Cloaked
Page 6
Hoping to distract Fawkes so he wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes, Charlotte focused on variables within her control. “We’re not leaving down the rope, right?” she asked.
He strode over and untied the length from the bedpost. “No, we can be civilized and leave through the door.” Picking up his satchel, he looked around the room one last time. “Get the supply bag.”
****
It was a relief to be outside in the fresh air, away from the stink of the inn. Fawkes kept watch outside of the stable while Charlotte darted in to get Ghost ready for their journey. Off to her left, she heard Ghost’s familiar snort of recognition at her scent. Finding his stall, she grabbed the bridle and the saddle from their hooks, then she clucked for him to follow. Ghost trailed after her obediently but started to trot as soon as he saw his master waiting outside.
Charlotte picked up her pace to reach them, and once Fawkes had mounted, he helped pull her up onto the massive animal. She settled in behind him, arms around his waist, and they left the village without a trace.
Chapter Five
Fawkes wanted to avoid the main roads, so they stuck to the wilderness trails and relied on his memory to take them in the right direction. They had to be doubly careful now that both Duke Belaq and Earl Hawthorne had men hunting them, but Fawkes seemed relatively unperturbed.
“When I met with the Lindsors last night, I told them that, should we agree on a contract, it would take a few days to survey the castle and figure out the best plan of approach,” he explained to Charlotte. “That leaves us time to put enough distance between us and Earl Hawthorne’s lands. A head start.”
The trees thinned out over the miles, turning into tall grass plains, and soon Charlotte found herself wishing for the cool damp of the Cursed Forest again. It was an unseasonably warm day for fall in Algonia, and Charlotte had never been this far east before. The sun beat down on them. Rivulets of sweat dripped out of her hair, down her neck, and under her arms, soaking the now-ragged clothes she wore on the day she left her home behind.
Fawkes seemed to feel the harsh effects of the heat as well, and had dismounted a while back to walk within the small amount of shade beside the horse. Charlotte was grateful; the last thing she needed was another sweaty body increasing her temperature. With Fawkes on the ground, at least he wasn’t blocking the scant breeze.
She held up her hair. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this hot,” she complained. Fawkes just handed her the flask of water in response. “How much further today?”
“There is still plenty of daylight left.”
Charlotte swallowed a bit of water. At least you aren’t dead, she reminded herself. And the people who want to kill you will be following soon enough. The more distance, the better.
Fawkes suddenly halted, Ghost followed suit, and Charlotte almost tipped out of the saddle. “Stay here,” he said, and pulled out his dagger.
Charlotte watched his back as he stealthily moved through the tall grasses, like a cat stalking a mouse. Looking at his graceful form, Charlotte didn’t envy the mouse, or whatever it was that caught his attention.
From her vantage point on top of Ghost, she tried to see what had suddenly turned Fawkes into his Cloaked Shadow persona. You forgot your cloak, she wanted to yell at him, certain that he was overreacting. They hadn’t seen a single soul since leaving the trading village, and they were on a little-used back road. The armies that pursued them were behind them, not ahead. Fawkes had told her that they wouldn’t come across any more villages this close to the border. Years of warring in the past had turned it into a dead zone. Citizens from both countries feared that the ground was either cursed or haunted, and no one dared to live there anymore.
Fawkes shrank in the distance, and Charlotte saw he had reached a dark lump, which lay off to the side of the path. A rustle to her left caught Charlotte’s attention. Ghost’s ears pulled back flat against his head, and he snorted nervously. However, his four feet remained flat on the ground, as if not willing to move a muscle unless explicitly told.
“Wait,” Charlotte told him, and slid off his back to investigate the noise. It’s probably a deer, she thought. It sounded bigger than a rabbit. From the depths of the dense grasses, a blur launched itself toward Charlotte. She let out a scream and stumbled backward to avoid the animal’s attack.
