Ashlin had accepted the rope and dagger as though she should have been given nothing less, and then looked to Norabel saying, “You don’t mind, do you?”
She hadn’t had a chance to respond, when Archer answered for her. “Are you kidding me? Norabel doesn’t even like being on the team! She’s probably relieved that you’re here!”
“Is that true?” Ashlin had asked, eyeing her with a look that Norabel could not quite place. “Why be on the team if you don’t want to be?”
Norabel had just stared down at her feet, saying, “Archer was just joking.”
They had then all taken their places, climbing up the tree while Ashlin disappeared down the road. Though she was, in truth, extremely relieved that she didn’t have to be the one down there on that cart, she couldn’t help but feel a little useless. All the roles on the team had been filled. There was no room for one more. Only two people were required to lift the basket, and only one person needed to play point in order to decide when to drop the hook. As Norabel waited in silence, she began to wonder if Ashlin had lied when she said that they could benefit from a fifth person on their team. Maybe all she really meant to do was to take her position.
A few minutes later, she could hear the sound of hoof-beats, and she looked down to see Ashlin, perfectly poised on the Pax cart, readying her hand on the rope connected to the basket. Then, just like that, the hook was lowered down, she caught it with one hand and lopped it through her line, and a moment later the basket was being lifted up. Norabel marveled at how quick and easy the whole thing looked from the view of the trees.
She kept her eyes on Ashlin as she expertly flipped off the cart and landed on the road without making a sound or rocking the cart in the slightest. However, instead of going over to the extraction sight to join them, she took out something in her pocket and stuck it at the end of her knife. From the tree, Norabel could tell that it was a small piece of parchment. Then, throwing it through the air, she embedded both the knife and the parchment on the back of the cart. Norabel winced, but the knife had hardly made a sound, and soon the cart was out of her sight and continuing down the road.
Once it had gone, Logan and Archer lowered the basket to the ground, and they climbed down from their tree to gather around it.
“Ashlin, that was amazing!” Archer commended her as he ran to the basket eagerly.
“Yeah. She did good,” Mason agreed.
“Thanks boys,” she said, patting her hand on the basket like it was a deserving dog. “But this was just child’s play.”
“Hey, what did you stick on the cart as you were going?” Logan asked, showing more reservation than the others.
She gave him a sideways smile before admitting, “It was a parchment that said, ‘The beast has answered.’”
“No!” Archer exclaimed, thrilled at what she had done. He started laughing, saying, “Oh, they are gonna love it when they finally look back and find that waiting for them!”
“How’s that for sticking it to the Pax,” she commented, looking over at Mason.
At first his face was still, but then he allowed himself to smile. “Well, it does serve them right.”
As Mason worked to cut the lock off the basket and Logan prepared the torch, Norabel was exceptionally quiet. She studied Ashlin from where she stood, seeing the adrenaline and excitement in her eyes. She wondered exactly where this girl came from. Why was she lying to them when she said she had been transferred? But, if she wasn’t living in Breccan, then how was she even here right now? Every person in Galerance was carefully accounted for, assigned a village, house, and a job, and there was no getting around any of it.
These thoughts and worries bugged Norabel so much that she felt she couldn’t keep them to herself anymore. The stunt Ashlin had pulled with the parchment made her even more suspicious. There was no way of knowing what the note actually said. She could have been giving the Pax each one of their names. It was too big of a risk to keep silent. Even if no one believed her, she had to say something.
She finally decided to speak out after the basket had been emptied and Logan had set fire to it. The four had started walking down the road when she called out, “I don’t think we should go to the drop-off point.”
She gripped onto the straps of her pack to gain courage. However, they still continued to walk down the road, not having heard her.
“Will you please stop!” she called out.
Her small voice reached Archer’s ears, and he glanced back around, asking, “You say something Norry?”
“Yes!” she cried. “Please stop and listen to me!”
Logan turned around at this, and seeing Norabel still stopped at the flaming basket, he tapped his brother on the arm to get his attention.
“What are you doing?” Mason called out to her. “We have to keep moving. The pox will be here soon,” he said, using his favorite nick-name for The Pax.
“We can’t go to the drop-off point,” she urged again.
He shook his head in aggravation. “Look! I don’t have time for this!”
She gripped her small hands into fists. Her heart was beating so fast. The smoke from the fire behind her was getting to her lungs, and it was hard for her to speak above a whisper. Please give me the strength to do this, she asked her Guardian.
“Either you hear me out,” she demanded, forcing the words to come out louder, “or I will start screaming at the top of my lungs, and we’ll see how long it takes The Pax to get here.”
“Norabel, what are you on about!” Mason exclaimed, marching back to her in anger.
“Her!” she said, pointing to Ashlin. “She’s lying to us!”
“Come on, Norry!” Archer said, laughing. “What are you talking about?”
Norabel kept her eyes on Mason as she explained, “She wasn’t transferred here to Breccan. No one’s been transferred here in the past two years.”
“Yeah right!” Archer exclaimed. “Like you could even know that! You’re just being sore because she took your spot as our Shadow!”
“That’s not what this is about,” she insisted, the features of her face darkened by the dancing fire behind her.
