by Merry Farmer
“You know,” Kinn sighed and rolled his eyes at her, “you’d be far better off if you shut up.”
“And you’d be far better off if you grew a brain.”
“Grace,” Kinn boomed over his shoulder, jaw twitching with annoyance. “Tell your buddy here to keep her fat mouth shut.”
“Go to hell,” Grace spit back.
Kinn’s eyes widened and he pivoted to her. “What the fuck is wrong with you today? I’ve had just about enough of your lip.”
He marched to her, standing toe-to-toe, towering over her. Danny jerked in his bonds, teeth bared in a snarl. He was yanked back.
“You should be resting,” Kinn continued to rail at Grace. “You’re gonna hurt the baby with all this running around and getting worked up bullshit.”
Danny didn’t need to see her clearly to sense the fury around her. Her shoulders bunched and she swayed to the tips of her toes as if she wanted to argue, but she remained silent.
When Kinn was satisfied that she wasn’t going to talk back, he gave her one more stern frown then turned back to Danny and Stacey.
“You,” he pointed to Stacey, “have a bad attitude. But as far as I know you haven’t done anything illegal.”
“Yet,” Stacey seethed.
Kinn gave her a warning look before turning on Danny. “You,” his voice was harder, “are under arrest for sabotage and for the murder of everyone who didn’t make it off the transport ship alive.”
“You have no evidence,” Stacey growled.
“I’m guilty.” Danny straightened his back and spoke with feigned calm.
“Goddammit, Danny, shut up.”
He ignored her. “I knew about the conspiracy and I did nothing to stop it.”
Grace had clearly told Kinn what she’d discovered about the explosion of the transport ship. There was no point in denying the truth. He stared past Kinn to her, still unable to make her out. How much had she revealed? How much had Kinn revealed, for that matter?
Grace stepped forward enough to come into focus and meet his eyes, emotion and color gone from her face.
Kinn’s expression had also gone blank, as if he hadn’t expected a quick confession. He stared down at Danny, then back to Grace. He shifted his weight and scratched his head with the barrel of the useless gun. “All right, what do we do, Grace?”
“What do you mean, ‘what do we do’?” Her voice quavered as she answered him, not taking her eyes off of Danny’s.
“Well, you’re the expert on these things. You’re the one who’s good at solving people’s disputes an’ all.”
“This isn’t a squabble over furs.”
Kinn sighed in exasperation and strode over to her. When he stood looking down at her she was forced to tear her eyes away from Danny.
“Come on. You’re the one who said he and your buddy Carrie and Kutrosky were responsible for blowing up the Argo. It was him, right? I didn’t get the wrong guy did I?” His confidence faltered.
Grace glanced to Danny again. Certainty left her expression. Behind the fury there was worry. Familiar, Grace-like worry. It was Danny’s first glimpse of the woman he loved in months. The emotion that had frozen inside of him during the confrontation welled up, threatening to unman him with tears. He swayed toward her.
She snapped her eyes away, blinking rapidly as the color came back to her face. “No, that’s him.” She swallowed. “He let Kutrosky carry out the plan to blow up the Argo.” She spoke carefully, eyes flickering back to him, old hurt returning.
She hadn’t told Kinn about their relationship. He knew it as solidly as he knew the sun would set that night. His pulse quickened. She’d kept that secret.
“Okay, I’m getting tired of this.” Kinn threw up his arms. “Our whole morning has been disrupted. Grace, go back to the house and rest. I don’t want you on your feet so much. You,” he turned to Stacey, “need a time out. Put her over there so she can think about what she’s done for a while.” Two soldiers lifted Stacey to her feet and marched her over to sit on a bench near the oven as she growled in protest.
“What about us?” Heather spoke up, nodding to Jonah.
Kinn pointed a finger at her then dismissed them with a wave. “Don’t talk to no one and stay out of trouble.”
He turned back to Danny. “And you,” he hesitated, a shard of uncertainty in his eyes. “Put him on ice until Grace figures out what she wants to do with him.”
