New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG) (30 page)

It went on like that for a while. Dad kept getting more and more angry and suspicious, and I got so flustered, I could barely stammer out answers. I knew if I admitted the truth, he was going to explode. But I wasn’t clever enough to come up with a lie that made sense.

And we were wasting valuable time. So finally, I gave it up.

“Don’t make no sense! Wot’d ye give ’em to flip?”

“A share of the plantation.”

“WOT?!”
He bellowed so loud that a pair of Moku women a hundred yards from us on the far side of the plaza whipped their heads around to see what was happening.

“Not all of it! Just a share.”

“Wot kind o’ share?!”

“Equal.”

“Equal fer who?!”

“All of them.”

“There’s FIFTY of ’em!”

“I didn’t have a choice! I had to give them—”

“It weren’t yours to give!”
He was standing over me now, purple-faced with fury.

“I thought you were dead! I—”

“It’s all we have!”

He raised his arm to hit me. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for it.

But he didn’t lay a hand on me.

He kept yelling, his rage mixing with grief.

“I built it from
nothin’
! With me bloody bare hands! Me life’s work! An’ the day I go—ye
give it away
? Like it was
nothin’
to ye?!”

I couldn’t look at him. He sounded like he was about to cry.

He was quiet for a second. When he spoke up again, the words hurt more than his fists ever could.

“Knew ye was a curse on me from the day ye killed yer mum.”

For all the times my brother and sister had accused me of
murdering my mother just by being born, I’d never once heard it come from Dad himself. He might have thought it plenty. But until then, he’d never said it out loud.

And it broke me. I put my head in my hands so he couldn’t see the tears.

Then I heard the scrape of his boot as he turned and left me.

BY THE TIME
I put myself back together enough to look up, I was alone. Dad had disappeared, and his shadow must have followed him. The two warriors were gone, too. I guess the Moku didn’t think I was worth keeping an eye on.

I went to the pit, hoping I could talk to the others. As I walked there, passing the occasional Moku who eyed me with the kind of wary look you’d give a stray dog, I told myself it didn’t matter what had happened with Dad. No matter how awful I felt, or how bad things seemed, I still had to get my friends out of that pit.

I figured if I could just talk to them, they’d have ideas about what to do. But when I got near the pit, the guard chased me off, waving me back to the avenue with his rifle.

I stood in the road for a while, trying to work out a plan in my head.

All I could think was to wait until the middle of the night, sneak over to the pit, knock out the guard, and pull them up.

But it was barely midday, and as far as I knew, the Rovians might show up any minute.

And even if I got them out of the pit, how were we going to leave the city without being seen?

I walked back to the ruined wall where we’d first entered, to
see if it was still guarded, and whether we could somehow get out that way.

There was a sentry with a rifle in the same place as before—to the left of the road, atop the intact side of the wall. He barely looked at me, even when I passed the wall and started down the road. For a moment, the thought crossed my mind that no one was stopping me, and I could leave right then if I wanted to.

Except I couldn’t, because everyone I cared about was still back inside the city, and anyway I had no idea where to go even if I did abandon them.

I turned back around and picked my way over the pile of rubble on the far side of the road until I reached the intact section of the wall, which I managed to climb from the top of the heap.

From the top of the wall, I could see the road snake across the valley for a few miles until it disappeared between the forested hills.

There was no sign of men on horseback. Not yet, anyway.

The sentry yelled something at me from across the road. I had no idea what the words meant, but his tone was pleasant enough—and when I looked at him, he was grinning. I managed a smile back and gave him a sort of wave, and he chuckled and said something else in a friendly voice before he went back to ignoring me.

It didn’t make any sense. We were prisoners, marched in at gunpoint with our hands tied, but I was free to leave.

They tossed us in a pit, but they cooked us breakfast.

They did unspeakable things to their own people, and then they laughed and joked with me.

And they made my fool sister into a queen, or something like it.

Maybe they’d let the others go if I just knew how to ask.

But then why wouldn’t they let me near the pit?

I wished I could talk to Kira. She understood Moku, and she might be able to explain things.

I watched the horizon for a while, looking for any sign of men on horses.

Then it occurred to me they might be coming from a different direction, and I needed to scout other possible exits anyway, so I started to walk the length of the wall.

It was ten feet high and maybe two feet wide, and over the next few hours I walked the whole thing, all the way around the perimeter of the city.

I didn’t learn much. Most of the buildings near the wall were abandoned, and one whole section had been fenced off and given over to pigs and chickens. There was a second gate on the far side of the city from the ruined one, with a paved road leading away down the hillside. That gate was intact, its heavy wooden doors shut with a massive bolt that looked like it’d take several men just to lift.

The wall was too high and smooth to climb. The best option I found for getting over it was a spot west of the temple, not far from Dad’s house, where a couple of big trees looked just close enough to the wall that I could jump to it from one of the lower branches. It’d be tricky, especially in the dark, but I studied the location of the spot carefully so I could lead the others there.

When I came back around and the sentry saw me approach from the opposite direction, he laughed and said something.
I smiled at him and shrugged. Then I jumped off the wall, nearly spraining an ankle, and spent the next hour scouring ruined buildings for a rock the right size and shape to use as a weapon.

