The match sizzles into life. I almost drop it in surprise, but clench my fingertips tighter and cup my other hand to shield the tiny flame from the wind. It seems so fragile, compared with the bombing fires tonight. But this fire is going to save lives rather than destroy them.
I press the match against the fuse. It catches immediately: a rush, a whoosh and then a sparkling trail of flame runs along the wire. I leap across to the turret’s edge and thrust the climbing picks into the crumbling mortar between a pair of bricks. Then I’m over the edge, clambering down the far side of Rourton’s wall. It’s much quicker with the picks to help me, and I’m slipping and huffing down the wall like it’s just another richie’s rooftop.
I glance towards the gate and see that it’s still half-open. The gate is strong but it’s also slow. As I watch, a pair of figures tumble out into the night. Two foxaries, each with two riders dangling from their backs. Two more foxaries burst past them, wild and riderless. Then one last foxary, a single rider on its back, and I’m counting to five in my head with a wild rush of hope. But there are guards behind them, spraying bullets towards the riders, and one of them is about to –
Psshreeeikkkk!
The flare screams into life above me. It’s a fireball upon the turret, squealing and spinning and shooting flames into the night. This is a specially designed guard-tower flare, designed to imprint a golden tattoo upon the sky, but its flames whiz out of sight above the distant trees.
Then there’s a smash of light and sound.
I slip several terrifying metres, but manage to slam one climbing pick back into the mortar. The jolt leaves me breathless, hanging from one arm. Agony tears through my shoulder and I know I’ve dislocated it. This isn’t the first time I’ve suffered a dislocation – and this doesn’t hurt as badly as the first time – but still, my eyes water. I can barely keep myself from screaming in tune with the flare. I thrust the other pick into the mortar and redistribute my weight onto the uninjured arm.
Then I twist towards the gate. The guards have stopped, panicked, and turned towards the flare. It must be an important emergency signal – something that isn’t just fired on a whim – because they’re suddenly as jumpy as seeds in a toasting pan. Some run back inside the city, while others head in my direction. The foxary riders have vanished into the trees, a fact that sends a surge of hot triumph through my body.
But there’s no time to celebrate. The guards have spotted me now – some are pointing up at the wall, loading their rifles. I scramble down even faster, favouring my bad arm. The guards are still too far away to shoot me, but they’re getting closer every second.
Finally, with a reckless leap, I yank my climbing pick from the wall. It’s a four-metre fall, but I angle my body towards a pile of leaf litter. I crash down with a shriek of pain, all the breath knocked from my body. I don’t have time to check for injuries. There’s a second of lying startled in the leaves before I’m up and staggering into the woods.
The guards are only fifty metres away. I plunge through the foliage with shaking legs. I keep tripping, thwacking my numb limbs into trees, but it doesn’t really hurt. The fall has shaken me badly; it feels like my body is a puppet, and I’m a very inept puppeteer who’s struggling to make its limbs work properly. I’ll feel the bruises tomorrow – if I live that long – but for now I’m grateful that the pain’s been put on hold.
My breaths are cold and sharp. I can’t keep this up forever, and I can hear the guards drawing closer. I’ve got to find a hiding place, a way to disguise myself until they blunder past me in the dark. My only luck is that they’re city guards, not used to the foreign environment of Taladia’s woodland. They’re probably just as lost as I am. If they were the king’s hunters, I’d already be dead.
I plough through a thicker crop of trees, struggling not to break too many branches. The last thing I need is to leave a clear trail. A few years ago, a crew of five adults spent almost a week on the run before the hunters caught them. Their only mistake was breaking too many branches. How unfair is that? You struggle halfway across Northern Taladia and then get blasted to scraps because you snapped a few twigs on the way.
Hunters aren’t like city guards. They’re trained for canopies, not cobblestones. They can read your trail like they’re tracking a deer, and they know how to handle the wilderness. When a refugee ends up dead in Rourton Square, you can bet it was a hunter who dragged him back in from the wild. I won’t have long until the hunters are sent for – but in the meantime, I’m going to play this hand for all it’s worth.
