“We might have to make a note of what we found here,” the young official told Vera, smiling suggestively. “Hording excess money is a crime against the Pax. If I were you, I’d be more careful in what I’d keep in my house.”
From where Norabel stood, she could see Vera’s back stiffen. A threat like that could often lead to a leaching problem. And leaching was way worse than one simple house raid. With a house raid, a couple of guys showed up at your home, took what they wanted, and were done with you. You didn’t have to deal with another raid for around a month or two. But a leacher. That was someone who could bleed you dry. They could show up at your house as often as they wanted, demanding what they willed, and you couldn’t do anything about it unless you wanted to be beaten and imprisoned.
“Come on Fletcher, let’s go,” the first official said, waving his hand in the direction of the cart.
The man named Fletcher shot them all one last hard stare before going to the basket and depositing his items. However, before they left, the tall official gripped The Albatross Seed in his hand and looked down at Iris.
“There are smart actions, little girl, and then there are dumb ones. And the Amias Pax will only allow for so many dumb ones before it takes action…no matter how young you are.”
Norabel could feel Iris quiver in her arms. She held her tighter to her middle so she could feel at least a little protected. Then, both officials mounted up on either horse and kicked them into a trot down the dirt road.
When they were long out of sight, Norabel turned to Vera, saying, “You didn’t need to do that. I would have told them it was me that gave it to her.”
The older woman shook her head. “It would have been pointless. They already found it in my house. Why get both of us in trouble?”
Norabel took a step forward with Iris still in her arms. “Did they take much?” she asked.
Vera hung her head and glanced back inside her house. “I’m sorry; I have work I need to do.”
Norabel nodded quickly in understanding.
“Iris, come inside,” her mother ordered tiredly, waving her hand as she turned to go in herself.
Iris took a step away from Norabel, about to obey, when she turned back and looked up at her with pleading eyes.
“You can get it back for me, can’t you?” she asked.
“Iris,” she said, apologetically shaking her head.
“I know you can!” she insisted. “You’re with the Harbingers! You can get anything back!”
“Iris, you can’t…” she started to scold her, taking a quick look around to make sure no one had heard. Then, seeing that no harm had been done, she crouched down so she was eyelevel with her. “You can never say that out-loud,” she reminded her gently. “Or we’ll both get into a lot of trouble.”
“But…” Iris started to argue, pouting out her bottom lip.
“Go on inside like your mother asked,” she said, motioning to the open door.
“I’m sorry I let them take it,” Iris squeaked, her eyes squinting in tears.
Norabel quickly wrapped her up in a hug, whispering, “It’s alright. It’s going to be alright.” From the doorway, she could see Vera picking up the pieces of a pot that had been knocked over during the raid. Before she let Iris go, she whispered in her ear, “I’m not promising anything, but I’ll see what I can do. Okay? How does that sound?”
Iris gave a small squeal of delight and hugged her even tighter. “Thank you!” she peeped out, before breaking away and running inside her house to help her mother clean up.
Though her words had made Iris happy again, they made Norabel feel worse. Yes, she was a Harbinger, but there wasn’t one job she pulled off where her stomach hadn’t been twisting into knots over the anxiety of it all. The weight of what she had promised to do sunk heavily on her shoulders as she walked back to work.
For the rest of the work day, she was heavily burdened by thoughts of what she would have to do come quitting time. Normally bowl making was a soothing, fulfilling task, but today she hardly found any enjoyment in it. She moved slower than normal, and a couple times had to start over because she had made a mistake in carelessness. However, her overseer, a man named Braj, would have hardly noticed if she had given him goblets instead of bowls. He didn’t care about the quality of her work, just as long as there was enough of it to fill the Pax’s demands.
When it was finally time to leave, instead of heading west towards her home, she had to turn north east. If she really was going to pull off a Harbinger job, then she would need to talk to Mason, the leader of their team. He and his older brother Logan both worked in the north-east commons section, in a building that had literally been cut into the side of a rock wall. It was there the city’s steal was manufactured. It was one of the hardest jobs a villager could be assigned. She felt bad every time she thought about them laboring away in that dark building like an army of underground ants.
She spotted Mason’s dark mop of hair when she just passed the checkpoint into the north-eastern commons. Mason’s raven-black hair was always unkempt and sticking up in all angles, especially after a hard day’s work. His pale face was smeared in patches with black soot, and his blue eyes were as sharp and piercing as if they had been cut from a gem in the heart of the mountain.
His brother Logan, though older than him, did not have quite as commanding an appearance. His hair was a common dark brown, and his eyes were the same. While Mason’s expression usually held some burning source of passion inside, Logan’s was more relaxed and neutral.
It was Logan that spotted Norabel first, standing off to the side of the road, twisting her hands in front of her in nervous apprehension. The corner of his mouth flicked up in the barest hint of a smile. Then he turned to his brother and whispered something in his ear. Soon Mason’s gaze settled on her. He said something back to Logan while staring intently at where she was waiting. A moment later, Logan broke away from his brother, heading towards the road that led south. Mason flicked his head towards the nearby rock cliff, and Norabel nodded in understanding, quietly making her way down the road towards the trail that led into the mountains.
