No. His best option was to push through for as long as he could, even if it was only a couple more days. With any small amount of luck he’d manage to stumble across something or someone that could help him find his way to more agreeable environments. He’d been traveling for days. In the Cienbal that was one thing, but in a place as green and rich as these woods there had to be some sort of community nearby somewhere. Worst case, if he didn’t make it, he’d build a bonfire to keep warm until he could go through with option two.
Raz grimaced at the image of himself hunting foals, or whatever the damn animals were called, in a foot of snow in the middle of winter. He’d never seen snow, but Agais had made it pretty clear that it was both wet and cold, a miserable, miserable combination.
For the love of all that is warm and living! Raz prayed half sarcastically, half desperately to the flashes of bright Sun he could see through the trees. Give me SOMETHING better than a frozen death!
“Arrun! W-wait! I-I can’t—can’t keep up!”
Arrun Koyt stopped running and turned around. Lueski was struggling along behind him, one hand pressed against a stitch in her side as the other pushed off every tree she passed to gain her a moment’s rest. She was gasping for breath, but so was Arrun, and his rush to his younger sister’s side was more fueled by desperation than anything as he lifted her into his arms.
“Come on, just a little more! I’m sure we’ve almost lost them!”
It was a lie, but as he took off again, carrying the exhausted girl, Arrun knew it was the only thing he could say. They’d been running for three days now, barely stopping to rest or eat, and for a while he thought they’d gotten off free.
Then one of the dogs had found their tiny campsite, and they’d been forced to abandon what few supplies they had been able to make off with and start running again. Arrun had managed to lose the dog, but that didn’t mean the others wouldn’t pick up on their scent soon after.
“Only a little more, Lueski,” he whispered quietly as they ran. “Just a little longer.”
The girl, too tired to respond properly, nodded sluggishly. Barely eight years old, she was as adorable as they came. Her blue eyes and black hair had caught the attention of many a customer along their little bread tables in Azbar, and her child’s smile almost always ended with an extra copper as a tip.
She was too young to be cut down as cheap entertainment.
Arrun, though… Arrun couldn’t care less what happened to him. He was the idiot who had gotten them into this mess. When money had started getting tight in the middle of the last freeze, it was he who had decided to go to the loaners and borrow the gold necessary to get through the last few months.
I could have worked harder, he cursed himself. I could have done SOMETHING. Instead, I do this…
They were running because of him. He’d tried to offer himself up willingly, but the council had decreed that his outstanding debt demanded the recruitment of both he and his sister.
Lueski, who wasn’t even old enough to understand exactly why they were on the run.
“Over my dead fucking body,” Arrun had told them, and he and Lueski had taken off before the guards could come to collect. Kal had taken them in, even insisted they stay until everything blew over, but Arrun had insisted on running.
Just another thing he’d messed up.
“Just a little further, Sis,” he said again in between gasps of breath. “Almost there.”
It was an endless flurry of forest. Trees whipped by to their right and left, spiny leaves catching the pair across chests, arms, and faces as they ran. Great boulders blocked their path in many places, and the slope of hills was far more common than flat ground, resulting in more than one stumbling trip. Lueski was sobbing outright now, but just as Arrun opened his mouth again to comfort her, he heard it.
The baying of the hunting hounds, devilishly close behind them.
“Run, Lueski!” Arrun screamed, halting and dropping the girl on her feet, shoving her forward as he snatched a thick branch from the ground nearby.
“N-no!” Lueski yelled, turning to her brother. “You can’t! Arrun—!”
But she stopped. Arrun was standing with his back to her, legs set and both hands shaking as he held the branch stiffly before him, brandishing it like a sword. For just a second he looked over his shoulder and gave the best smile he could.
“Go,” he said, throwing her a roguish, sad wink. “I’ll catch up when I’m through here.”
Lueski could feel the tears streaming from her eyes, stinging the cold skin of her cheeks. She would have argued, but the look on her brother’s face as he turned away from her told her it wouldn’t matter. He was willing to make a stand here so that she could live, and she wasn’t about to let him throw away his life in vain.