Then I spot it. A ditch full of dirty water, frosted over by the chill of the night. The thought of diving into that water – cold, muddy, maybe diseased – makes me hesitate for a second. But I can survive being cold and sick. I can’t survive a bullet through the throat. So I clamber sideways and plunge into the pit.
It’s cold. The shock is worse than falling from the wall, worse than slamming into tree-trunks or slipping down a furious richie’s roof-tiles. It’s like being whacked with a mallet. Every cell in my body screams, and maybe my mouth is screaming too, but all that escapes my lips is a torrent of froth.
I can’t help it. I thrust my head back above the surface and suck down a desperate breath. The guards aren’t in view yet, but I can hear them trampling towards me through the trees. I empty my lungs, then suck down the deepest breath I can manage. It’s not much – my lungs feel as limp as wet fabric – but there’s no time to try again.
I plunge below the waterline, crouching in the mud at the bottom of the ditch. The muck and leaf litter should be enough to hide my body. I clench my eyes shut after a few seconds, because the floating grit makes them sting and I can’t see anyway. Any sounds from the surface are distorted, rippling like a dodgy radio wave.
When I was little, my father had a radio. It was a huge wooden box with copper knobs and strange wires poking from its back. Normally only richies can afford such technology but my father worked as a rat-catcher at the alchemics factory, using his Beast proclivity to stop rodents from chewing the wires. He won his radio in a staff lottery. It was a reject from the batch, with a wonky receiver that made the newsreaders’ voices fizz and crackle. It only worked for a few hours at a time before we had to wait for the alchemy to recharge.
Sometimes, when we couldn’t afford coal for the fire, my father would herd our family into the living room and say, ‘Tonight is the night for a grand ball.’ We would don our finest clothes – I still remember my mother’s dress, as blue as the morning sky – and position ourselves on the living room floor. Then my father would switch on his radio, twiddle the knobs to find a music station, and we would dance the warmth back into our bodies.
The distorted crackle of that radio comes back to me now for the first time in years. The ditch water has that same fuzzy quality, that blurring in my ears. But instead of waiting to dance, I wait to die. My lungs hurt already.
I force myself to count to ten – a long, slow, torturous count.
One. Two. Three.
I need to breathe . . .
Four. Five.
Just a little sip of air . . . That’s not too greedy, is it? That’s not too much to ask?
Six. Seven. Eight.
I think my body is going to explode. The guards must be gone by now. They were tearing through the woods at such a pace, and I can’t hear crashing overhead, so perhaps they’ve been and gone already and the gurgle of muddy water meant I never even knew . . .
Nine.
Almost there . . . Almost . . .
Ten!
I burst upwards like a flare, a sodden firecracker from a turret of ditch water. I suck down air with a horrible rattle, again and again, until the ache in my lungs subsides and the panic in my skull begins to fade.
Then, and only then, do I stop to look around.
There’s no sign of the guards.
Broken
branches hang, splintered, from nearby tree trunks. The guards have been and gone, oblivious to the girl in the water beneath them. Against all odds, I have escaped.
This realisation is almost enough to knock me senseless again. I’ve just broken through every shackle that held my life in place – the laws, the city walls, even the guards – but this is not the time for a victory dance. The hunters will be summoned soon, and I’m in danger. More danger than I’ve ever faced before.
I pull my dripping body from the ditch and shake myself off. I wring the water from my coat, from my sleeves, from my trousers and hair. I even risk removing my neck-scarf for a second to squeeze it dry. I feel incredibly exposed. It’s like standing naked in the woods, divulging something very private to the trees. I know no one is nearby – the trees are silent, except for the crickets and the wind – but breaking the taboo feels wrong.
Then I snort, and clap a hand across my mouth to silence myself. I’ve broken enough laws to be shot on sight, but I’m worried about exposing proclivity marks that haven’t even developed yet? It seems so stupid, now, to worry about taboos and modesty. Anyway, better to break the taboo than catch hypothermia. The water is too cold to leave it streaming down my neck.