While most of the cliffs and mountains that surrounded the north and west sides of Breccan were harsh and unclimbable, there was one section in which a small, narrow meadow had formed at the base and led to several naturally-occurring caves in the rock wall. This was where their Harbinger team agreed to meet should the opportunity arise. It was the only place of privacy in the whole village, and they didn’t need to pass through another checkpoint in order to get to it.
However, Norabel had been coming here long before she was ever recruited as a Harbinger. When she had been forced to move to Breccan when she was eight-years old, she had found this place on accident while playing with a young boy. There they had spent every minute of their free time, playing in the meadow and trying to hit targets on the rocks with small little pebbles. Norabel’s favorite thing to do was to sneak into a cave and draw a pair of Albatross wings on the walls with a piece of charcoal. Then she and the boy would light a fire and try to get their shadows to line up with the pair of wings on the wall.
It was something that Norabel’s grandfather used to do. He would tell her that each person was born with an Albatross that was sent to guard them. They were always invisible, but sometimes the shadow of their wings could be seen poking out of a human’s shadow. He promised her that, if she was patient and diligent enough, she might one day see them framing her own shadow.
Then Guardian Amias had their house burned down, and her grandfather had died in the fire, and all talk about the Albatross had become outlawed. The only way she could keep the myth alive was to come to these caves and call to her Guardian Albatross in secret.
She and the boy had turned it into something fun and mysterious and honorable, almost like a sacred ritual. Then the little boy grew up. Now Mason didn’t want to hear talk of anything to do with Albatrosses or shadows or wings. Now all this beautiful place was
to him was a strategic point for meeting in secret. He did not want to remember, as she so often did, how they would have fun here as children.
As Norabel walked through the village towards the mountain, she could tell that Mason was following behind her. He did not speed up to walk alongside her, and she knew she shouldn’t look back at him. He would scold her if she did, telling her that it would look like they were conspiring. She wasn’t sure if he was right or not, but she did not want to make him angry. It wasn’t until they were already on the small dirt path, hidden away from the sight of the village, that Mason came up from behind her and fell in step by her side.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
Norabel looked up at him and found that his gaze was fixed firmly on the path in front of them. A small twinge of pain crept up in her chest. While Mason was her friend and leader, it sometimes seemed as if he didn’t want to look at her, as if the sight of her face brought up something that he didn’t like, something that she would never be able to change.
“My neighbor’s house was raided today,” she explained, studying the profile of his face silhouetted by gray rock. “They took something from a little girl that lived there.”
Mason stopped walking and finally looked down at her. “And you’d like us to get it back?” he guessed.
Her gaze shifted down to her boots. She felt embarrassed for asking. Normally the guys had a tough time convincing her that they should do any job. She had never before been the one to ask them to act.
“Well, that’s a surprise,” Mason commented.
She continued to stare down at her boots. She could just picture the smirk on his face and the raised eyebrows that he was giving her right now.
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” she said, braving the knot in her stomach and tilting her head up to face him. Though she had wanted to sound courageous and firm, her voice came out sounding like the small pleadings of a child. She inwardly winced, wanting for once in her life to sound as old as she really was.
Mason regarded her for a moment before he asked, “Have you been kissing bowls? You’ve got clay on your lips.”
Norabel’s face reddened slightly, but she tried to control her blush as she turned away and wiped at her lips.
“Try spitting on your fingers,” he offered, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he watched her.
She looked down to her fingers, which were dully stained in clay, and raised them to her lips, trying to spit on them without looking exceedingly gross and callow in the process. She could taste the earthy flavor of dirt as she rubbed at her mouth, feeling the hot squish of saliva against her lips. She didn’t know how it was possible that nearly every time she was around Mason, he could make her feel like this—flustered and childish.
Judging that she had probably gotten most of the clay off, she turned back to him and looked him firmly in the eye.
“Will you please do this for me?”
“Well that’s up to the rest of the guys.” He flicked his head in the direction they had come, adding, “I’ve sent Logan to get Archer. Let’s see what they say when they come.”
He was about to start forward on the path, but Norabel reached out for his arm with two hands. “And what do you say?” she asked.
He sighed and ran his free hand through his hair. His palm was covered in the dirt of a hard day’s work, but his hair was so dark that she couldn’t see if it left a mark.
“You know me, Norabel. What do you think?”
“That you’d never miss an opportunity to stick it to the Pax,” she replied quickly.
“Well then there’s your answer,” he said, starting forward once more.
She followed behind, and soon they reached the narrow meadow that lied in between a gap in the rocks. Mason was quiet as he leaned against a boulder, looking up at the sky above him and waiting for the rest of the guys to get there.