She gave the smallest of smiles towards the boy’s back.
“I love you, Arrun,” she said. Then she turned and fled, dashing through the trees again. She was too far away to hear it by the time her brother’s broken voice responded.
“I love you too, Sis.”
Raz was seriously reconsidering his earlier choice. Even though the temperature had actually risen a few degrees since that morning, his feet were so cold each step had progressed from painful to agonizing, then numb of all feeling, a sensation he didn’t enjoy in the least. His wings and hands weren’t much better off, and he shivered as he pulled the thin cloak tighter around his lean, scaly body.
“Sh-should have taken the time t-to make this a little warmer, huh, Ahna?” he muttered to the dviassegai still slung over his shoulder with a laugh. “W-would have been worth the d-delay.”
I’ve become that fool who talks to himself in the streets, Raz thought with a snort, carefully navigating around a narrow brook that already had hints of frost biting at its shallow edges. Or the woods, rather. Damn it all, how could it possibly get colder than this?
But he knew it would. The Arros had educated all their children well, and Raz understood fully that water froze and snow formed only once the temperatures dropped past a certain point. And, as he’d seen no snow and the few rivers and streams he had seen were still flowing strong, it meant that this was only the beginning of what Raz was starting to think was going to be a very long few months for him.
“By the time I c-crawl out of my hole, I’ll be t-trying to bleedin’ feed you,” he muttered to Ahna, annoyed. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re a great listener, Sis, but your ability to h-hold a conversation is somewhat l-lacking.”
I’m going mad.
Raz laughed out loud at the trees, then cringed and swore as his numb toe caught an extending root and shot a hot bolt of pain up his left leg.
“DAMN. IT. ALL!” he yelled, dropping Ahna and the supplies and limping to lean against the trunk of the pine who’d abused him. “I thought I would enjoy this? Really? If this is what you have to offer me, you—!”
Raz let out a fluid stream of every curse he knew, including the few old desert ones he’d once conned the Grandmother into teaching him. His rant went on for nearly a minute, and he was so busy venting to the empty woods that he almost didn’t notice the sounds that eventually tore him away from his anger. It was faint at first, the source still a ways away, but Raz froze to listen harder as he realized what it was.
Someone, or something, was running full tilt through the forest right at him.
In a blurred instant, Raz “the lost and angry wanderer” disappeared, and Raz i’Syul Arro came rushing to the surface. Kneeling down without taking his eyes away from the direction in which the noises were approaching, he opened the supply sack and grabbed the handles of his gladius and war ax, pulling them out. He would have preferred Ahna, but as she was tangled up in the straps of the bag he didn’t have much of a choice. As he stood up, though, Raz realized the smaller weapons were probably a better choice anyway. His hands were so cold he could barely hold on to the grips with enough strength to wield them efficiently.
Combine that with the dvi
assegai’s weight, and it might have spelled bad news.
Pushing those thoughts away, Raz cocked his head to the side to listen. Whatever it was that was coming towards him, it wasn’t slowing down. He couldn’t tell how big it was, nor if it was human or animal, as it was thrashing around too much for him to make sense of its bearing. As it got closer, he started to hear fast, rasping gasps, and after another few seconds thought he heard whimpering.
Is it injured? he thought, relaxing a little as he continued to scour in underbrush in the direction the thing was coming from. Maybe some wounded animal trying to escape…
Whatever it was, as it got closer and closer, Raz was almost positive it wasn’t human. No person could make that much noise unless they were sprinting absolutely haphazardly through the trees, running through anything that got in their way rather than dodging around it.
Maybe it’s a foal! a sudden, oddly elated voice piped up abruptly in the back of Raz’s mind. Shoving it back, too, he waited, hood up and weapons raised in a defensive stance, ready for the worst.
It was therefore that, when a little girl about half his height came crashing out from between the trees, Raz was taken so off guard that he let her plow right into him.
