Tribe: The Red Hand (Tribe Series Book 1)

by Kaelyn Ross

  Kestrel peered about, and the forest appeared empty. She tried to jump to her feet, but instead fell flat on her face. Cramps knotted the muscles in her legs, her belly, and her back. The slashes made by the lion’s claws burned like trenches filled with hot coals.

  Teeth gritted against a scream of agony, Kestrel kneaded her legs until she was able to straighten them. Once she felt better, if not stronger, she caught hold of a dripping root and hoisted herself up. The lumpy bulk of the lion skin lay nearby, but before she could take it in hand, the snap of a tree branch whipped her head around.

  Twenty strides away, she made out the hunched shadow of a man creeping through the forest. Crackling lightning lit the sky, and in that brief flash, she saw his tangled black hair, and a long scruffy beard hanging from his chin. He held a spear, its tip as long as her knife.

  Darkness fell again, thunder rolled.

  She blinked a few times, clearing the afterimages. Although he was harder to see than before, she could still make out the way he was turning his head one way, then the other. If he had found her trail, he would have been on her already. As close as he was, she could not hope to remain hidden for long.

  Kestrel stood stock still, taking shallow breaths, until he passed behind a cluster of saplings. Only then did she hunker down, careful to move slowly, despite the way her flexing muscles pulled at her injuries. She glanced at the bundled lion skin again. For the second time, she considered leaving it behind. And for the second time, she decided against it.

  She had just picked up the sopping bundle of bloody fur, when two voices rose up at once. “There she is!” and “Found her!” followed by the crash of men surging through the forest.

  Kestrel forgot the weakness in her limbs, the utter exhaustion cloaking her mind and, like a deer set upon by wild dogs, she fled.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Shouts of victory filled the dark forest, seeming to double, then triple, until Kestrel feared there were not eight or nine men after her, but an entire raiding party. And they were closing fast.

  Kestrel stumbled through the dark, dodging this way and that each time an obstacle loomed before her. She leaped a log here, ducked a branch there, always one step from sprawling on her face. Hot, shuddering gasps tore at her lungs like broken glass. Her injuries screamed within her flesh, their voices sharp and fiery. Hope of any sort had soared out of her grasp.

  Her mother’s voice rose up in the back of her mind. There are times when you must become the rabbit. Kestrel had considered that advice the word of a coward. Until now.

  But if she was to play the rabbit, she would do so with a weapon in hand. Shifting the sodden hide to the crook of her arm, she drew her long knife.

  A stutter of lightning brightened the forest, and she saw that she was nearly to the ghost snag that she had marked out before. Another flickering blast of lightning revealed men bounding along beside her, angling toward her, their spears waving. When a hulking man veered in from the side and blocked her path, Kestrel lifted her knife and locked her elbow, turning her arm into a spear. A second later she collided with him and bounced away.

  Kestrel rolled through a soaking bed of ferns and slammed against a tree trunk. The knife was no longer in her hand, and the man, lost to sight but somewhere near, was making horrid, breathless gagging noises.

  Still holding the bundle, Kestrel lunged to her feet and tore away into the night. The way was getting steeper, making it harder to stay upright. She thrashed one hand for balance, while holding tight to the bundle with the other.

  Kestrel never saw the drop off.

  One moment she was running toward the gray snag, her feet pounding the ground, the next she was soaring like a startled bird through the rain-lashed air. She hit hard, and her breath exploded from her chest. Then she was rolling and sliding along at a stunning, jarring pace. She banged against the base of the snag, bounced off like a rawhide ball, and skidded to a stop a little farther down the rocky slope. A crackling groan sounded above her, followed by a hollow whoosh, and then the top of the ghost snag smashed down beside her, spraying her with chunks of dry-rotted wood and choking her with a cloud of itchy dust. If it had fallen two feet closer, it would have crushed her like a bug.

  On the slope of above her, shadows of men were gathering together and shouting their triumph.

  You have to get up. You have to run. Kestrel knew these things, but she could not get her limbs to work.

  Her foes spilt up and began making their way down toward her, leaping over boulders and fallen trees. She had seconds before they were upon her.

  When rough fingers caught hold of her shoulder and dug savagely into the gouges there, Kestrel’s thoughts ceased. Shrieking like a demon, she clamped both hands around the arm dragging her up off the ground, twisted her head around, and sank her teeth into her captor’s wrist.

  “Damn it all, Kes! Stop that!” The voice was as rough as the hand that held her, but she knew it well.

  “Aiden? Why are you here?”

  “Get to the stream,” her brother ordered, his flat voice eerily calm.

  Kestrel feared a nightmare had caught her in its clutches. None of this made sense. Aiden could not be here. “W-what?” she stammered.

  Once Aiden had her on her feet, he shoved her away, and moved a few steps up the slope. The men who had pursued her were still clambering near, oblivious of the newcomer.

  Maybe they don’t see him, Kestrel thought, because he isn’t really here.

  “Go, Kes. Now!” The last word came out as an uncompromising roar, shattering her bewilderment.

  The men scrambling down the mountainside skidded to a stop as one. Kestrel backed away, her eyes wide, even as her brother moved forward. He was no longer paying attention to her.