“Norabel,” Mason said, speaking sternly to her as though she was a child. “Archer’s right. There is no way you could know that.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” she urged, staring up into his face and begging him to believe her. “A Pax official told me himself.”
“A Pax…” he started, trailing off in anger. “You’ve been talking to the pox?! And you think it’s Ashlin we should be worried about?!”
Norabel cringed and looked down, but she would not give up yet.
“If you continue to the drop-off,” she said, taking in a shaky breath, “then you can consider me off the team.”
Mason leaned closer to her, saying, “If you don’t want to come, then stay here. Wait for your pox friends to show up!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Logan said, trying to keep things from escalating. “Let’s just all take a step back for a moment and think this through.”
“There’s nothing to think about,” Mason said, turning around and starting to walk down the road. “She’s off the team.”
Norabel stood there as still as a stone, watching him walk away from her. For the second time in her life, she thought she was going to lose him forever. What hurt the most was how easily it had come for him; how quickly he had decided to give her up.
However, before he could walk away completely, Ashlin glanced over at Norabel and then called out, “Mason, wait.” He stopped and turned to her, and she took in a deep breath before admitting, “She’s telling the truth.”
“What!” he demanded, reaching for the short sword he kept at his waist. He unsheathed it and pointed it at her chest.
Ashlin put her hands up in a sign of surrender as she continued, “Please, let me explain. I was telling the truth about everything else; about coming from Noor Summit and working as a Harbinger up there. And I wasn’t t
rying to deceive you.”
Mason huffed. “Funny thing—that’s what happens when you tell someone a lie.”
He took a step towards her with the sword, but she held her ground.
“I am an enemy of The Pax, same as you,” she affirmed. “The only reason I lied about being transferred was because I knew you wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth.”
He was silent as he stared her down from the shaft of his blade. From the direction of the village, they could hear shouts of alarm. The Pax had spotted the burning basket from their look-out towers. They would be here in a few minutes.
“Alright, we need to move,” Mason decided. “We’ll take her to the northern cave. We can decide what to do with her there.” He motioned Ashlin forward with his blade and turned back to Logan, saying, “Keep your sword on her for me.”
As they started moving through the forest, heading for the northern mountain cave that they rarely visited except in times of emergency, Norabel hardly had the energy to keep up with them. Not only did the disease inside of her inhibit her from moving too fast, but the emotional toll of the past few minutes made her feel weak and shaky inside.
When they were within sight of the path up the mountain that led into the cave, Mason turned around and saw that Norabel was lagging behind. Her heart caught in her throat when she realized he was coming back to get her, and her eyes felt hot with the threat of tears. It was dark and windy up on the rock path, and she tried to take comfort in the fact that he would not be able to tell how shaken up she was.
“I’m sorry I doubted you,” he yelled out when he was just a few feet away on the rocks.
She kept her eyes fixed on her footing beneath her. “You haven’t just known me for a few years, Mason,” she said, continuing past him. “No matter how much you want to forget that.”
“Well, what was I supposed to think?” he defended, jogging up the rocks to catch up with her.
Norabel closed her eyes shut. “That I wasn’t trying to sabotage you,” she said, her voice cracking in her constricted throat.
“That’s not what I…”
Her eyes flew up to his. “It took you all of two seconds to decide to leave me there on the side of the road!”
“The Pax were coming; I didn’t have much time to mull the matter over!”
“Well, why don’t you do some mulling now?”
She tried to hurry forward on the rocks, but Mason grabbed her arm, pulling her back to him. Her breath caught in her throat as he drew her even closer so that his forehead was resting against hers.
“I’m sorry, okay?” he breathed out, closing his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
His hands came up to cup her shoulders, and she was finding it very hard to breathe. Mason was so close, his scent filled her nose like a dizzying perfume. Dusty coal and the subtly spicy scent of Snapper.
“I haven’t forgotten,” he whispered, rocking his head back and forth against hers.
Norabel bit down hard on her lip at his admission, and found her eyes welling with tears. When Mason lifted his forehead from hers, she couldn’t stop her arms from reaching up and wrapping around him in a tight hug.
“I forgive you,” she whispered out, speaking almost directly into the fabric of his shirt.
Mason’s arm wrapped around her waist, and his other hand came up and cradled the back of her head. “Come on,” he said a moment later, drawing away. “We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”
When the two of them entered into the cave, they found Logan and Archer with their swords fixed on Ashlin. All three of their packs had been slung off and discarded on the floor by their feet, and Ashlin’s bow also lay surrendered on the ground.
“Can I speak now?” Ashlin asked, directing her question to Mason.
He nodded his head, and then motioned to Logan and Archer saying, “Lower your swords. Logan, get a fire going.”
Ashlin rested her back against the cave wall and let her arms fall down to her sides. Once Logan had a small flame flickering in between a circle of rocks, she began to tell her story.
“It’s hard to find a place to begin,” she started. Then, finding Norabel in the group of faces around her, she said, “I lied about getting a transfer to Breccan. And my job isn’t some boring, Pax-enforced assignment.” She looked down to where her bow lay on the ground and said, “This is my job. This is the only thing. My sole purpose. I mean to take down the Pax, and kill Guardian Amias.”
