by Kaylin Lee
He was torn. I could sense it, could read it in his eyes. I held his gaze steadily. “I can handle this,” I said again. “And you can trust me, Wolf. No one wants this more than I do. I won’t let you down.”
His whole body tensed. He gripped the hilt of his knife but didn’t unsheathe it. “This is crazy. I shouldn’t be—” He shook his head and broke off mid-sentence. “I can’t.”
The way his voice faded made the phrase sound more like a question to me.
“You can.” I edged closer and placed a gentle hand on his arm. “You must.”
I thought he would pull away, but he didn’t. This close, he smelled of wood smoke and earth. I searched his face, finally close enough to see the details of his features beneath the hood. His eyes were black and heavy-lidded, the bridge of his nose oddly uneven. A scruffy beard covered his cheeks and jaw, thick enough to obscure his bone structure. He was half a head taller than me, but twice as broad and heavily muscled. I kept my hand on his arm and silently willed him to yield. He felt about as solid and stubborn as a boulder, but somehow, for several tense breaths, he didn’t push my hand away.
Then he did. “Fine.”
“What?” The word had been so quiet, I barely heard it.
“I said, fine,” he growled. “I’ll take you to Draicia. If you survive the journey, you’ll have to enter the city and do your investigation on your own. I can’t risk anyone discovering that I’m the one who brought you there.”
I felt a genuine smile light my face, the first one in days. “Thank you! You won’t be sorry, sir. I promise you that.” Then his words fully registered, and I felt my smile fade. “But I thought you were our source. That’s not … How do you expect me to find this mysterious story unless you provide information and assistance?”
He seemed to be gritting his teeth. “I’ll help where I can. Without being seen.”
“And you’ll inform where you can? I need facts to guide the investigation.”
“No.” He raised his eyebrows slightly, as though challenging me to disagree after my show of confidence. “I’m highly ranked in our clan. If I give you information and my clansmen read your article, they’ll suspect I was the one who provided it. I can’t let that happen. You’ll have to find the facts on your own.” He paused a beat. “The way you have for countless criminals, right?”
I swallowed. The whole reason Grandmother had sent me out here was because we finally had a Wolf clan source! But what choice did I have? We needed whatever cooperation he was willing to offer. It wasn’t as though we had any other Draician leads. “Right.” I could only hope that whatever secret assistance he planned to offer would be enough.
“So …” I gestured toward my pack, which rested on the ground beside us where he’d dumped it after inspecting it for weapons. “I’m packed. Ready to go. Where is your fomecoach?”
His lips twitched. “What fomecoach?”
I gestured toward the road. “For the trip to Draicia.” He continued to smirk. “The drive will be a long one, won’t it? I’ve heard the Badlands are rough, but …” I squared my shoulders. “I’m prepared for whatever comes.”
The Wolf’s eyes crinkled. “There’s no fomecoach, Ruby from the Asylian Herald. I couldn’t get one out of the city without drawing attention. We’re walking.”
He turned and strode away, melting into the darkness almost immediately.
I stared into the void as his words slowly sank in. “Walking?” I’d studied maps before leaving Asylia. The road to Draicia took at least a day and a half in a sturdy fomewagon. How long would it take to hike that distance? Days? Weeks? And he wasn’t even following the road! “Wait!”
Ignoring the fact that every instinct was telling me to cower next to the locked city gate until dawn, I grabbed my pack and started off in the direction he’d gone.
The moon came out from behind the clouds, and I could just make out the Wolf’s shape in the distance. Leaving my sanity behind, I blew on my cold hands and followed him into the night.
Chapter 7
The moon was almost all the way across the sky by the time we finally stopped to rest. I was certain we’d walked the entire night, but when we reached the edge of a cluster of dry trees, the Wolf stopped and pulled off his own pack. “Get out your bedroll,” he said gruffly. “We’ll catch a few hours of sleep here, then keep pushing.”