Eventually, I found a long, narrow stone about ten inches long that fit my hand pretty well and felt like it could do some damage at close quarters. I paired that up with a fist-sized rock that was good for throwing.

By then, it was late afternoon. I was getting hungry, so I went back to the middle of town to look for food I could eat and maybe bring to the others.

I didn’t see Dad anywhere, but his Moku shadow was outside the house, cooking meat over the fire. I put the rocks down, then pointed to my mouth with what I hoped was a polite look. He nodded and gestured for me to sit.

I sat down in the shade of the house. Then I pulled out a smaller rock I’d picked up to use as a chisel and started to chip away at one end of the long stone, trying to give it a sharper edge.

A few minutes later, Dad came back. He was frowning.

“Where ye been?”

“Looking around. Thinking.”

“Been thinkin’, too.” He sat down next to me, his back against the wall of the house.

“I’m sorry about the plantation,” I said.

“Yeh.” He rested his forearms on his bent knees and stared at his hands.

I was about to apologize a second time when he spoke up.

“Lookin’ at it from yer angle…makes sense. I know ye was
hard up against it, and thinkin’ we was dead besides. Talked to yer friends some when I took ’em food just now—”

“You did? Can we go back? So I can talk to them?”

Dad grimaced. “Best not. Don’t want them savages gettin’ suspicious.”

“Of what?” I asked.

“In a minute. Gotta say this first…” He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly through his nose. He studied the line of dirt under the nail of his grimy index finger.

“Seem like good kids ye hooked up with. That blondie got a knife fer a tongue. Reminds me of yer mum.”

He raised his head and stared at the sky with the same achingly sad look he used to get back on Deadweather, when he’d sit on our porch and stare out past the shoulder of the volcano, in the direction of my mother’s grave. I’d seen that heartbroken look on his face a thousand times, but until that moment, I don’t think I’d ever really understood what it meant: that after all these years, he was still in love with my mother, and grieving her loss.

And if the fact that she’d died having me meant that I was the person who’d taken her from him…

My eyes were welling up. “I’m sorry—” I started to say.

“Nah,” he said, stopping me. “Got nothin’ to be sorry fer. On me, it is. Ain’t been much of a dad to ye. I know it.”

My throat was thick, and it was hard to talk. “You’ve been all right,” I managed.

He shook his head. “Nah, I ain’t. But there’s time yet. Gonna do right by ye.”

He lowered his voice. “Cooked a plan with yer friends to get ye all out. Adonis, too. But ye gotta promise me sumpin’.”

“What’s that?”

“Gonna help me get that plantation back.”

I nodded.

“Not just fer me. Fer you, too. ’S’all we got in this world. Be sunk without it.”

I wiped the wetness from my eyes. “We’ll get it back. I promise.”

“Told Adonis the same. Gonna have to work together, I said. Told ’im yer his brother. He’s gotta treat ye like it.”

That seemed like a pretty tall order where Adonis was concerned. But I nodded again.

“Right, then. Here’s wot we’ll do.”

Dad’s plan was basically the same as mine—to wait until dark, sneak over to the pit, knock out the guard, and pull the others up with the available ropes. Kira had told Dad she knew a way out of the city and could lead us to it even in the dark.

In the meantime, we just had to hope the Rovians didn’t show up before we could take our shot.

And Dad added one more complication.

“Gotta make it look like ye did it without me. Can’t let on I helped ye.”

“Aren’t you coming with us?”

He shook his head. “Gotta stay with yer sister. Get her out, too. Gonna take time. Might help matters havin’ them Rovians come round, tho’. ’Specially if they speak savage.”

“What about Roger Pembroke?”

“Wot of ’im? Far as he knows, I still think that business with the balloon was an accident. Map on Deadweather’s busted, wot else he want from me? Long’s I play dumb ’bout you and yers, man’s got no reason to trouble me.

“Same’s true o’ them Moku—long’s they don’t figger I helped ye cut out. I been square with this bunch. Do just fine with ’em till I can convince yer sister to give it up and go home.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. The Moku were friendly enough to him now, but I figured things would get pretty hot for Dad after we’d escaped, especially once Pembroke’s men showed up.

But when I tried to persuade him to come with us, he shrugged it off.

“No point in chewin’ on it. I’m stayin’.”

THE NEXT FEW HOURS
were tense and endless. Until well after sunset, I kept jumping at random noises in the distance, thinking they were horses’ hooves. And when I wasn’t fretting over that, I was worrying about how we were going to pull off the escape, and what the Moku might do if they caught us.

We turned in early, pretending to go to sleep. Then we had to wait for what seemed like an eternity before Dad’s shadow quit hanging around in front of the dying fire by our door and went off to sleep himself.

After that, we waited another hour to make sure the rest of the city had turned in for the night.

Finally, I felt Dad’s hand shake me on the leg. I got up and followed him outside, carrying the two stones I’d planned to use as weapons.

We’d decided to travel to the pit separately so no one would spot Dad walking with me. Since he knew the city much better than I did, he sent me down the main avenue while he made his way along the smaller dirt roads behind it.

There wasn’t much of a moon, and if it hadn’t been for the
occasional cooking fires in front of the buildings off the main road, I would have had a hard time keeping my bearings. As it was, I missed the turn the first time and had to double back.