The whole cave was exceptionally quiet after hearing her declaration. Not even the chirp of a bug or the drip of water could be heard. For the longest time no one knew what to say, until Logan finally voiced what they were all thinking.
“How…how is that possible?” he asked with a shake of his head. “Not the killing Guardian Amias thing, though equally unfathomable, but…how is it possible that the Pax hasn’t assigned you a job?”
“Did you fake your death or something?” Archer asked, taking a step forward, obviously convinced that Ashlin meant him no harm.
“It’s the Pax’s own fault that it doesn’t know about me,” she replied harshly, Logan’s words having struck a sore subject. She absently rubbed at a spot on her wrist and closed her eyes. “If they hadn’t sent my mother to Arkadiak,” she said softly, “then I would have been born and branded into the system just like everybody else.”
Norabel felt a pang of pity for this girl as she looked at her face and saw the suffering of a painful memory hidden inside. Losing her grandfather in a fire was certainly painful, but having your mother sent to Arkadiak…
Though everyone had heard of Arkadiak, it had always seemed like another world away; just something to whisper about in the night. It was a prison up in the clouds, cut inside the rock of the tallest mountain in Galerance. No one was ever let out or had ever escaped. There were no guards and no cells and no order. The worst part of it was, every day at noon, wild beast were dropped inside to both serve as the prisoners’ food, and to decrease the prisoner population. But these weren’t just any wild beasts; they were The Torrent, the very creatures that Amias won the war with. Bears, wolves, birds, and even rodents, these creatures were trained to be vicious and could put forth a scream so loud it had the power to disable the hearing of any person within a half mile away. It’s why many people referred to the twelve o’clock hour as the silent hour, because of what was happening in Arkadiak at that time.
The stories all sounded bad, but she couldn’t imagine how horrible it really was inside.
“What happened to your mom?” Norabel asked gently, suddenly feeling bad for having accused her of being their enemy.
“She died in Arkadiak,” she admitted, turning her face to the floor and pressing her thumb harder into her wrist. “But not before she gave birth to me.”
“She was pregnant when they sent her inside?” Norabel asked, half whispering the words, for they came as such a shock.
Ashlin’s shoulders slumped, and she took her hand away from her wrist as she admitted, “They knew she was, and they didn’t care. They sent her in anyway because she had disobeyed the Pax. Said us both dying was the price she had to pay for her transgressions.”
“How did you make it out?” Mason asked, keeping his voice stiff.
“I don’t exactly know,” she said, tensing her shoulders. “A small crack in the mountainside, I guess. Or maybe she threw me up when The Torrent were sent inside. All I know is that one day I was found crying inside the branches of an ash tree near the dungeon’s entrance. It’s why the man who found me called me Ashlin.”
Her eyes shifted up to the cave ceiling as she continued. “His wife had Jotham’s Disease and couldn’t have kids, so they took me in. They pieced together where I had come from, and they made sure to never let anyone else know I existed. They were the only two people I ever had contact with until…until they died a few years ago.”
“Ashlin, I’m sorry,” Archer said, taking a final step towards her. He reached out for her arm and held it just
above the elbow.
“It’s fine,” she said, trying to wave it off. “I’ve been too busy to even think about it.”
“Busy doing what?” Logan asked.
“Trying to take down the Pax,” she said, anger flashing through her eyes. “For the past few years, I had tried to do it from Noor Summit, but then I realized that Breccan was the better place to start. And that’s the truth about why I’m here. That’s why I couldn’t tell you where I came from.”
The cave was quiet once more as everybody seemed to deliberate what they were just told. Though Ashlin’s story seemed extraordinary and incredibly unlikely, Norabel found herself instantly believing it. If Ashlin really was trying to trick them, she figured she would have come up with a more believable story. And, she couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. Maybe she had rushed too soon to the conclusion that Ashlin was a Pax spy because she was feeling a little jealous.
Walking over to where she stood, Norabel extended her hand, saying, “I’m sorry I accused you. And, I know it’s not up to me, but, for what it’s worth, I…I want you to stay.”
Ashlin looked down to her pale hand and then grasped it firmly, so strongly, in fact, that it almost hurt. “Thank you,” she said, staring back at Norabel with sincerity.
Mason went over to Ashlin’s discarded bow and picked it up. “Here,” he said, extending it out for her to take back. “You shouldn’t have lied to us, but I can forgive that.” He waited for her to grab it before turning around and announcing, “We should hurry to the drop-off point. Malachy will wonder where we are.”
As the guys made for the cave entrance, Norabel chose to stay back and walk with Ashlin.
“Thank you for telling them,” she said. “You could have kept quiet and left me there, but you didn’t. I know it must have been a hard thing to do.”
Ashlin shrugged. “I didn’t want to be the reason you left the team. And I knew I would have to tell you guys eventually.”
She started to walk faster to try and catch up with the guys, but Norabel hurried forward a little ways, saying, “And I want you to know there’s no hard feelings.”
Chasing Shadows (Saving Galerance, Book 1) Page 8