He had been the one to first form their Harbinger team over three years ago. He had heard about these groups operating in two of the other main villages in Galerance, stealing back what was taken during house raids, and he wanted Breccan to have a rebel Harbinger team as well. However, in order to form a full team, you needed at least four members: two Lifters, one Point-Man, and one Shadow.
He had quickly convinced his brother Logan to be one of his Lifters, while he would head the team up as the Point-Man. Not much later, a young fisherman named Archer volunteered to be their second Lifter. The three of them trained for several months, growing stronger and figuring out the proper technique to snatching a Pax basket from a moving cart. Yet, they still needed to find a Shadow. Unfortunately, the Shadow position was the most difficult one to fill. While the Point-Man was the leader of the team, the Shadow had to be the most skilled, for they were placed in the most danger.
As Norabel sat down in the scratchy grass of the meadow, she remembered the day that Mason had first approached her about joining their team.
…It had been four years since she had spoken with him. The last time they had really seen each other, she had been fourteen years old and he had been fifteen. For those four years, he had avoided her at all costs. It didn’t matter that they had been best friends since she was eight-years old; he didn’t want to see her, and she wasn’t going to hurt him by trying. Of course, she would speak to his brother Logan a few times, ask how Mason was doing and even send him a gift on his birthday. Logan was always very polite and friendly with her, but she got the feeling that even her small conversations with his brother irked Mason.
And then one day he had finally sought her out. It was her eighteenth birthday, and she was sitting in this very meadow, looking up at the clouds, when his face appeared over hers. She thought he was going to scold her, tell her to leave him and his brother alone for good. But he didn’t. Instead he took a seat next to her, not even uttering a word. She had been so nervous, she didn’t know what to do. She had wanted so badly to see him for four years—to get to speak with him for just a few minutes—yet she couldn’t say anything now.
A few painful moments went by before Mason had quietly whispered out the words, “I need your help Norabel.”
She was exceptionally quiet and stiff as she listened to him speak, telling her of his plans to create a rebel Harbinger team. And then he started to talk about when they were kids and they would balance on wobbly rocks, seeing who could keep their balance the longest, or when they would play hide and seek inside of the caves nearby. She had been silently thrilled to hear him talking of old times. She thought he was trying to rekindle their lost friendship. It didn’t occur to her that he was only bringing it up because he wanted her to be his Shadow.
“You could always sneak around better than me,” he had admitted.
Four years of waiting, and that’s what she got. A request to commit treason.
She didn’t say yes. At least, not right away. Logan had promised her that he would look out for her should she decide to join, and that was at least a little comfort. But the real reason she had eventually said yes to him was because she realized this would be her only opportunity to be Mason’s friend again. Treason or not, she felt it was worth it…
Back in the meadow, Norabel was taken out of her thoughts as she heard the sound of laughter. Looking over to the dirt path, she saw Logan and Archer walking over to them, sharing in some joke Logan had just said.
Similar to Logan, Archer had common brown hair and a tall build. However, that’s where the similarity ended. Archer was much less level-headed, and had swimming green eyes which he felt could win the heart of even the prettiest lady. Although, when it came to actually talking with them, he tended to fall flat on his face.
The only girl that Archer never tried to flirt with was Norabel. When she had first been introduced to the team, he had mistaken her for a fourteen year old girl and asked Mason why he was bringing in a kid. Even when he had been told how old she really was, he couldn’t seem to get the idea out of his head that she was just a c
hild, and so continued to treat her like one. Which was just as well, Norabel decided. She would rather have him talking down to her than trying to flirt with her.
As they were still walking down the dirt path, Archer spotted a pine cone on the ground and stooped to pick it up. He took a quick whiff of it before depositing it in his pocket. Archer was always sticking random objects into his pockets in an attempt to smell better. Since he worked with fish all day, he ended up smelling like one, and so was constantly trying to mask the odor. There was no telling what manner of objects could be in his pockets on any given day.
“Hey Norry!” Archer called out, waving over to her. “I heard you called this little meeting of ours. There’s a first time for everything I suppose.”
“There’s nothing’s wrong, is there?” Logan asked, trying to search her face for any sign of trouble.
She shook her head and told them exactly what she had told Mason. When she had finished, Logan readily agreed to do the job, but Archer looked at her suspiciously.
“Wasn’t it you that said we were taking too many jobs? Drawing too much attention to Breccan?” he asked.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Then I’m curious as to what was stolen that would make you change your mind.”
Norabel inwardly cringed. She knew she couldn’t tell them that it was an Albatross Seed she was really after. Archer would never do the job if he found out, and Mason would probably be furious with her.
“It’s not what was stolen that’s important,” she reasoned. “It’s who it was stolen from. Iris is just a little girl. She was terrified and crushed by the whole experience. I just want to try and make it better. Isn’t that why we all got into this? To help make things better?”
Before Archer could respond to her, Mason kicked off from the boulder he was leaning against and began to walk past them. “Be at the meeting point in Valor Wood at nine,” he announced. “Don’t be late.”
Chasing Shadows (Saving Galerance, Book 1) Page 2