Finally. I sat down hard, or maybe I collapsed, my pack still clamped onto my shoulders like a vice. “Bedroll?” My feet throbbed in the lace-up boots, and my shoulders ached from the weight of the pack. I couldn’t shake a strong desire to simply burst into tears. I put that down to the exhaustion, and not the fact that I was in a vast wasteland, in the middle of the night, dependent on the goodwill of a criminal for my survival.
A criminal who wants to do the right thing. Remember that part.
I struggled out of the pack and let it crash onto its side next to me.
“Bedroll.” The Wolf removed a neat, cylindrical bundle from the underside of his pack.
I squinted at his gear. It certainly looked like a roll of some kind. “What’s that?”
“Bedding. Pad to sleep on. Blanket.” I could feel his judgment. “You brought something to sleep on, right?”
I thought we’d only be spending one night out here! “I planned to sleep in your fomecoach.” More silent judgment. I forced my sore body toward my pack. “But I think I remember seeing Sebastian put a blanket in here somewhere.” I rummaged halfheartedly through the top of the pack. “Yes!” My fingers brushed the unmistakable, scratchy fabric of my jacket. I needed that way more than I needed a blanket anyway.
“Keep your voice down,” he hissed.
I stilled, my jacket halfway out of my pack. “Is someone else out here?” I whispered. I held my breath, straining my ears to try to identify any sounds beneath the constant shushing of the cold wind.
The Wolf finally moved, setting his bundle down and spreading it into a lumpy-looking bed. “There’s always someone out here,” he said, his voice quiet. “Someone or something.” He stretched out on the bedroll, but his eyes glinted in the starlight. “Sleep well.” He pulled his hood low over his eyes.
Sleep well. Ha. So, the scary, boulder-like man had a sense of humor. Wonderful. I wrapped myself in the jacket and buttoned every button, ducking my head down so it reached nearly to my nose. I lay down on the dirty, dusty ground, contorting my body so I wasn’t resting on any rocks. The ground was even less comfortable than my dormitory bed, and that was saying something. But closer to the ground, the wind wasn’t so bad.
I was hungry, sore, cold, and terrified. In fact, I’d been frightened for so many hours in a row by now, the vibrating anxiety in my limbs was beginning to feel normal.
I shut my eyes. Mage Fortis smiling at me over her patron’s shoulder. What do you say, Ruby? Will you join us? Sunlight streaming through high windows. The scent of goldblossom perfume. Finally being at home among people who cared for me, who genuinely wanted me with them.
I felt myself drifting off to sleep within minutes, proving to myself, once again, that I was capable of enduring anything if I wanted to badly enough.
~
“Up.” Something jostled my shoulder, pulling me from a deep, numbing sleep. “Get up. Time to go.”
I blinked. The gray, pre-dawn light hammered mercilessly against my tired eyes. “Already?” My voice was scratchy and dry. I sat up. My pack stood upright beside me, looking oddly small. I put a hand on the pack and felt it give beneath my pressure. “Um … where is all my gear?”
“Badlanders.”
I squinted up at the hooded man in front of me, who was tugging on his own pack, his shoulders tense. My heartbeat stuttered. “Badlanders came here?”
“Not yet. But they might. We should go.”
I stood and rubbed my shoulders. “But where are my things?”
In the early-morning light, the Wolf’s skin was dark bronze, his hair shaggy beneath his charcoal gray hood. H
is clothes were dark, sturdy, and thick but covered with dust and mud-stains. His eyes were dark and unsmiling. “I went through your pack. You shouldn’t have brought that nice gear out here. Especially not the victus.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You took it? Why?” It was a good thing I’d stuffed Grandmother’s stipend envelope in my boot, or he’d probably have taken that too.
He adjusted his pack’s straps. “It’s too nice.”
“Too … nice?” I thought of the pile of dusty odds and ends I’d seen on the outfitter’s counter before Grandmother and Sebastian stuffed it into the pack. Nice was not the word I would have chosen to describe it. “That doesn’t make sense.”
The Wolf huffed out an annoyed breath. “You don’t look like a Badlander. If they see you and see your gear, they’ll figure out you’re a rich Asylian.” He frowned. “Or are you a Westerner?”
I lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t know about rich. And I’m Asylian, not Western,” I added. “At least, not for generations.”
He met my eyes, his expression unreadable. “Regardless, they’ll take your gear.”
“Oh.” I bit my lip. Still, how was I supposed to survive out here without my things? “But—”
“Or they’ll take you.”
“Me?”
“They’ll figure you’re worth something in Asylia.” His expression was stoic and his tone matter-of-fact, at odds with his chilling words. “They’ll take you and your fancy gear together. Then they’ll sell you back to whoever loves you.”
“I see.” A strange weight pressed against my chest. “How do you know? And are these Badlanders coming now?”
The Wolf frowned. “Get your pack on.”
I fumbled with its straps and pulled it on over my thick coat, my shoulders aching but relieved at the lighter weight of the pack.
He jerked his head. “Let’s go.”
I followed him from the small copse of dead trees. The dry plains stretched out before us, broken up by low ridges and clusters of skeletal trees like the one where we’d spent the night. There was no hint of life—no Badlanders, no animals, no water.
My belly growled as we walked, and my throat was parched. No water sloshed in my pack, which meant he must have taken my canteen. How was I supposed to mix victus without water? Right, he’d taken my victus, too.
I shook my head. We’d sort food and drink out when we stopped. I needed a chance to inspect whatever gear he had left in my pack.
The sky was a pale gray that pressed against my tired eyes and made my head hurt. The wind twisted the dust into cloudy swirls across the craggy landscape, and though I wanted to hate it, the dusty swirls had their own subtle beauty. The air was cool but warmer than it had been last night. I peered through the haze at the horizon. “What’s that, in the distance?”
The Wolf paused as I caught up to him. “The Gold Hills. We’ll find tree cover and water once we get closer. Badlanders, too.”
I frowned. The peaks to the north of us were low compared to the towering mountain peaks of the West, or so I’d read, but they still looked steep and difficult to climb. “Why aren’t we taking the road?” According to the map, the road plowed straight through the northern hills with knife-like precision, a path cleared two centuries earlier by mages on trade caravans.
“Too easy.” The Wolf resumed his bruising pace, and I scrambled in his path.
“I know I’m Asylian,” I bit out, my simmering frustration welling over for a moment. “That doesn’t mean you have to make everything more difficult than it needs to be. Believe it or not, just being out here is challenge enough.” I felt my cheeks flush as the rude words spilled out. It wasn’t like me to speak so harshly. I blamed my empty stomach.
He made a strange noise that might have been a short laugh. Then he waved a hand out at the plains. “You ever wondered how Badlanders survive out here?”
I glanced around, then I focused on my feet so I wouldn’t trip over the uneven ground, as I’d been doing all morning. “Not really,” I said, feeling guilty. “But now that you mention it, I don’t see how anyone could harvest crops without grower mages out here.”
The Wolf cast a glance over his shoulder at me. “So they can’t grow food. Not in many places, at least. And there are no friendly government mages handing out canisters of victus out here.” His tone was dry. “How do they get fed?”
I bit my lip. “The trade caravans. They rob them?”
He nodded shortly and turned away. “That road sees two or three violent clashes every day. Caravan mages and Badlanders do battle over the shipments going between cities, and they don’t care who gets caught in the crossfire. If we take the road, either one of them will make quick work of us and move on without thinking twice.”
His words clicked into place. The Asylian government had guarded the caravans with its own mages ever since the trade routes had reopened. No wonder Prince Estevan’s treasury was always empty. He must have kept the dangers quiet since the city was in such desperate need of trade. “I see. So, we’ll take the harder route, and that way, we won’t be such easy targets.”
“Right. Probably.”
Hopefully. He didn’t say it, but from the skeptical tone in his voice, I caught the meaning just fine.
We hiked in silence for one hour, then another. The sky remained gray and cool. I admired the pretty dust swirls, listened to my stomach gurgle, and tried to ignore the dry, sticky feeling in my mouth.
A low ridge rose up before us, and the Wolf stopped beneath a dead tree at its base.