The girl screamed as she bounced off his waist, tumbling to the ground and sobbing.
“No! NO! DON’T TAKE ME! PLEASE DON’T—!”
And then she stopped yelling, because she’d looked up enough to see the face that hid under Raz’s hood. There was a pause where the look on the girl’s features shifted from terrified shock to utter horror, and Raz knew what she was going to do the moment before it happened.
“No, don’t—!” he yelped, dropping his weapons, but too late.
The girl opened her mouth and shrieked, a sharp, keening screech so loud a group of winter crows pecking about in the nearby shrubbery took off in fright.
V
RAZ FELL to one knee by the screaming child and clapped a hand over her mouth firmly, shutting her up.
“SHH! SHHHH!” he whispered urgently. “If someone is chasing you, the last thing you want to do is lead them straight here! SHH!”
It had occurred to Raz before, when his plans to escape northward first started to form, that there were some flaws to his schemes. Chief among them: he doubted many people in the North had ever dealt with or encountered the atherian.
This meant that he wouldn’t have the same familiarity with the strangers he met in the forested scapes of this realm as he did with those of Miropa and the other fringe cities. While he was despised by as many people in the sandy plains as by those who appreciated his work, he did, at least, have a reputation there which meant he avoided the awkward exchange of introductions.
Awkward exchanges exactly like this one.
“My name is Raz,” he whispered hurriedly. “I know I probably frighten you, and that you’ve likely never seen one of my kind, but I’m not going to hurt you. I’m atherian. Do you know what atherian means?”
The girl hesitated, her bright blue eyes frozen on his amber ones. Then, slowly, she nodded.
“Good,” Raz breathed. “Now, I’m going to take my hand away, but only if you promise me you won’t scream again. Do you promise?”
This time the hesitation was only brief, and she nodded again. Slowly Raz lifted his hand from her mouth, letting go of her completely. Immediately she started sobbing again, but held her word and kept the noise to a minimum, curling up into a ball on the mossy forest floor and wrapping her arms around her legs. Raz scooted back a step, still on one knee, just to make sure she knew he wasn’t there to hurt her.
“Are you all right?” he asked after a moment. “What happened? Why were you running?”
The child shook her head rapidly, sobbing a little louder.
“No!” she hissed at no one in particular, squeezing her eyes shut tight. “No!”
“It’s fine, you don’t have to tell me,” Raz said quickly. “I just need to know if you were followed. Are there men chasing you?”
This time the girl nodded once, very briefly, like she was trying hard not to think about whatever Raz’s questions were prodding her towards.
“Are they trying to hurt you?”
Another nod.
“How many are there?”
A shake.
Raz sighed, standing up and listening again. He couldn’t hear anything nearby, but the trees made it harder than he was used to. The only reason he’d made out the girl was because she’d been thrashing through the underbrush like a madwoman.
For good reason, apparently, Raz thought, looking back at her. She was shaking, still huddled in her tiny ball. Her clothes, once a decent set by the looks of them, were ripped and muddy. Dirt spattered every inch of her bare skin. Leaves and twigs stuck out from her messy black hair, and her fingers were somewhere between white and blue from the cold.
She must have been out here for as long as I have…
Raz’s eyes narrowed as he tried listening harder, but still nothing, not a hint of trouble, snuck through the thickness of the woods. He was about to turn around, intent on grabbing his things to make another fire, when the girl spoke of her own accord.
“Help…” she whispered, so quietly Raz doubted he would have heard had he been human. “Help… please.”
Moving to kneel beside her again, he tilted his head to look her in the face evenly.
“I’m going to,” he said softly. “Let’s get you warmed up, okay? I’m going to go find some wood. You just—”
“No,” she interrupted, opening her eyes and looking up at him. “My brother… Help my brother.”
Raz was quiet for a moment, studying her face before speaking.
“I can try, but for that you need to tell me exactly what’s going on. Do you understand?”