Chapter Four – Fire and Ice
Danny clenched and unclenched his fists to keep circulation going in his fingers as shivers of cold wracked his body. He focused on breathing, on the icy air filling and leaving his lungs one breath at a time as his body slowly succumbed to hypothermia. For more than an hour, he’d been tied to the post on the deck of the large house on his knees, feet and hands bound with rough rope behind the post, no parka, no boots, no mittens.
The guard set to watch him paced to the side, his breath huffing in frosty puffs. Something was agitating the man. At one point he passed behind the post and dropped his woolen scarf on Danny’s feet. That wool and the direct winter sun pouring down through the trees were the only things saving him from extreme frostbite and death. It wasn’t warm, but it was close. Gil was right, winter was easing. The fact that he was still alive proved it.
Not that he was enjoying it. His teeth chattered uncontrollably behind blue lips. It was probably a good thing that his feet were numb as he wiggled his toes under the scarf. The pain of frostbite was not something he looked forward to. He’d treated a few cases through the winter that were a result of carelessness. This was malicious.
The weight of the felt pouch of bullets in his pocket gave him a reason to fight, to endure the torture in silence. They’d taken his backpack, confiscated the gun, but the pockets in his soft leather pants had gone unnoticed. They hadn’t frisked him. It could have been that Kinn’s soldiers were getting lazy in the domesticity of a comfortable village. That answer felt wrong. Something sharper was going on under the surface. The restless guard pacing around him was proof of that. Men who were content with their lot did not grumble over guard duty or drop scarves on a prisoner’s feet.
When Grace came walking slowly up the path from the longhouse toward the deck, it took a monumental effort for Danny to hold his head still enough to focus on her. His heart, already taxed with the effort to keep his body warm, thumped harder. Partially with trepidation.
The petite figure of Mina, the woman from Kutrosky’s camp, walked by Grace’s side holding a baby. Without his glasses he could only make her out by the sharp and peevish way she walked and the tension surrounding her as it had whenever they’d crossed paths on the Argo. The thick guard beside him stood straighter and rushed forward to help Grace up the stairs to the deck.
“Nice, Tyrone,” Mina drawled. “You help her but you can’t lend a hand to your own wife and child?”
“Uh, sorry.” Tyrone’s voice was deep and resonant. He hovered beside Grace until she made it up to the deck then shifted back to Mina. Mina handed the baby to him and helped herself up to the deck, sending a glance to Grace. The baby burst into newborn wailing. “He always cries when I hold him,” Tyrone complained.
“That’s because you’re doing it wrong.” Mina shook her head and stepped toward him, forcing him to back several feet away from Danny’s post and out of the range of his clear sight. “He’s a baby, not a rock.”
Mina was more than a foot shorter than Tyrone and rail thin to his hulking build, pale to his chocolate complexion, but his shoulders hunched and he fumbled to hold the baby the way Mina told him. He inched backward to the railing at the far end of the porch as Mina tucked the baby into his arms.
Danny shook uncontrollably as he shifted his attention to Grace. She was close enough for him to see in clear detail as she watched the interaction between Mina and Tyrone. The lines of her face were set in veiled alarm and she held her breath. She and Mina were up to something. Her eyes flickered down to meet his, her expressio
n pinching before she took a breath and deliberately smoothed it.
“Now look!” Mina sighed in irritation and threw up her arms. “You’ve ripped his swaddling.”
“I didn’t, I swear.”
“Clumsy oaf. I don’t have time to fix it either. Go back to the house and change him and wrap him up again.”
“Mina, you know I can’t do that.” Tyrone pleaded with her, as cowed as though he was disobeying a general’s order.
“I was in labor with that boy, your son, for twenty-two hours. You fainted, or do you not remember? And who is it who has to wake up every four hours to have him clamp on my tit like a bear-trap while you snooze the night away?”