Except it wasn’t an animal. Though covered in blood and dirt, the creature that lunged again for her was most decidedly a wiry and, despite his numerous injuries, agile man.
Ghost reared up, deadly hooves slashing the air and coming down inches from the feral stranger. Dodging the horse distracted the man just enough for Charlotte to get her bearings. She braced her stance, and when he ran for her again, she shoved her fist into his face.
A sickening crunch filled her ears as her hand collided with his nose. The added momentum of his forward attack, and his unfortunate assumption that his victim didn’t know how to land a punch, knocked him out cold. He fell straight backward onto the ground with a thud.
At the same time, Charlotte let out a howl, cradling a hand that felt like it was on fire. Her vision tunneled from the pain, and her legs nearly gave out while she held onto consciousness. Charlotte was so focused on her own agony that she barely heard the shouts from up the road. Raising watery eyes, she saw Fawkes sprinting toward them.
Charlotte swore she saw relief replace terror on his face as he immediately analyzed the situation. He was over to her side in a flash, gently prying her injured hand from where she cradled it against her chest. With a feather light touch, he examined it thoroughly. Still, Charlotte couldn’t help the wincing at the contact. “Bruised,” he pronounced.
“Not broken?” she gasped.
“No. Though I’m surprised, considering our friend’s condition, here.” He kicked the man in disgust.
Charlotte regained her breath. “Who is he?” she managed to ask.
“Highway robber, I would wager. There is an overturned carriage up the road. All the travelers are dead, but they put up a good fight. A good number of robbers are lying next to them. If I had had any idea there were more, I would not have left you here…” He looked at her, frowning, regret written on his face.
“I handled it.” She managed to stand up straight to face Fawkes. “Maybe next time, you should just take me with you.”
“Next time?” He almost cracked a smile at her, but then busied himself with the body on the ground. “He still breathes,” he observed, “but we cannot leave any witnesses behind.”
“I thought you didn’t kill people?”
“I don’t kill people when it isn’t necessary. This is necessary.”
Charlotte didn’t argue with him. She knew it would have been stupid to leave the man alive. After all, he attacked her and would have stolen Ghost. His desperation and injuries made for a deadly combination, and she was lucky to have escaped without a scratch, minus a swollen hand. It could have been so much worse, a possibility Fawkes must have recognized, considering how fast he ran back to her.
“Take Ghost up the road. I will follow behind in a moment,” Fawkes told her.
Charlotte and Ghost were almost to the carriage crash site when Fawkes appeared beside her. She noticed the blood on his hands and his tunic but said nothing more about it. She wondered how many men he had killed, and if this one was just another number to add to his count. Did he remember everyone he killed? Was that why he only did it when it was necessary? Charlotte wondered if Fawkes had cut the man’s throat, and if the robber had woken up once he felt the cool blade of the dagger on his skin. Did Fawkes look him in the eyes as he killed him? She gave an involuntary shudder and decided maybe she didn’t want answers to her questions after all.
Still, she couldn’t squelch her morbid curiosity as she walked by the splintered carriage and examined the disaster. Bodies littered the site, the differences between the robbers and the wealthy riders immediately apparent. The robbers were skin and bones, their clothes in tatters,
hanging off of their filthy bodies. The finery of the wealthy victims was a stark contrast, each vest or shoe or corset worth more than a month’s worth of food for the robbers.
A lump formed in Charlotte’s throat. What a waste, she thought, so much needless death.
Fawkes strode over to one of the bodies. He began to strip the modest but clean apparel off a slender young man. He wasn’t a wealthy member of the family, nor was he a dirty robber. The driver, or servant perhaps? Charlotte wondered. Whoever he was, he at least deserved some dignity in death. “Stop! Why are you doing that?”
Fawkes ignored her, taking the britches off the boy, followed by his tunic. “You need clothes. This boy no longer does.”