  “Who’s that?” one of the men asked.

  Aiden did not answer. Lightning flashed, and she saw her brother holding a knife in each hand, each nearly a foot longer than the one she had lost.

  “Two young Red Hands, is my guess,” said another man, chuckling as if at a fine joke.

  “Our lucky day.”

  “No need to fear,” another voice called, sounding reasonable. “We come as friends.”

  Kestrel almost laughed at such a ludicrous idea, but even if she had, no one would have heard it, for her brother was already moving, his blades flashing dully in the night.

  Two men had fallen dead, and a third had dropped his spear to clutch at the slithering skein of intestines pouring from his severed belly, before the others could react. By then, Aiden had settled deep within their broken line, roaring and killing. The survivors slashed the air where Aiden had been with their spears. He spun through them, a whirlwind of death.

  Steel rang against wood and flesh and bone.

  Another man went down, the blood spraying from his neck blacker than the night. Another followed, the stump of his arm spurting, and a gut-wrenching gurgling sound bursting from his throat.

  Kestrel backed away from the furious fight, but more she retreated from her brother’s rage. It was not the first time she had seen him furious, but she had never seen his wrath displayed so openly.

  Another man fell amongst his writhing companions, but he lay as unmoving as the dead wood littering the stony ground.

  The last man held his spear out before him to block another attack. “There’s no need for this! I’m your friend!” he cried, as if he really believed the lie. Lightning painted his terror-stretched features silver and black.

  In that brief light, Kestrel also saw Aiden, his clean-shaved face spattered and running with crimson gore, his pale eyes burning with the same eerie fire that had lit the lion’s eyes.

  When darkness fell again, she saw only blurs of movement. Steel sang a high shrill note, wood crunched, and the last man loosed a frightened screech. When the steel sang again, his last shout echoed away into the storm.

  Only seven, Kestrel thought, counting the dead. There had been eight coming down the mountain, and another at the
edge of the forest.

  “There are others!” she blurted, looking wildly about in the dark.

  Her brother’s silhouette turned slowly, his dripping blades held out to either side. “Why are you still here?” His voice was cold, uncompromising.

  “There are more,” she insisted.

  “I’ll worry about them. Now go, as I commanded you.”

  “I must find the lion skin,” Kestrel murmured. “I need it to … to prove my Kill.” After seeing what Aiden had done, her achievement seemed trivial. Worse still, if he was here, then that meant he was the observer and….

  And he helped me, she thought, sick with understanding. Aiden, who had never believed she should become a Red Hand, who had done all he could to discourage her, would never allow her to stand beneath the Bone Tree, and he would make no argument to keep her from being sent into the Dead Lands.

  Aiden’s broad-shouldered shape did not move and did not speak.

  Numb of body and mind, Kestrel began a hasty search for the bundle. It made no sense to do so, with the way things had turned out, but she could not stop herself. Some part of her simply refused to accept that all her efforts had been wasted.

  With her brother staring at her, judging her as he always did, her fingers were clumsy, and it seemed to take forever. Eventually she found the sodden hide up under a bush farther down the slope. The skull had fallen out, and she had to wrap it all up again.

  As she stood up, she thought about her lost knife, but Aiden had already donned his knapsack and was making his way down into the black throat of the ravine. He had turned his back on her, as would her tribe when he told what had happened on the mountain.

  Not knowing what else to do, feeling more lost and discouraged about her life and future than she could ever remember, she followed him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tripping and sliding down the steep ravine, soaked to the skin from the drumming rain, Kestrel struggled through the stormy darkness to keep up with her brother.

  Now that the threat of becoming a prisoner was no longer spurring her on, the debilitating weakness of blood loss had once more settled into her limbs. Worse than that was Aiden’s presence.

  She wanted to believe she was on her way home to become a Red Hand, but Aiden had shown up and ruined everything by slaughtering the men who had chased her. Observers were not supposed to help Potentials, yet he had done so. He despised her, and always had, so she could find no reason that would have compelled him to give her aid … unless his only purpose had been to shatter her dream.

  A violent shiver rattled Kestrel’s teeth and shook away her unsettling thoughts. She had been caught in the rain plenty of times while hunting, and knew what it was to be cold, even in the middle of summer, but the chill she felt now was closer to the bone-breaking frigidness felt on the frostiest nights of winter.

  Only the deep lacerations she had taken from the lion’s claws held any warmth at all—across her belly, her hip and shoulder, and more on her calf—but that warmth was a sharp, cruel heat that promised the looming sickness of flesh-rot.

  The night seemed to go on forever. As she hobbled along after Aiden, feeling sick and dizzy, she forced her sluggish mind to reconsider the idea of being cast from the village and cursed to seek solace, brief as it would be, in the Dead Lands. Was her chance to become a Red Hand really gone? Aiden had helped her, it was true, but he had not helped with the Kill—that seemed crucial to her—and she had no intention of letting him help her get home. That she was following him meant nothing and broke no rules. They were just two people taking the same path to the same place. The final judgment, of course, rested with the Elders. It gave her a little hope.

