Aster Wood and the Blackburn Son (3 page)

In a flash, Dormir crossed his arm over his torso and backhanded the man across the jaw. His howl of pain was quickly drowned beneath the sound of the other warriors, who now jumped onto him, screaming and punching, as he stumbled to the ground. Shouts of victory and pain pierced the quiet as the men fell into a brawling pile, and soon the entire company was a blur of punching fists.
 

I must have stopped breathing, though my mouth hung wide. When I realized this, it took me several long moments to convince my throat to open. When it finally did, my first gasp of air resulted in a coughing fit I couldn’t quiet. But they didn’t hear me over the fight, their sickening laughter mixing with howls of agony, filling the night. Dormir spoke again, but my ears were ringing too loudly for me to understand him. My whole body shaking, I frantically backed away.

My foot knocked into something hard, and the surprise of the sensation sent me reeling again. I turned, praying it had been a stone.
 

But it was no stone. Standing as tall as he dared along the edge of the firelight, one side of his face purple from Dormir’s blow, stood the boy I had heard.
 

I froze, not knowing what to do. Would he yell for help? Turn me in? I rolled onto my back and raised my hands in front of me silently. He just stared down, his eyes as wide as mine, his body shaking, too.
 

A shout from the men broke our gaze, and the boy’s head whipped up. They were dancing now, a sort of rhythmic stomping of the hard ground around the fire. The fight was over.
 

I made a split second decision and grabbed the boy’s hand, pulling him firmly to the ground beside me. I clasped my hand over his mouth, but he soon stopped struggling.
 

“Don’t scream,” I breathed into his ear. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Tears rolled down his dirty cheeks.

“You can’t scream, or they’ll come for us both,” I said. “Do you understand?”

He nodded. Slowly I released my hand from over his mouth. He turned to look at me. He was young, much younger than I had thought. Eight, maybe nine years old at the most.
 

“What is going on here?” I asked. “How did you get here? This isn’t the place for a kid.” It wasn’t a place for anyone.

“We were taken,” he said softly, his voice choked with tears.
 

“Who are they?” I motioned towards the fire. “Where are they going?”

“They are the Coyle’s army,” he said. “They stole us in the night, killed our families. Now we serve them or die.”

“Us?” I asked. “Who is us?”

“The children. We are the servants of the Coyle. It is upon our backs that the war will be waged.” His voice was monotone, as if he were reciting a passage of text he had memorized.

What?

“War? What war?”

He looked confused.

“I—I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just a war. That’s what they said.”

I looked up at the men again. The firelight played with their features, flickering across their demonic faces as they danced around it.

“Where are you going?” I asked again, not taking my eyes off the men.

The boy lowered his head to the grass, trembling from head to foot.
 

“Hey,” I said, shoving him. “Where are you going? Where is this war supposed to be happening?”

He raised his head slowly, as if it weighed a hundred pounds. His expression was blank, as if hope had long since left him.

“The walled city,” he said, still staring at the dirt.
 

Oh, no.

“What?” I asked. “Why?”

But he didn’t know. He just shook his head back and forth. He began to get back to his feet. I grabbed his arm and pulled him back down into the grass.

“What are you doing?” I hissed. “You can’t go back there. Come on, you can come with me. I’ll get you out of here.”

“I can’t
leave
,” he said.
 

“Why not?”

“I can’t leave Cait. He’ll kill her.” He pulled his arm backward, trying to get it away from me.

“Who’s Cait?” I asked. “We can bring her. We have to go.”

“No.” He wrenched his arm out of my grip.
 

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I said. “These men are going to kill you!”

“Not without my sister,” he said. “She’s only five. I have to protect her. There’s no one else.”

Tight, burning pain permeated my chest, and I almost stopped breathing again. I understood his plight.

“Where is she?” I choked.
 

“She’s on the other side,” he said, his voice low and miserable. “She is a slave of the Coyle. We can’t get to her. I can’t get her out. The only way I can stay close to her is to stay here. With
them
.”