I heaved a sigh of relief. “Can I please have my water back? And my victus? I’m famished. I didn’t get a chance to eat before I left the city yesterday.”
The Wolf’s brow crinkled, a strange look drifting across his face before his usual bored, heavy-lidded stare returned. “Fine. Quickly.”
I took the water and victus from him and mixed a quick bowl just as I’d done a thousand times while growing up, the habitual, familiar movements an odd comfort out in the wilderness. “Want some?”
His expression was unreadable. “I’ll eat later.”
I nodded and tried not to look happy. I wanted every last bite for myself. A moment later, the victus was gone. I scraped the bowl clean, licked the spoon, and sighed, feeling my lips drift into a smile. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
His lips twitched. “Oh?”
I couldn’t help laughing quietly. “I’m joking, sort of. It’s disgusting. But there’s nothing like the relief of a full belly.” I paused as he frowned. I’m highly ranked in my clan, he’d said the previous night. “I suppose you don’t have to worry about that, do you, Wolf man?” I doubted his belly had ever been empty, growing up in Draicia’s most powerful clan.
He shrugged but didn’t answer.
I sighed and handed him the victus and water again. “Well, thank you,” I said. “Wolf man.”
His eyes crinkled. “Stop calling me that.”
“Sir.”
He scowled. “Not that either. I’m … I’m the same age as you.”
“Also twenty?” I smiled. “And here I thought we had nothing in common.”
“Get your pack on.”
I pulled the pack back onto my sore shoulders. “I can’t call you Wolf man, and I can’t call you sir. What shall I call you, my mysterious, secretive source?”
His gaze searched my face for a long moment, and once again, I had the distinct feeling that I was under evaluation. For some reason, I held my breath.
“You can call me Lucien,” he said at last.
For once, it appeared I’d passed the test.
Chapter 8
“Green! They’re green, aren’t they?” The trees on the northern hills were the first living plants I’d seen since leaving Asylia’s territory. I wanted to sing with happiness.
“Quiet,” Lucien grunted.
“Right. Sorry,” I whispered.
The closer we drew to the hills, the quieter Lucien became.
&n
bsp; Other than the occasional observation, I’d given up trying to draw him into conversation. I just followed him, privately admiring his broad, muscular shoulders, and wondering why they seemed to be growing ever tenser.
He paused long enough for me to come alongside him. “You’re a refugee.”
“What was that?”
He continued walking, his gaze on the hills. “If you run into Badlanders, you’re a refugee. Western. That explains the … pants.” He shot my lower body a concerned look. “And the hair. You’re seeking refuge with your family, already settled in the Badlands.”
I patted my hair self-consciously. “What are you talking about? Won’t you be with me?”
A shadow crossed his face, and my heart skipped a beat at his dour expression. “No.”
“Why?” I squeaked. Stay calm. Be professional. Don’t clutch his coat and beg him not to abandon you alone in this wasteland.
He wouldn’t look at me. “When I came through here on the way to Asylia, I ran into a few groups of Badlanders. They know me, know who I am in the Wolf clan. They can’t see us together. If they do …” He shook his head. “They can’t.”
“But what will I do if they find me?” Panic made my voice shake. The tender sense of safety I’d had ever since my bowl of victus evaporated.
“You’re a refugee from the West,” he said gruffly. “Like I said. You have nothing of value. Your family settled in the hills, and you’re here to find them.”
I tried to squash the panic and focus on his plan instead. “There are Westerners out here in the Badlands?”
He lifted one shoulder. “Heard rumors. No one sees them.”
We walked in silence as I tried to wrap my mind around his instructions. “I don’t know—”
“You have a better plan?”
I tensed at the sudden, sharp words. It was a stark contrast from his usual quiet, matter-of-fact tone.
He shook his head when I didn’t answer. “Didn’t think so.” He scowled. “Just … don’t tell them you’re Asylian. Make sure they know you’ve got family out here, that they’ll be looking out for you, but they’re just as hard up as you are. You’ll … be fine.”