Once I’m no longer dripping I set out into the trees. I need to find a safer place to hide. The guards will summon the king’s hunters soon, and I haven’t got the speed or knowledge to outrun them. My only hope is to bunker down for a few days, somewhere with fresh water and maybe even food nearby, until the hunters give up or look elsewhere.
Taladia is a huge country. One little scruffer girl can’t be worth a massive search, right? They’ll have to give up sooner or later, when they’re summoned to deal with some more important case of rebellion or refugees.
Radnor’s refugee crew is out here too but they’ve got a head start and they’re riding foxaries. A human guard has no hope of outrunning a beast like that. Then again, the foliage is so thick that the foxaries’ bulky bodies might be a disadvantage. Just like the city’s slow-closing gate: too big and strong to move swiftly. I guess there’s something to be said for being small.
As I crunch through the leaves, the cold sets in. The water is practically frosting over on my clothes. Fabric chafes like sandpaper in my armpits, and the flare in my trousers is even worse. With every step, its fuse scratches the soft skin of my thighs. Has the water ruined it? Maybe it will work once it’s dried out. I’m half-tempted to toss the flare away, but it’s the closest thing I have to a weapon. And it’s more than that. The flare reminds me of what I did up on the turret, the way I blasted its sibling into the night. The memory feels foreign, like the actions of a stranger, terrifying but thrilling.
I fish the flare out of my trouser-leg and clutch it in my hand. If the guards find me, perhaps I can use it to scare them off. I bet a lighted flare could do some damage at close range. That threat might buy me a few seconds, before the guards realise the flare’s been soaked.
I keep on walking. I don’t know where I’m going yet, and I’m too exhausted to think of a plan. Most refugees follow the main trading route south. I’m guessing that’s Radnor’s plan, since he’s disguised his team as foxary riders. But I have no idea how to find the road, and in the meantime I’m as lost as a richie in Rourton’s sewers.
The Valley lies far to the southeast, nestled in the Eastern Boundary Range. But I’m not stupid enough to head east right away. The Range is too high and desolate for even a biplane to cross in one piece. It’s why the people on the other side remain safe from our king: the Valley is the only gap in their borders.
Besides, I’m not even sure which way is east. Left or right? Forward or back? All I can see here is darkness.
After a while, the silence begins to worry me. At least when the guards were chasing me I knew where they were. Now, though, I have no idea whether I’m being watched. I can’t see smoke from Rourton any more – I’ve travelled too deep into the forest. The canopy is thick and bushy enough to block out most of the moonlight. All I can hear is the rustle of the leaves, and once the cry of a distant owl.
The world is black. I am alone.
Now that the terror of the chase is over, and my numbness from the freezing water is fading, I’m rewarded with a surge of pain from my shoulder. It’s sharp and hot, still injured from my slip down the wall.
To ignore the pain, I recite my times tables in my head. My parents were obsessed with education. They wanted me to learn my way out of downtown Rourton, I think. And so the tables come back to me in a rush, echoed in my mother’s sing-song voice like a lullaby: Five times three is fifteen, five times four is twenty, five times five is twenty-five . . .
Five.
There are five other teenagers in these woods tonight. I wish I could find them. But the forest seems endless: a sea of black that rolls across the horizon as if to reach the very edges of the continent. There’s nothing in the world except this forest, this night, and the nervous hitch of my breath in the dark.
Five times six is thirty . . .
If I found them somehow, if I joined them, we would be a crew of six. That’s assuming that they’re all still alive and haven’t been captured by the guards. Not likely.
Eventually, I can’t stand the pain in my shoulder any longer. I fall to my knees in the mud and shove a bundle of twigs between my teeth. I have never re-set my own shoulder before, but the blacksmith did it for me once and I think I remember the process. And this dislocation isn’t as bad as the first time; my tendons have already been stretched by the old injury.