“The Coyle? What’s that?”

“The leader. They call him the boss, but we were told to call him the Coyle.” He lowered his head to the grass again. “I can’t get to her,” he said quietly to the dirt. “It’s impossible.”

“It’s not impossible. You come with me and I can take you to her.”

His head shot up.

“You know the Coyle?” He looked both hopeful and terrified.

“No,” I said. “But—”

“Then you have no hope. They will kill her as soon as I’m gone. They told me so. I can’t go.”

We stared at each other. I understood, but I so desperately wanted to help him that I refused to give up.

“What’s your name?” I finally asked.
 

“I am Rhainn,” he said.
 

“Listen, Rhainn, if we just work together we can figure this out. This is no place for you, and I can take you somewhere safe.” I fumbled with the top of my shirt, blindly searching for the link. “We can jump and leave this place, and then we can find—”

“No,” he said. “You don’t understand. They’ll know if I leave. They’ll raise the alarm and then Cait—” He choked on the words, unable to finish his thought. Then, in a flash, he rolled away from me. I tried to grab him, but he quickly jumped to his feet and took several steps away. Then, with a determination I had never before seen, he walked back towards the fire.

“Rhainn!” I whispered after him, but he didn’t look back. Once back at the group, he stayed to the outside, just beyond the reach of angry soldiers looking for a target. As he circled around behind them, he disappeared into the crowd.

The fool!
 

I stared after him, horrified. He could easily be squashed by those men if he stepped just an inch out of line. And yet he walked among them, frightened and emboldened at the same time. For her.
 

But I carried no such mandate. So, like a coward, I backed up, crawling through the grass towards the cover of the black night behind me.
 

If I had felt centered before, it had only been brief. My insides twisted now, and I lay in the grass, away from the horde, less sure than ever. Courage. Cowardice. Certainty. Confusion. All fought for attention in my racing mind.
 

He was just a kid, a little boy, but his bravery had far outweighed mine. He would stay to save his sister. Or at the very least, to accompany her to her death.
 

Would I have done such a thing? For Jade?

I doubled over, pain flaring with the memory of her name. But then the pain was overtaken by a much more powerful feeling.

Shame.

I stared down at the dirt and lay my forehead down, defeated. I was outdone, and I knew it. I had fancied myself brave, facing down Cadoc. Facing the dragons. Taking the book and surviving the fall of the mountain.

But that wasn’t brave. Not compared to what Rhainn did now. Not compared to him living that nightmare, waiting every minute to be beaten, just to be close to her.
 

I had lived my own nightmare, I argued with myself. Jade had left me for dead. She had chosen, my legs dangling over that enormous chasm, to walk away.
 

But she didn’t choose. It wasn’t her.

The thought made me grit my teeth. I couldn’t get the image of her out of my head, of her spirit leaving, abandoning me to this impossible task all on my own. It was her fault, her weakness, that had led her away and left me here alone.
 

Wasn’t it?

No.

The voice, tiny and quiet, seemed to echo against the interior of my skull. It was true.

Jade hadn’t chosen. Or Rhainn. Or Cait. Or any of them. Alliance with the Corentin was never a choice. I knew this, had known it all along. But the betrayal I had felt had made me forget it until now.

Maybe it was too late. Jade was somewhere else now, somewhere unreachable. I would find out. I would have to track her down somehow, and as the resolve to do so seeped in, relief flooded me as the path I needed to take finally became clear.

I would find Jade. How, I didn’t yet know.
 

But Rhainn and Cait were right here. And I wouldn’t leave them.

I started moving, this time crouching low and making sure to stay far from the light of the burning fires. I broke into a jog and skirted the perimeter of the whole group, scouting, searching. The army was divided into sections, and among each one were the servant children, just as Rhainn had said. Those big enough to carry a slab of meat or a pitcher of wine scurried around the hordes of men, trying not to get stomped beneath their armored boots. More than once I saw a child slapped, or shoved, or tossed aside like a tattered rag doll. Where the smallest of the kids were, I didn’t know.
 