  She held the bundled lion skin wrapped tight around the beast’s head to her chest with shaking hands. She licked rainwater off her lips to wet her parched tongue, but that only made her thirstier. Her waterskin hung at her elbow, but she did not have the strength to lift it.

  Up ahead, Aiden said something over his shoulder.

  “What?” Kestrel croaked. It seemed impossible that only a few short hours ago she had been running up a ridgeline, tempting the lion to chase her to its doom.

  Aiden halted and spoke again.

  To Kestrel, it sounded as if he were underwater. Too weak to slow herself, she tottered forward. As she came closer to him, he seemed to fragment and puff apart. She tried to stop but could not. Her knees came unhinged, and then she was floating forward into blackness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Kestrel opened her eyes, she felt warm, despite the chill gray light of dawn just beginning to seep through the pines towering above her. The storm had passed, but it would be an hour or more before daylight revealed if the day would be fair or overcast. Being late summer, she guessed the former. It would be a month or more before the frosty mornings around Reaptime began to signal the nearness of coming winter.

  She heard a gurgling stream off to one side, and to the other she saw the fitful light of a fire. The smell of roasting meat filled her nostrils, and she turned her head to find Aiden sitting cross-legged on the far side of the blaze, using his teeth to tear charred flesh off a bone.

  “What happened?” she asked, her throat raw, hoarse. Other than that, she felt better than she had the previous night—not much better, but she would take what the Ancestors gave her. She raised her head a little, noting that he had cooked the rabbits she snared the day before—those she had used to tempt the lion to chase her up the mountain.

  Aiden tossed the bone in the fire and watched it turn black, before raising his eyes. They were gray like hers, and empty of all but a familiar glimmer of scorn. “You fainted.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Is there another name for falling on your face?”

  As often happened when he criticized her, her tongue froze as hard as her brain. Eventually everything would thaw, and she would find an appropriate answer, hours or days later, but by then it would be too late.

  Shame and anger warred inside her. She hated that he alone could make her feel so useless, foolish, and … unworthy. She hated more, especially right now, that she still loved him. Not just because he was her brother, but also because he was the perfect example of a Red Hand, and all that she had worked so hard to become.

  She struggled to sit up. “The lion fought well, but I defeated it. After the Bone Tree ceremony, I’ll be named a Red Hand.” Still unsure if that day would ever come, she did not say it with as much confidence as she intended.

  Aiden snorted and shook his shaved head. “You call that a victory?” he said, gesturing at her bandages and clothes. It was then that she noticed he had re-bandaged her wounds and applied poultices filled with healing herbs. Splatters of mud, pine needles, and old blood covered the rest of her. Aiden added, “You look like a mountain fell on you.”

  “I fought with only a knife,” she reminded him.

  “Is that a boast, or an excuse for almost getting yourself killed?” He went on, raising his voice over hers when she tried to protest. “Many Potentials have fought lions with knives. Others have fought wolves, and even bears.”

  “And many have died in the attempt.”

  “Those who died were weak. Losing the weak makes the tribe stronger.” Firelight played across Aiden’s angular features, danced in his flat stare. Most backed down from that expression. Only their father did not. If she had not grown up with Aiden, she might have backed down herself. Still, it took all of her courage to hold her ground.

  “What if those who died weren’t weak or foolish, but just unlucky?”

  Aiden leaned closer. “And what if you were just lucky?”

  Kestrel felt her cheeks redden. How could she deny the question? She remembered all too well how she had stumbled the last time she and the lion clashed. If she had not, the beast would have ripped her head off with a powerful swipe of its claws. If that was not luck, then what was?

  Aiden sat back, a smirk twisting his lips at the sight of her doub
t and confusion. “Don’t worry, little sister, I won’t tell anyone what I saw in that meadow.”

  Kestrel’s heart sped up a little. If he did not intend to tell what he had seen, then maybe he would not tell that he had helped her.

  After a moment, she asked, “Why were you there at all?”

  “I was your observer.”

  “But why you? Why not One-Ear Tom, or another Red Hand?”

  Aiden shrugged. “You know how Mother is. She didn’t want anything to happen to you. Neither did Father or One-Ear Tom. I volunteered because I guessed their worry was well founded. Turns out my suspicions were right. If you hadn’t stumbled there at the end, that lion would even now be crunching on your bones.”

  A frown pinched Kestrel’s brow. “And why did you let those warriors chase me for so long?”

  He laughed. “I actually found myself hoping you’d fight them off on your own, and prove yourself worthy to be a Red Hand—they were just a mangy pack of Stone Dogs, after all. But you didn’t fight them. You ran, as I thought you would. Lucky for you, I stayed around.”

  “Why did you stay?” she asked, unable to say what she really thought, that she wished he had gone away. Or better yet, had never come at all. The only thing that tempered the idea was that if he had not shown up, she would be a captive, or dead.

  He sneered at her. “Because in my heart I knew you didn’t have it in you to fight them off, and would need me to save you.”

  Kestrel’s mouth fell open.

  “Don’t look so surprised, little sister. You’ve always been weak, and I’ve always known it. Father sees it, but refuses to believe what his eyes tell him. And Mother … well, as much as I love her, I have no doubt you get your weakness from her.”