Bluewing (13 page)

I realized how ridiculous I must look. I lowered the knife to my side. “My name is Lia Weaver.”

“Weaver,” he repeated. The other figures shifted and looked at each other. “We know about the Weavers.”

“What do you know about us?”

“You can walk the forests of this land without fear,” he said. “Can’t you?”

“I can.”

He muttered something beneath his breath and looked at the others over his shoulder. “You’re coming with us.”

~

They took us out into the night and across the snow at knifepoint. My heart beat fast like the wings of a trapped bird, but my mind was as clear as the sky above us as we passed through the ruined gardens. There were four men. We were outnumbered if we tried to fight, but if we ran...

I tried to catch Gabe’s eye, but he was behind me. When I turned my head, Stone ordered me to keep walking. When I ignored him, one of the other men planted a hand between my shoulder blades and shoved me forward.

We left the gardens and passed into the wilderness of the Frost. Trees leaned down around us, twisted and misshapen from the wind. The men moved quickly, their whispers furtive and their glances quick and frightened. I heard the word on their lips:
mechs.

So they knew what the Watchers really were?

We passed from the forest into a flat wasteland where no trees grew. Rocks jutted toward the stars, their edges glittering with ice. Wind howled around us, making our cloaks dance and flinging shards of snow at our faces. Stone wrapped the cloth back around his mouth. Gabe and I suffered along with nothing but the edges of our cloaks to shield ourselves.

Finally, I saw light.

Beautiful, transparent sculptures rose out of the darkness, statues of animals and men. As we drew closer, I realized they were carved from ice. Beyond them lay what appeared to be a village of tents.

“This way,” Stone said, leading us down a lane that ran straight through the forest of carved creatures. Although it was night, people moved freely among the sculptures and the tents beyond. I saw children playing tag around a fire.

“Aren’t you afraid of Watchers?” I asked. “It’s night.”

“Watchers?”

“I mean the monsters,” I said. “Mechs.”

He shook his head. “They don’t come this far. They turn away before the wastes. It’s the end of their territory, and they never cross the line.”

I absorbed this information. So this was the end of the Compound land, then.

“Come on,” Stone said, pointing toward a camp of tents set in a cluster. A wall of ice blocks encircled them, shielding them from the wind. We had no choice but to go where he’d pointed.

I heard a wavering trill of music. Flutes. It made me think of Jonn, and my chest ached with sudden fear. When would the others discover we had gone missing? What would they do?

My family was splintered—Ivy stuck in the village, Jonn back at the mansion ruins, and now I had been taken prisoner and forced to journey to who knows where. My stomach twisted, and I felt like vomiting.

We reached the tents. Stone thrust aside the flap of the largest one and put a hand on my shoulder, propelling me firmly through the doorway and inside. Warmth hit my face and made my cheeks tingle. The flicker of firelight lit the space around us. A few people sat around the perimeter of the tent, and a woman tended the fire in the center. Her long hair glittered reddish gold where it spilled over her shoulder. My heart skipped a beat—Claire?—but then the woman raised her head to look at us, and her face was unfamiliar.

“Sit,” Stone ordered, and I let my legs fold beneath me. I sank onto a pile of animal skins and stared up at our captors. One of the others shoved Gabe down beside me, and he found my hand with his and squeezed. We exchanged glances, and I read the question in his eyes.

I shook my head slightly to indicate that we should do nothing. Not yet. I had no idea where we were, it was nighttime, and Gabe didn’t have any snow blossoms even if we did make it back to the Frost. There was no sense in running until we’d tried to talk, and we couldn’t fight. We were outnumbered many times over.

Stone crossed the room to the fire and drew a pot from the coals. He poured steaming liquid into cups and returned to us. He thrust one at me and handed the other to Gabe. Then he left the tent.

I inhaled the steam from the cup, and the scent of mint filled my nose and made my throat prickle.

The red-haired woman spoke. “That will warm you. It’s cold out tonight.”

She was expressionless, but her eyes brimmed with curiosity as she gazed at us.

I took a sip, and the liquid made a trail of fire down my throat and burned in my belly. I coughed.