“Aw, come on, Mina, you know that if I could—”
“I don’t want to hear it from you, mister. The least you could do is help raise your own son. This loser isn’t going anywhere. He’s tied to a goddam post.” She stuck a thumb at Danny.
Tyrone dropped his head, looking down at his son. “Well, all right. But stay here and watch him just in case. I don’t want to get in trouble with Lieutenant McKinnon.”
He bent over to give Mina a kiss, which she accepted with a scowl, and crossed the deck. Grace nodded to him. He nodded back with the crisp answer of a soldier following orders. Far from the restless grumbling of the last hour.
When Tyrone reached the bottom of the stairs and set off down the street, Mina turned to Grace and said, “I’d give him about ten minutes. I’ve hidden the clean diapers and swaddling, so it should take him a while. Your little friend Heather has Kinn busy in the longhouse. If either Tyrone or I get brought up on charges with Kinn over this, it’s on your head.”
Grace nodded. “I can handle Kinn.”
Danny’s stomach twisted at the implication.
Mina went inside the large house, slamming the door behind her.
Grace turned to Danny, pursing her lips. Her green eyes swam with worry.
“This is madness,” she whispered.
She grabbed Danny’s shoulders and used him as a support as she laboriously lowered herself to crouch in front of him. Her hands caressed his cold face, filling him with more warmth than a thousand suns. She studied his condition with lips pursed.
“Grace,” he muttered, mouth barely working, unable to keep still with the violence of the cold and emotion that shook him. Even his breath came in sharp, uneven gasps.
She was inches away, close enough to hold. He jerked his hands against the post and rope behind his back. The piercing pain it caused was nothing compared to the frustration of not being able to hold her or make his mouth form words.
“Have they given you anything to eat?” Her voice was flat, hard.
He shook his head, unsure if she could distinguish it from the rest of his shaking.
She hissed out a breath, cheeks glowing with anger. “Joe does this to the men who disobey him all the time, no matter how much I complain. He insists that he knows how much a man can tolerate, that he won’t let you die of exposure, but—”
“J-Joe?”
She glanced down and away, color flooding her pale cheeks. “That’s his name. Joe McKinnon. Kinn is a nickname.” She forced herself to meet his eyes again. “He makes me call him Joe.”
“M-m-makes you?”
She answered his implied question and his scowl with an equally fierce glare. Her lips worked over words that refused to come out. The lines and muscles of her face twitched from anger to fear, disgust, grief, shame. Helplessness. Each of her emotions was like a crossbow bolt in his chest.
He pushed forward, gasping raggedly at the pain his efforts to get closer to her caused.
“Stop struggling, Danny.” Her voice came out in a mournful squeak. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
A swell of indignation had his heart pounding like jagged ice daggers in his chest. “Hurt m-myself?” he chattered. He turned his head to show her the cheek she’d slapped. “D-did it leave a mark?”
Her expression pinched with bitter misery. “Do you consider this a mark?” She laid her hands on her belly.
The sudden tidal-wave of his grief drove all anger and energy out of his body. He sagged against the post, convulsing harder as he no longer tried to keep himself still in the cold. He remembered the way she’d wept in his arms the first time she’d come back from sleeping with Kinn. He could still hear the horror of it in her tears.
“Grace, I—”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” She sighed, pushing her hair out of her face. How he’d missed that simple tick of hers. The light in her eyes grew pleading. “How’s Carrie?”
“Dead.”
He cursed himself for striking out at her the moment the word was past his lips. Her face went ashen.
“P-probably dead.” He recanted, wincing, unable to meet her eyes or master his maelstrom of emotions. “Sh-she had a difficult b-birth the day before yesterday. H-hemorrhaging. I left b-before I found out if she’d waken up.”
“You left her? On the verge of death?” Her voice rose an octave.
He’d known she would be furious at him for leaving Carrie’s side, known her eyes would burn like that. It was a paradoxical comfort.
“I did everything I could do,” he gave her a stiff reply. He wanted to blurt out everything Carrie had said, about Kutrosky being wrong, about the beacon. He wanted to tell her Carrie had asked for her, begged him to bring her to her side. The words wouldn’t come out. “Sean is there to take care of her.”
