Fallen (16 page)

“Don't worry,” said Beko. “It's not deer we're after.” He walked past her and unslung the bow from his back. He looked up into the tree canopy, down at the ground, shifted the leaves and twigs around with one foot. “We'll have to go deeper.”

“What are we hunting?”

“Green tree lizards.”

“They're poisonous!” Nomi said. When she was a young girl some of her friends had fed a green tree lizard to a farm wolf, and they had laughed and danced as it squirmed in agony and died. She could still hear its howls, and she could still hear her own hesitant laughter as she tried to join in.

“Don't worry so much, Nomi,” Beko said. He stepped close, grinned and touched her on the shoulder.

A touch,
she thought.
Not a squeeze or a clap. He touched me.
And as she realized that he was closer than he should have been, he turned and walked away.

Nomi put her hand to her neck as she followed the Serian, as though she would feel something different there. On their previous voyage they had grown close, but neither of them had let romance grow between them. Nomi because she had still been involved with Timal at the time . . . and Beko? Why had he held back? For a while she had assumed that it was in deference to her own wishes, but as time passed and Timal left, she had believed that less and less.

Perhaps it was this new voyage, and where they were going, and the feeling that this was something different. She smiled at Beko's back and followed him into a bank of high bushes.

“Slow,” he whispered, crouching down and walking slower. He held the bow at his side so that it did not snag on undergrowth.

Nomi imitated his pose, trying to walk in his footsteps. She could not hear him—no breathing, no rustling clothes. She was certain that she would spoil this hunt. Her trousers whispered as she walked, and her open jacket caught on a sprig of bracken and whipped it back. She closed her eyes and breathed through her mouth, and when she looked again Beko was staring back at her.

He stared for a little too long.

“What?” she whispered, but she thought she knew. Her stomach was warm, her legs shaking under the stress of her pose and the influence of his stare.

Beko pointed up and to his left. Nomi looked and saw several green tree lizards roosting on a tree trunk, the largest of them easily the length and thickness of her arm. She gasped. She had never seen one so huge.

Beko was still looking at her, and he blinked slowly as he began to turn away.

She thought he would move slowly, getting into position, plucking the arrow from the quiver across his back, stringing it, turning, aiming and firing only when he knew the moment was right. But as she looked back up at the lizard, she saw a flutter of movement from the corner of her eye, and then an arrow struck home. The lizard hissed for a heartbeat and then hung still, impaled against the trunk. Its companions disappeared around the tree, and a heartbeat later Nomi heard them dropping to the forest floor and away.

“That was so fast,” she said. “I didn't even see you move.”

“I'm hungry,” Beko said, grinning. He had already shouldered the bow and was heading for the tree.

“But they
are
poisonous,” Nomi said. “I know for sure.”

“Only if you don't know how to cook them properly.” He reached the tree, drew his sword and stretched to hack through the arrow. The lizard fell and Beko caught it neatly in one hand. “Waste of an arrow, but it'll be worth it.”

“We should go deeper,” Nomi said. Her heart suddenly beat faster, and her face flushed as she looked away from the captain and through the trees into the forest's deepening darkness. “Might find some peace truffles. Good for relaxing.”
I'm not looking for truffles,
she thought, all too aware of Beko's gaze once again. She could almost feel where he was looking: her hair, her neck, her breasts. Or perhaps that was her own wishful thinking.

“No need for peace truffles,” he said. He was standing right beside her, though she had not heard him move. The dead lizard nudged against her leg. “And no need to go deeper.”

Nomi closed her eyes. The coolness of the forest air soothed her hot skin as a breeze ventured between the trees.
What am I doing?
she thought. She knew well enough that a long voyage could be made awkward by an involvement such as this, but—

Beko's hand brushed across her stomach and stole down between her thighs, pressing there gently, weakening her legs and making her gasp.

“Beko . . .” she said, turning to him at last. She could hear his breathing now, fast and shallow. He was looking at her as though he could see her soul.

Timal never looked at me like that,
she thought, and with her ex-lover's name in her mind, things fell apart. The pleasant coolness beneath the trees turned cold. Beko sensed it and moved away, looking down at the lizard swinging from his hand.

“It's me,” Nomi said. “It feels wrong.”

“It doesn't feel wrong to me,” the soldier said, and there was something so vulnerable in his voice that Nomi almost went to him. She looked at his scarred face and remembered how awkward he had seemed when he first spoke free poetry to her, sitting alone in a Ventgorian stilt house. He had loved and lost, and only someone with such experience could recite like that.

“We've a long way to go,” Nomi said. And as if that could explain everything, she turned and started walking back uphill.

“Nomi,” Beko said. She smiled at him, because he was already grinning again. “I can be very persistent. I should tell you, in case you see a problem in that.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Then persist.” She turned away again, scolding herself as she walked, grinning, wondering what doors had been opened and which hidden places they would reveal.

BY THE TIME
they returned to the camp, the others had lit a fire and started pitching tents. The horses were tethered loosely in the trees, saddles lay ready around the fire and Rhiana was foraging across the marshy ground by the stream. She eyed the green tree lizard appreciatively, then glanced quickly at Nomi.

“Good hunting?” she asked.

“I look forward to seeing how you feed us that and keep us all alive,” Nomi said, only half joking.

Rhiana opened her hand and showed Nomi a mixture of berries, leaves and dirt-encrusted root. “Magic,” she said.

Nomi was glad to see that the Serians had also erected her tent. She slipped inside and pulled the flap closed. She sat down and sighed, wiping her hands across her face and feeling the grit and grime on her skin. The heat of her arousal was fading but the memory was still there, an imprint of Beko's brazen and confident touch. A stroke against her stomach, soft as a butterfly's wings, and then the firm pressure of his hand between her legs. He was a warrior and a poet, and she could not help but wonder which one had touched her. She was excited, but also slightly unnerved. She was not like some other Voyagers, setting themselves above their hired help. Yet she could conceive of nothing but trouble if she and Beko . . .