“Well—you can’t just—” Charlotte tried to come up with an excuse and failed. She couldn’t voice how much she did not want to wear a dead man’s clothes. Fawkes would scoff at her if she said it made her squeamish. The words he had said to her still rang in her ears—You could not endure my world. This was the reality of his world, and she needed to face it.
His next words, though, made her forget all about the origin of her new outfit. “You can’t very well train in that dress, can you?” He said it so casually that Charlotte had to clarify.
“You’ll train me?” she asked, stunned.
“We will see how you do in the coming days. If we get to the border and I am not convinced of your skills, then we will part ways.” He paused, as if hesitating to continue his thoughts. “You have good instincts,” he told her. “And courage.”
At his words, Charlotte’s heart swelled with pride. She couldn’t keep the grin off of her face when she asked, “When do we start?”
“Tomorrow. The swelling in your hand needs to go down, and we need to put more distance between us and the highway robbery. This road is no longer secure.”
“What’s our new course?”
“Around the valley, instead of through it. It will add additional time to our journey, but I do not want any more surprises.”
An extra few days? Darn, Charlotte thought with a grin. Her good mood almost made up for the fact that her injured hand emitted its own heat source. The throbbing, swollen limb pulsed in time with her own heartbeat, but at that moment, the punch was completely worth it.
****
After Fawkes redirected them onto a new trajectory, they finally came across a shallow stream, just as afternoon turned into evening. “That’s far enough. We will camp here for the night.”
Charlotte went to the stream in a flash, plunging her hands into the cool water and splashing her face. The sweat from her skin tingled on her lips as she licked the salt off. She resisted the urge to walk all the way in and submerge herself under the surface.
Fawkes, understanding the desperation in her actions, reached into a saddlebag and threw the new clothes at her. “Bathe and change,” he instructed. “I will hunt for dinner.” He headed upstream and out of sight.
Charlotte waited a few minutes until she was sure Fawkes wasn’t going to return, and stripped out of her dress. A pang of regret hit her as she watched the last reminder of her old life crumple to the ground. A sensation of absolute bliss replaced that feeling as she entered the water. A groan escaped her lips as the water lapped up her sore feet and calves. She waded in until the water touched the top of her thighs, at the deepest point of the creek.
She took a deep breath, crouched down, and felt the water envelop her completely. Bubbles streamed from her mouth and nose, but Charlotte stayed under for as long as her burning lungs would allow. When she finally broke the surface, clean for the first time since leaving her home, she felt as though her soul had been scrubbed as well as her body. The old Charlotte, along with her past and sadness, washed away downstream. She lingered a few moments longer, relaxing in the current, thinking about Fawkes and the circumstances that brought her to this exact moment in time. Her new life might not have been what she expected, but she embraced it now. She had been given a second chance.
Charlotte stood up and made her way to the bank. Still dripping as she put on the dry clothes, she gave silent thanks that they didn’t have any blood on them from the previous owner. Fawkes had been very careful not to soil them.
After tending to Ghost and setting up the rest of their camp, Charlotte was just beginning to wonder where Fawkes had disappeared to when he popped out in front of her.
Charlotte yelped. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?” He innocently held out two fish.
“Sneak up on people like that. Move without any noise.”
“Practice.”
“Will you teach me?”
“That comes later.” Fawkes chopped the heads off of their dinner. “No fire tonight,” he said. “We are too exposed.” He tossed the fish to Charlotte. “Finish gutting these; we can eat them raw. I’m going for a wash.”
Charlotte realized that he was just as sweaty and uncomfortable as she had been but had pushed it aside to make sure she didn’t need to eat jerky again for dinner. “Thank you,” she said, as he walked downstream.
He kept his pace, so she didn’t think he heard her, until he said, “The britches suit you better than the dress ever did.”
The next morning, Charlotte awoke to a repetitive, grinding sound. The scraping of rocks on rocks was incessant, and she sat up in irritation. Her swollen hand kept her awake long after she had gone to bed, and now the sun had not even crested the horizon, yet she was being forced from her slumber.