I held back. The pull of Stonemore, with the hope of friends and power and solace, reminded me that I could go. I could get help and bring it back here. But the look on Rhainn’s face kept my feet planted on the ground and kept the link out of my fist. I couldn’t leave. Not yet.

I scoured the camp for the young ones. They had to be here somewhere. I wasn’t sure what to look for, and yet I found it quickly. The sound of crying, of a baby, met my ears, and I stopped to listen. It was coming from the opposite side of the valley. In the darkness, I was able to just make out the outline of a large tent that was placed apart from the rest of the encampment.
 

I slunk towards it, circling around the army in a wide arc until I came to the place where I could observe the tent unseen. Several muffled cries rose up from beneath the canvas, and my blood ran cold.

They were inside.

I hid behind a boulder and watched as a small toddler, probably not on his feet for more than a month or two now, burst from behind a tree, running from the tent in my direction. I crouched further down, but his big eyes seemed to lock, impossibly, onto mine as he fled. Then, a soldier came after him in pursuit, his enormous strides reaching the child before he had a chance to slip out of sight. He scooped him up with one arm around his middle, and a cry of fear escaped the little boy’s throat as he was swept away. As the man strode off with the boy, his little head popped up over his shoulder, searching. Then, when his large, round eyes found mine again, he wailed, reaching out his arms towards me. I could do nothing but duck down deeper into the grass as he disappeared back into his canvas prison.

I retreated, fleeing until I was running outright up the hill behind me. For several minutes I ran, desperate to put distance between myself and the weird and dangerous situation that seemed to be unfolding down below. But the memory of Rhainn’s determined face finally halted my escape, and when I had found a shallow valley where one hill met another, I stopped.
 

Rhainn had been right about one thing. The children were being held against their will. I wondered how many there were and, more importantly, how many grown men it took to care for them. I tried to imagine the fully armored soldiers sitting inside with a group of tiny children, but the image didn’t seem right. How were they caring for them?

My stomach twisted when I considered that maybe they weren’t caring for them at all. Maybe the soldier had been there only to protect them, not from harm, but from escape.
 

If I were to storm into that tent right this minute, how many soldiers would I have to fight in order to rescue little Cait?
 

The whole idea was stupid, I told myself. Why focus my attention on saving the one boy and girl when there were so many others here suffering, too? Would they all look at me the way that little boy had just now? If I were able to make it inside the tent at all, would I be able to leave with just the one child when the time came?
 

I found a place to sit on the hillside where I could watch the camp below. I sat for hours as the fires in the distance slowly burned down to embers, one by one.

I tried to imagine what my mom would have done if she were here, if it had been her about to storm into that tent to rescue just one child among so many. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to leave the rest. Maybe she would stay and try to tend to them all, to protect them by becoming captured, herself.
 

Would she have been able to stay focused on just the one girl? Would I?
 

Thoughts of Rhainn dominated my mind. His resolve. His love for his sister. His unbelievable courage. Everything about him seemed so extraordinary. I wanted to be like that. So clear and certain and true.
 

I couldn’t leave them here. I had to try.

I sat thinking, planning, trying to figure out a clever way to get Cait out. But I had no magic. And I had no physical strength to speak of, at least nothing that would help me in a fight.
 

But I did have speed.

When the entire camp was finally dark, I stood and made my way back down the hill. I kept my circle wide as I stalked around the perimeter until I was finally back where I had started, looking down on the brutal group of men that was Rhainn’s assignment. All were sleeping from what I could tell, the dead of night now upon us. The only sounds were the loud snoring of drunken soldiers and my feet sneaking through the grass.

I found Rhainn easily enough. The best spots by the fire, now cold, had been taken by the men, and he had been left to fend for himself on the edges of the group. Only one soldier slept still farther out, and I slunk between the two, holding my breath as I placed a trembling hand over Rhainn’s mouth.