“What do you think they’re going to do with us?” Gabe asked, his voice barely a whisper.

“I don’t know. They know my name—Weaver.” My stomach turned over as I said it.

“Do you think they want something from you?”

“I don’t know... I even don’t know how they’ve heard of my family. I’ve never heard of these people before. I didn’t know they existed.”

Time slipped past. The woman tended the fire. My eyes began to feel heavy, and I struggled to stay alert.

The tent flap moved, and Stone reappeared with another man beside him. I saw the knife in the man’s hands, and I scrambled to my feet. A man and woman appeared at my side. One pushed me onto my back and the other grabbed my shoulders to hold me in place. I kicked, thrashed, but my head was spinning and my muscles felt limp and tired. The drink—had they drugged me?

“Lia!” Gabe shouted. He tried to push the hands away, but more people surrounded us, and then they were dragging him back while the others held me down. I heard the sound of a fist striking flesh, and Gabe moaned.

The man with the knife bent over me and pulled my arm taut. He opened my sleeve, bearing my skin. The blade flashed in the firelight.

“No,” I gritted out between clenched teeth.

The edge of the knife opened my vein, and rich red slid in a stream down the white of my arm. The man pulled a glass tube from his belt and pressed the edge against my arm, catching the blood. My arm throbbed. My heart thudded in my chest. Sweat prickled across my neck and back, and nausea swept over me.

The man capped the first tube and produced a second one.

My vision dimmed. The hands that held me in place were too tight. The ground beneath me dug into my back, and my arm was so cold. I stared at the place where my blood welled up as vomit rose in my throat. Would they bleed me dry?

“Enough,” Stone said, and the man with the tubes stepped away. Stone knelt beside me and wrapped my arm with a piece of cloth. He pressed his thumb against the cut and bent my arm at the elbow, keeping pressure against it. “Let her up.”

I struggled into a sitting position using my good arm. Across the room, I saw Gabe on his knees, flanked by two men, his hands and feet tied with rope and his right eye swollen from where he’d been hit.

“Drink this,” Stone said, putting more of the mint-scented drink into my cup and offering it to me.

I glared up at him. “You think I’m falling for that again?”

He looked ashamed. “It will make you feel better. You’re too weak. You’re underfed—”

“If you’re so concerned with my health, perhaps you shouldn’t have forcibly bled me.”

He put the cup down by my hand. I moved my fingers away from it even though my throat ached with sudden thirst.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“What more do you want from me?” I was angry, but almost instantly, I regretted the outburst. I needed to be cool, calm, calculating. I needed to talk my way out of this instead of snarling and crying like a fox in a trap.

“Let us be alone,” Stone said firmly, without taking his eyes from mine.

Without a word, the others rose and headed for the tent flap. The man who’d taken my blood vanished with the rest. They left Gabe, still tied hand and foot, at the other end of the tent. His eyes met mine across the empty space, and I saw the violence in his expression. I shook my head. We needed patience now. We needed to bargain.

Stone sighed. “I’m sorry. I did not want them to do that. But I couldn’t convince them that—” he stopped.

“You couldn’t have
not
kidnapped me?”

He ignored that comment. “As a Weaver, your blood is very valuable to us. It’s possible it saved your lives tonight, as there are those who wanted you, a stranger who was in our greenhouse, dead. I’m sorry for what happened, but you should be grateful.”

“Grateful? You kidnapped us, brought us here against our will, and bled me. And I’m supposed to be grateful you didn’t kill us, too?”

I was getting too angry. I sucked in a deep breath to calm myself.

Stone rubbed the space between his eyes. “You were trespassing. We have a right to defend ourselves against interlopers.”

I wanted to argue with him, but I needed to focus. “What happens to my friend and me now?”

“I’m not interested in keeping prisoners,” he said. “So I’m hoping we can come to an agreement.”

“An agreement? How?”

He didn’t respond. He just studied me.

“Well, I have a few questions. Who are you people?” I looked around the tent at the furs, the open fire, the metal pot.

“We don’t have any formal name, but we call ourselves the Wanderers. We never stay in one place for too long. We follow the deer.”

