was clearly etched in his tone.
Mala cringed. I never should have opened my mouth. Sludge, Mala, you know better than that. She tried to think fast—to rationalize. She glanced back … away from Lowe. “I don't know what it was. Maybe it’s just some stress reaction to the night my dad died ... It's probably just in my head ... but ever since that night, if I'm around people and they're hurt or angry or sad ... I start to burn …”
Blut was gaining. He leapt over a fallen tree trunk and grinned up at them. Mala could see the savage gleam in his eyes. It froze the blood in her veins.
Lowe tugged at her. This time she didn't resist. She pushed her sore ankle to its limits. And when Lowe said, “Faster!” she pushed harder.
Mala thought Lowe had moved on, but then out of the blue, he asked, “You burn?”
“Not literally. I burn. Inside. And then I ... see things ...” she trailed off.
With that admission, Lowe’s entire demeanor shifted from disdain to curiosity. “Does the heat start in the pit of your stomach and then reach out to your limbs?” he panted, glancing at her, and then back at Blut. They'd managed to gain some distance, so he paused for a second to catch his breath.
Confused, Mala nodded. How could he know that? How the pain radiates?
Lowe patiently helped her wade through some of the more stubborn brambles. Then he pulled her to a stop. “Mala, I don't think you have a curse. I understand why you might think so right now. But ...” Lowe said carefully. “I think ... you'll have to pass the test to be sure, but I think you're Kreis.”
“What?” Mala felt shock ripple through her. Her head swirled with possibilities. Me, Kreis? “How is that possible?”
Lowe responded with a curt, “Survival first. Explanations later. You can do this.” He shuffled around in his shirt pockets as they continued to battle the briars. He looked back. They had maybe two minutes. He pulled a small vial out of a hidden inner pocket.
“What's that?” Mala gasped.
“My specialty,” he replied gruffly, holding the powder downwind as he sprinkled it deftly over Mala’s blade. When he was finished, he slipped the vial back into his shirt and then glanced cursorily at their surroundings. They were blocked in by at least two meters of hedge on any given side. Mala could barely move as the thorny branches scraped against her legs.
He turned her around to face downhill. Blut was close enough that she could make out his sadistic expression, the wide hungry smile.
Lowe whispered in her ear. “He'll be on us soon.”
Mala's heart pounded in her ears, until she couldn't hear the birds or insects surrounding them anymore. Her hands started shaking, and Lowe put his arm around her, as much to keep her upright as to keep her calm. He uncurled her fingers, and slid the knife into her hand.
“Mala, he's not a person anymore. He's an Erlender now. If I'm right, he's the reason the Wildes attacked. Which means he's ultimately the reason your mom died.”
He saw her fingers clench the weapon, and he smiled. “Go for the gut so the knife can penetrate. You're in the thicket so once he gets close, just throw. It will take him a minute to wade through the thorns. Engel powder will do the rest. It kills on contact. If you can even nick him, it will do the job.” His tone was soothing, a stark contrast to the deadly instructions he gave.
Mala nodded. But as she looked at Blut, heat swept over her and the fear of her hallucinations, a fear that had driven her all her life, took hold. “I … I can't.” Her whole body began to quake. “You do it.”
“Mala, I haven't thrown a knife in ... I can't remember. You want to pin your hopes on me?”
“Yes,” she said desperately. Anything else. Any other option. “Please. Don't ask me to do this.” She begged with her eyes.
“You're from the tributaries. Far north guard. You had to have killed some people if you've survived this long.”
Mala shook her head desperately. “No. My mom's a medic. They always held us back ... they didn't want her to get hurt. Last night. I threw my knife at that man. That was the first time I ever did anything like that. And I missed. And ...” she couldn't go any further. Couldn't let herself think any further.
“Then he'll kill us,” Lowe said simply. And he let go of Mala's shoulders and began to wade back through the thicket, directly towards Blut.
“What are you doing?” Mala screamed.
“If you won't save us, I'm not going to drag it out. Because he will. He likes the kill. I've seen it,” Lowe responded. He took out the vial again and opened it. He turned back to face her, ignoring Blut as the boy started running forward. His manic laughter carried up the hill. Slowly, Lowe turned a shaking palm face up. He began to tilt the vial over his palm.
“You're faking,” Mala shrieked, desperately.
<
br /> Lowe turned to her, his lip curled, disgusted. “I fight when there's a chance of winning. I cut my losses when there's not. Apparently, you don't want to live,” Lowe said simply.
After a pause, Mala whispered, “Well, what have I got to live for?”
She heard the clink of the vial as Lowe closed it and put it back in his shirt. The bushes rustled as he approached her again. He lifted her chin gently and used the back of one hand to brush away her tears. He stared into her eyes and she saw a deep, burning ferocity there, one that ignited a new kind of heat in her belly.
“Mala, you can live for revenge,” he breathed. “You can make your mother's blood and your father's pain worth something. Fire for fire. Blood for blood.” His eyes bored into hers and she felt a spark.
Blut came bursting out of a gap between two trees. Mala hurled the knife without thinking. It sank deep into the young boy's belly, and the thrill of the chase faded from his eyes. He fell to his knees at the edge of the bushes, gasping, hands on the knife handle. He stared at her in disbelief.
“You—” he couldn't finish as pain took over.
Blut's gaze drew her in. She couldn't resist, couldn't turn away; Mala felt her face melt. The world surrounding him blurred slightly until only he was in focus. She saw the blood drain from his cheeks. The freckle under his right eye. The soft rounded shape of his baby cheeks. No one else existed but Blut. His gaze was magnetic.
Entranced, she started walking toward him. Lowe tried to hold her back, but she shrugged him off easily. The trance lent her extra strength. As she walked, her bones felt like they were cracking, bursting, fizzling. Her eyes felt like they might pucker and explode from the heat.
The hallucination started. A toddler Blut ran on a dirt road toward her, arms outstretched, tears running down his pink cheeks. She scooped him into her arms. Mala blinked, and she was back in the woods. It seemed darker, somewhat dimmer, but she could still see. And suddenly, mysteriously, the heat was gone.
She crouched beside the Blut's eleven-year-old body, stroked his yellow hair. He was weak. His gasps for air became shallow and she took his head into her lap. His eyes widened at the sight of her. He gripped her wrist, and though he was dying, the grip was like an iron manacle.