The girl nodded. After another moment she seemed to calm minutely, letting go of her knees to push herself shakily up.
“L-Lueski,” she started, her voice breaking. “I-I’m Lueski. My brother Arrun and I had a shop in A-Azbar, but we didn’t have enough money so bad men from the town took it. They were going to take us, too, but Arrun wouldn’t let them. H-he—”
“Wait,” Raz cut in. His body had experienced a jolting chill that had nothing to do with the cold. “What do you mean, ‘take you’? What was the town going to do with you?”
“The Arena,” Lueski whispered in a frightened hiss. “They take the people who don’t have enough money and make them fight each other. I don’t like it… I don’t want to fight!”
For just a moment the world went silent as the girl started to cry again, and Raz could hear the blood rushing through his ears, hear his breathing in his chest.
A little girl… They would use a little girl for pit fights? What kind of place had he come to? He’d left the South to escape this sort of horror.
Just as he felt the balance tip again, felt that fragile conscience he’d spent the last two weeks piecing back together start to crack, Raz shook himself free.
“Your brother, Lueski,” he said urgently. “What happened to your brother?”
The little girl hiccupped and rubbed her eyes, trying to stop her crying.
“They sent men after us. Big men. Angry men with mean dogs. Ar-Arrun stayed back to try and stop them.”
She looked up at Raz, her eyes swimming.
“He’s gonna die!”
There was another moment’s silence as Raz contemplated her words. He didn’t have as many details as he would have liked, but if the child was right, then they didn’t have a lot of time. Standing, Raz moved to pick up his gladius and war ax from the ground where he’d dropped them. Turning them over in his hands, he loosened stiffened wrists.
“Lueski,” he said, “you need to take me to him.”
“You think we’re daft, boy? We know there was two of ya’ this mornin’ at that camp of yours! Where’s yer sister? Spit it out!”
There was a smack and a cry of pain through the trees, and Raz got his ha
nd around Lueski’s mouth just in time to keep her from gasping in fright. He was listening, trying to make out as many details of the scene just beyond the tree line as he could without showing himself.
They’d traveled fast, Lueski guiding him back surprisingly well. He’d have liked to bring Ahna and the last of his supplies, but the need for haste had forced him to leave them, marking the path to find them later.
Listening now, he knew he’d made the right call.
“I told you,” an exhausted, falsely fearless young voice retorted. “I don’t know where she’s at. Lost her two hours ago at the river. Stupid girl probably drowned for all I care.”
“He’s only trying to set them off track,” Raz whispered as Lueski’s eyes grew wide and hurt. “He just doesn’t want them to find you.”
“Right…” the first voice, an older man’s, picked up again sarcastically. “Which is why Morty here’s picked up a trail headin’ south an’ west. Ain’t that right, Morty?”
In response a dog snarled, and at least three or four men laughed as the second voice, Lueski’s brother, yelped.
“Just tell us where she’s goin’, Arrun,” the bounty hunter’s voice growled in wicked amusement, “and I promise I won’t set the hounds on her when we catch up. Deal?”
“Lueski,” Raz whispered sternly. “Stay. Here. Do not move. Got it?”
The terrified girl nodded and, as soon as he was sure she wouldn’t budge, Raz stood up to make his way through the last few paces between the pines. The dogs must have smelled him first, because they started growling in unison before he even stepped into the small clearing the group was standing in.
A young man with blond hair—Arrun, Raz assumed—was on the ground, right leg torn and bloodied by one of the hunting hounds, his back pressed against the stump of a tree that had rotted away years ago. Three men and their hounds stood nearby, dressed in thick trapper’s furs with an assortment of swords, bows, and daggers hanging from backs and belts. A fourth stood over Arrun, the meanest looking of the lot. This man turned at the dogs’ warnings, his own animal held by a chain wrapped around his hand, and Raz took in the scruffy beard and scarred face at a glance.
The Warring Son (The Wings of War Book 2) Page 4