“There's nothing wrong with a hump,” she whispered.

But there
was
something wrong, and it took a moment of silence and privacy to acknowledge what that was: Ramus. The other Serians would likely offer jibes and make fun of them if she and Beko were together, but Ramus was something else entirely. Their complicated friendship made other aspects of their relationship equally intense: the jealousies, the resentfulness.
But I've never wanted him in that way. Not Ramus. He's too cold, too serious, too . . .

Too much like I want to be?
The voice and thought were her own, and yet they seemed to come from elsewhere. Perhaps from the person she would have been had she returned from Ventgoria dying, not cured.

“Piss!” she hissed. “Piss on it all!” She should go outside, watch Rhiana cook and spend the evening with her traveling companions, doing her best not to let such concerns intrude.

After all, Rhiana had offered a meal that they would never forget.

“ IT’S THE LIVER
that's poisonous,” Rhiana said. “Make sure you remove that whole and the rest of the meat is wondrous. Watch.” She had the dead lizard on the ground before her, laid across a few wide sheets of bark.

The others were leaning against their saddles, relaxing in the warmth from the fire and sipping the remainder of the root wine from their mugs. Only Noon was absent, sitting somewhere away from the camp, on watch. Ramus sat quietly against his saddle, his backpack within easy reach. He was not actively ignoring Nomi, yet since her return from the hunt he had not gone out of his way to talk to her.

Beko was as relaxed and casual as ever. He smiled at her, and everything seemed unchanged. She was glad. She would hate there to be tension between them.

Rhiana heated her knife in the fire, turned the lizard onto its back and sliced. With a few deft swipes of the blade the animal lay open and bare, steaming slightly in the fading light. The Serian leaned back to view the corpse then worked with the knife again, lifting out a glistening mass and dropping it into the fire. Then she took a root-wine bottle and poured a good slug into the wound.

“There,” she said. “All the nasty stuff burned away, all the good stuff left. Now to really make the meal.”

Nomi felt a brief sense of disgust when Rhiana chopped off the animal's head and legs, stripped its scaly skin and started slicing chunks of meat and dropping them into a pot. But she thought again of what Ramus had said, and disgust turned to satisfaction that she had at least been involved in the hunt. She'd seen the animal killed, knew that it had died quickly and cleanly, and now it was being prepared with casual skill by someone who knew the value of good meat.

“This is when I turn good to great,” Rhiana said. She started crushing berries, slicing fine washed roots and tearing leaves into the pot with the meat. “This is a good place for herbs and berries,” she said. “It's the water that rises with the spring, fresh and clear and untouched by the sun or moons. Spends its life underground, picking up all sorts of hints of nature, and when it comes up here it seeps through the soil and gives these plants life. Don't know why it's so good. Just know it is.”

“
Very
good,” Ramin said. “Sends your mind away!”

“What do you mean?” Nomi asked.

“He means we're going to get swayed,” Ramus said.

“Oh.” Nomi had never been one for such things. Wine, yes, in reasonable quantities, but she liked maintaining control of her mind. She glanced at Beko and their eyes locked briefly before they both looked away.
Thinking the same thing?
she wondered. Perhaps. She was thinking about loss of control. “Is that really safe?” she asked.

“Gives you less of a headache than that pissing root wine,” Konrad said.

“I mean, with us camping so close to the border.”

“We can still fight if we're swayed,” Lulah said.

“And Noon is on watch.”

“Don't worry,” Beko said. “It's not like the sky-root you get in the city. That's meant to lay you out cold. This is all natural, all fresh.”

Rhiana finished chopping, crushing and slicing and stirred the meat and plants together. Then she poured in half a bottle of root wine and hung the pot over the fire. “It'll take a while.

Time for a talk or a poem, a song or a story. Which will it be?”

“I'd like to hear a story from Nomi,” Beko said.

Nomi laughed and shook her head. “I'm no storyteller. You Serians are the ones known for that. In fact, Ramus and I only hired you for your cooking and storytelling skills.”

“That's right,” Ramus said. “We can look after ourselves.”

He spoke it so seriously that it was a few beats before everyone started to laugh.

THE SMELLS FROM
the cooking pot were wonderful. After some haranguing, Beko stood and recited a poem, part of something old augmented by some improvisation . . . or so he claimed. To Nomi, it sounded like something he had prepared long before. It spoke of the moons shedding their light on unknown lands, the curve of hips against rolling landscapes, the smell and dust of the trail washed away in pure waters, the caress of trees against a sky heavy with rain, the rivers flowing like Noreela's bloodlines. The camp remained silent and contemplative after he finished, and then Rhiana clanged the pot and announced that the meal was ready.

The meat was wonderful—rich, tender and moist, and the spices, herbs and root extracts complemented it perfectly. It cut a warm path down into her stomach, driving any chills from the inside out, and she found herself chewing and swallowing with eyes half-closed. Every one of Nomi's senses was focused on the meal. She looked at her plate and perceived patterns in the food there; a face with one eye, a bird impaled on a thick thorn of a lightning tree, clouds striving to resemble something else. The smell was continuous, warm and smoky. Tastes grew and faded with each mouthful, the meat providing a perfect canvas on which the other ingredients painted their own particular images. Her mouth and tongue became her prime organs, swilling the food around to make the most of its touch, listening to the sound her teeth made grinding through meat, cracking seedpods and grinding leaf stalks. It was a sensory experience, and the satisfaction the food brought to her empty stomach was almost an afterthought.