Hence the tents, I supposed. “How do you know about my family?”

“My ancestors lived here before the Great War,” Stone said.

“The Great War?”

“The one that followed the Sickness. They were trying to find a cure here, in a place called the Compound.”

“I’ve...heard about that.”

Gabe choked on a laugh at my understatement. Stone ignored him.

“They didn’t succeed. Society disintegrated, and the work here was abandoned. Our forefathers had to flee beyond the Compound boundaries because of the creatures that guarded it, the mechs. They turned wild and attacked everyone. Everyone but your ancestors.”

“And how do you know all this?”

He eyed me. “I only know what I’ve been told by the stories. There were always rumors of a family living within the remnants of the Compound near the Iceliss village, a family who could roam the snowy wastes at night without fear.”

I was silent.

“Life is harsh here, but safe. My father’s generation lived in the warmer regions, but when I was a boy we were driven north by the Aeralians.” He spat the word. “Hateful people. Half our numbers were lost.”

“The Aeralians occupy the Frost now,” I said. “They occupy my village.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of soldiers in the woods. I hear the mechs got a few of them.”

I nodded slowly. “They’ve built walls now, fences. They’re frightened of the monsters.”

Stone grinned at that, but his smile faded as he looked at me again. “And your people, what has happened to them?”

“The occupation is killing us. We are starving.”

He reached out and ran a finger down the side of the cup of drugged liquid he’d tried to get me to drink. “My people hunt and trap, but many of the animals move into the land we dare not enter as the spring approaches. We are often hungry. With vials of your blood, we could enter the Compound again.”

“There are things besides my blood that repel the monsters,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “We know little about them, except their true nature.”

“And yet you know my name.”

“There was a man,” he said. “He told us about you.”

“A man?”

“Yes. He came to us heavily wounded, accompanied by a companion. He was sick. He rambled in his sleep, talking of Weavers and the monsters and blood. Some of my people thought he was a prophet.”

“And you?” My heart beat fast. Who was this man who spoke of my family?

“He was just a man,” Stone said. “A man with knowledge.”

“And his name?”

“He didn’t give one. He didn’t stay with us long. We called him Scar, for he had many after he’d healed.”

My mind spun with questions.

Gabe spoke up from across the room. “What happens to us now? Are you going to keep bleeding Lia until you’ve killed her?”

“My people want access to the Compound again,” Stone said. “We are facing another long summer without good hunting, and I’m afraid some immediately saw you as the solution to that problem.”

“There are other ways to gain access,” I said again. “I could teach you them in exchange for our freedom.”

“I will speak with the leaders. They’ll decide what to do with you.” He started to rise.

“Stone,” I said.

He paused.

“I am part of a plan to drive out the Aeralians,” I said. “If we succeed, the Frost will be ours again. No more Farthers. Isn’t that what you want? If you don’t free me, it might not happen.”

He studied my face as if looking for signs of duplicity. “I will mention this to the others,” he said finally. “They might find it worth considering when it comes to your fate.”

Reaching into his pocket, he produced a rope and bound my hands behind my back. I winced as the movements jarred my throbbing arm, and Stone noticed. “I’m sorry,” he said. He got to his feet. “I’ll have someone bring you some food.”

With that, he vanished through the tent flaps, leaving us alone.

“Lia,” Gabe growled, wriggling toward me on his knees. His hands and ankles were both bound, which kept him from standing. “We have to get out of here before they decide to tap your veins until you’ve been drained dry—or keep you here forever as some kind of blood slave.” He reached me, panting, and looked at the knots in my bindings. “Perhaps if we put our backs to each other, we can undo these ropes—”

“Not yet,” I said.

“What?”

“Listen. If we can get these people on our side—and they have every reason to want to be—we have that many more to assist us in liberating the Frost.”

Gabe blinked. “You think you can trust these people after what they’ve done?”

“They’ve done what they’ve done because they’re desperate.”

He looked at my bandaged arm, and his meaning was clear. Could I trust them not to get desperate again?

I wasn’t sure that I could, but I had to try.