“What are you doing?” She suppressed a yawn to keep her tone sharp.
“Come here,” Fawkes said. He sat wrapped up in his cloak, the wetness on his boots testified that he had been up and about in the pre-dawn morning for some time. In between his legs sat a flat stone, and on it was a kind of greenish sludge. Fawkes worked the material back and forth with a stream-rounded stone, grinding it to a smooth paste.
She made her way over to him, wiping sleep out of her eyes and shivering in the gray chill. Parts of her old dress, now torn into strips, lay beside him. The fabric was damp, as though it had been recently washed.
Fawkes used his fingers to scoop the poultice onto one of the strips, spreading it out evenly. “Hold out your hand.” She felt immediate bliss as the cold compress wrapped around her skin and a groan escaped her lips. Working quickly, Fawkes bound the injury from her second knuckles down to her wrist, rendering it immobile as he secured the trailing edge of the bandage.
“Better?” he asked.
“You couldn’t have done that last night?”
“I stumbled upon the materials this morning. Usually crestwood refuses grow this far east.”
Reprieved from pain, Charlotte didn’t question him further. Obviously, he knew what he was doing, but Fawkes’ extensive knowledge of medicinal plants surprised her. She sniffed at the bandage. Charlotte had used crestwood in the past, but she had a suspicion that it wasn’t just crestwood in the poultice. There was something else added to the mix, but Fawkes wasn’t willing to let her in on the secret.
Interrupting her thoughts, Fawkes said, “Go find us something to eat.”
Charlotte’s eyebrows shot up. “But I’ve never hunted before. Or fished.” She held up her wrapped hand. “Plus, I’ve only got one good arm.”
“You said you wanted me to train you. Be my apprentice. Well, here is the first lesson. Go catch us some breakfast.” He tossed his dagger at her feet. “Gut and scale them before you come back.”
She bent down to pick up the deadly blade, the same blade that had killed a man just the day before. Wondering if that even bothered him, she shoved the dagger into her belt and headed upstream.
The icy water had felt so refreshing the day before, but now it felt like needles pricking her tender skin. Maneuvering slowly so she wouldn’t scare her potential prey, she waded in up to her knees. At first, she couldn’t see anything. The sun had just started to peek over the horizon, casting shadows and sending shimmering sparkles across the water.
Charlotte lowered her uninjured hand down to the surface of the water before pausing. Crouching, she waited until one of the bigger fish drifted directly underneath her ready palm. “Got you!” she exclaimed, her triumph creating a massive splash that soaked her pants up to her rear. Her excitement disappeared when she came up empty handed. “Bugger.”
Again she waited, muscles tensed to spring. Waiting for the right moment tried her patience, and she came up short when another opportunity presented itself. I’m just too slow, she thought, discouraged. Again and again she missed, until her body was soaking wet and her teeth were chattering.
In her final attempt, she reached down to grab the biggest fish she had seen yet, only to have Fawkes’ hand hold her wrist steady. “Watch,” he told her. Somehow he had managed to sneak up behind her from the bank without her noticing. Charlotte winced. Obliviousness was not a good way to start an apprenticeship.
With his other hand, Fawkes dangled his fingers lazily through the water, looking like delicious bait. Curious fish nibbled on the tips, but still he waited to make his move. It wasn’t until the largest fish was within his grasp did he strike.
The flapping fish was hauled out of the water, spraying the pair and trying in vain to wiggle free. Fawkes held onto the tail, gaze boring into Charlotte’s with a look of nonchalance. Wonderful, she thought. At least we get to eat.
Fawkes bent down, and with a gentle motion that gave no reminder of his initial yank, set the fish free. At her disbelieving stare, he raised an eyebrow. “You took too long. No time to prepare it.”
When they got back to Ghost, Fawkes reached into the saddlebag and pulled out two pieces of jerky. He tossed her one, and bit into the other. “There are many miles to walk today. We are already late.”