It helps that I can’t see. The darkness allows me to disconnect from my fear. I wrap my hands around a raised knee, intertwine the fingers and stretch back my neck. For a moment, I can’t bring myself to move. I just sit there in the darkness, half-convinced that I’m already dead. But the stink of rotting leaves is too potent and my skin is still cold with the remaining ditch water. This is real. I have to do this.
I thrust my shoulders forward. There is a click and the mouthful of twigs muffles my scream. I spit out the twigs and force myself to my feet.
Finally I find a hollow log half-submerged in mud and leaf litter. Well, I trip over it. After a few moments of stunned pain and silence, I remember to breathe again. Then I stumble along to an opening at its end, use my fingers to trace its length in the dark and shove myself inside like I’m stuffing a sausage. My shoulder still burns, so I’m careful to keep that side of my body facing upwards. There’s a scatter of frantic claws at the log’s far end, suggesting I’ve startled a rodent from its lair.
It’s not a very good hiding place – in fact, it’s painfully obvious, and I probably smashed a clear path for my pursuers while I blundered through the night. But at least it’s a shield from the wind, and from the shine of a hunter’s lantern.
And so, inside my log, I wait in silence for dawn.
I wake slowly, dazed and disorientated, struggling to remember how I ended up in this tube of rotting wood. My body is numb, except for my aching shoulder, and some kind of sharp wire is poking into my belly. The fuse of a signal flare. Slowly, I remember my desperate journey last night.
I must have dozed for several hours. It’s now early morning and sunlight filters down through cracks in the log. I hear a noise. A crunch.
Footsteps.
I hold my breath. How have they found me?
The footsteps crunch closer. A shadow blots out the light coming through the cracks in the log, as through someone is looming right above my hiding place. I slide a climbing pick from my sleeve and grip it in my hand. It’s not much of a weapon, but at least it’s sharp. If this hunter is going to kill me, I’m going down with a fight. Then I focus on the shape of my body, the weight of my limbs, and try to conjure an illusion to hide myself. It will only last a few seconds, but it might be enough –
Too late. Something rips away the top of the log, peeling back the
bark as though I’m a walnut to be shelled. Light floods across my face; I blink, eyes stinging, and slash out wildly with the climbing pick.
‘Hey, whoa!’ says a familiar voice. ‘If I’d known the party games were gonna be that full on, I would’ve brought my croquet mallet.’
It’s Teddy Nort.
I peel myself upright out of the log. Teddy has taken a few steps backwards, holding up his hands in self-defence. Even now, he’s grinning like a madman. I wonder whether maybe he is one.
‘What’s going on?’ I say.
‘Wanna drop the pointy thing before we get all heart to heart?’
I realise I’m still brandishing my climbing pick in his direction, and stuff it back into my sleeve. My shoulder is much less painful than last night, but it’s still tender. ‘Sorry. I thought you were a hunter.’
‘Forget it,’ says Teddy, waving a forgiving hand. ‘I’m used to it. Wouldn’t feel like a proper morning if it didn’t involve someone poking knives at me.’
Knowing Teddy’s reputation, that’s probably true.
‘So,’ I try again, ‘what’s going on?’
‘Well, it’s morning. The sun is shining down, plants are using its energy to grow new cells, birds are hunting for worms . . .’
‘You know what I mean! Where are the others?’
‘The others?’ Teddy claps a hand to his head, as though he’s just remembered their existence. ‘Oh, right, those others! Well, I dunno exactly. We stayed together for a while, but it was dark . . .’
‘And you lost them?’
Teddy nods.
‘You don’t look too worried,’ I say.
‘They’ll be all right. They’re riding foxaries, aren’t they? A few overfed Rourton guards aren’t gonna catch them anytime soon.’
‘What about the king’s hunters?’
‘Yeah, well, we’ve got a decent head start,’ says Teddy. ‘If we meet up with the rest of the crew quick enough, we should be able to outrun them for a while.’
Chasing the Valley Page 4