“Sean.” Grace sniffed, nodding and with the look in her eyes that said she was telling herself there was hope.
Her expression shifted from confident and resolved to twisted with pain and tears. She sobbed, crumpling to sit on the deck in front of him, hugging herself and rocking as she wept, unable to hold it together.
It was a far worse torture than hours of exposure to the ice and snow. “Don’t cry, Grace,” he broke down himself, tears tracing frigid trails down his face. “Please don’t cry.”
“This is a disaster.” She ignored him, weeping freely. “She can’t die, Danny. No one can die, but no one seems to understand that.” She glanced up to him, eyes red-rimmed and pleading.
Hearing her speak those words again after so long cracked straight through his heart. Always concerned for others. Always Grace.
“Carrie is strong. S-she may surprise us all and m-make it through.”
Grace shook her head. “You don’t understand, Danny. It’s not just Carrie. People are dying all over.”
“What people?”
“Brian’s people. And I’m trapped here under martial law.” The frustration in her voice dropped like a rock in his gut.
“You’re what?”
Her eyes flickered up to him as though she’d said something wrong. She bit her lip, glancing over her shoulder to the longhouse. The heat of anger washed over her again.
“Joe’s men had you the minute you came within sight of the river because there have been raids by Brian’s men all through the winter. We captured one of them about two months ago, Jeff.”
“You’ve s-seen Kutrosky?” The need to find Kutrosky and make him pay for his actions flared anew.
“No, just his men. They’re in bad shape. Jeff was nearly dead with malnutrition, as scared as I’ve ever seen anyone.”
He fought to keep himself from shaking apart as Grace struggled to return to her crouch in front of him. A new light sparked in her eyes as she leaned closer.
“After the battle we heard nothing from anyone for a long time.” Another cycle of conflicting emotion flashed through her expression, rising as tears just under the surface. She swayed toward him, jaw clenched, before swallowing and going on. “We heard nothing. Then, after the windy season, when the snow began to fall, raiding parties started coming across the river and attacking our supply caves. They weren’t frequent and they didn’t take anything at first.”
“Raiding p-parties that didn’t take anything?” Nothing about it felt right.
“It was like they were spying on us to see what we had. But in the last few months there have been raids at least once a week. They’re taking things now, taking food.”
“Just food?”
Grace nodded. “Then we captured Jeff. The others left him for dead. He wouldn’t talk for the first few weeks, but we fed him and gave him warm clothes and housed him in a cabin, and as soon as he trusted us, he started to talk. Kutrosky’s way of ruling his people is madness, it always has been. He has them all terrified of Vengeance and convinced he’s the only one who can save them, like some sort of cult.”
“H-have you s-seen Kutrosky himself? Where is he?”
She shook her head and shifted, sitting with an exhausted sigh. “We don’t know. Jeff was so disoriented by hunger and the terrain that the best he could offer was that Brian has moved everyone miles further north, where the hills are even higher. I wanted to send a scouting party out looking for them, but Joe wouldn’t….”
She pressed her mouth shut, lowering her head. She winced as she sought for a way to support herself and the bulge of the child inside of her sitting on the bare deck. Danny’s fury at Kutrosky funneled into exasperation that she was being so careless of her own health.
“Grace, h-how far along are you?” he asked through chattering teeth.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head, not meeting his eyes. “We tried keeping time according to Earth months but it doesn’t work. This should be August. Chronis has too many moons and they all move at different speeds, so….” She let out a frosty breath. “I wish Gil was here.”
“Y-you didn’t answer my question.”
“Jules says I probably have a few weeks left,” she answered with a scowl. “It feels like it’s been forever.” Her face tightened as if tears would flow again. She swallowed and fought not to break.
“Y-you should r-rest.”
Fiery energy surged through her at his scolding. “Now you sound like Joe.”
“Don’t you ever say that to m-me again.”