The Arena (Ultimate Soldier Book 1) (8 page)

Lila swallowed hard, taking one of the chairs on the side nearer to the fire. The room seemed small and crowded with so many people in it, like the walls were pressing in on her. Seeker sat as close as physically possible, pressing her body against Lila's leg. Lila wiped sweaty palms on the fabric of her pants.

Josef took the seat directly across from her, turning the chair around so that he straddled it with his arms propped on the back. Antonio leaned against the pantry door, his arms crossed. One of the tall men sat on the far end of the table, with the other just behind his shoulder. They had to be brothers―twins even. The red haired man leaned against the other side of the pantry doorframe, adopting a stance and facial expression identical to Antonio's.

“So start talking,” Antonio demanded as soon as Lila sat down.

Josef shot him a glance. “You said you lived in the forest?” He prompted Lila.

Glancing around nervously at the men surrounding her, she couldn't seem to find her voice, and just nodded.

“Impossible.” This was from Antonio. He started toward the table. “Josef, you know what Jarda says. She--”

“I'm well aware of what Jarda says,” Josef interuppted. “The girl has no reason to lie to us.”

“She could still be a spy.”

“Oh, would you be quiet, Antonio!” One of the tall men exclaimed. “You think everyone you don't know is a spy!”

“Because it's usually true.”

“Snake don't send little girls to do their dirty work. She couldn't hurt a fly.”

The comments stung, and Lila opened her mouth to reply, but Josef's quiet word cut across Antonio's growled retort. “Enough.” The room quieted, returning the entire weight of uncomfortable focus onto Lila's shoulders.

“Why are you here?” Josef asked.

He already knew this. Why was he asking? Did he just want to see her incriminate herself by saying the words out loud? It seemed she had no choice this time. “I came for the medicine.”

“Why?”

If these people were from the Fox village, they were the people who had thrown Katie to the wolves. Lila wondered if Protector's 'no lying' guidance would apply in a situation like this. Looking up into Josef's eyes, she had the sudden feeling that it wouldn't matter, he would know if she didn't tell the truth. She twisted her hands together in her lap, scratching one of Seeker's ears. “It was for a friend.”

“Who?” This was from the tall man, who had jumped up from his seat on the table. “Who was it?”

“Aran, you are a romantic fool.”

Aran shot a look full of venom at Antonio. “If it was your sister, you'd hold onto hope just as long as any of us.”

“I don't have a sister.”

“But if you did--”

“Aran! Antonio! Do you want the girl to talk, or not? It's probably someone she's been living with for years.” He turned back to Lila.

Sister?
Suddenly it all made sense. The brown skin, the straight black hair .
They're Katie's brothers!
She shook her head at Josef's statement. Aran and his brother were looking at her intently. The fire on her back was getting uncomfortably warm and beads of perspiration were running down her back. Lila wiped her palms on her pants again. “Katie. Her name is Katie.”

“Josef, that's our sister. You have to give her the medicine. What's wrong with her?” This last question was directed at Lila. “Is she okay?”

Lila shook her head, half to answer the question and half to dispel the dizziness that the heat and hunger were starting to cause.

“Jarda sent her to the wolves. She's as good as dead anyways.”

Aran lunged toward Antonio, but the silent brother held him back. “How can you say that? I--”

Josef stood up. “I begin to think Jarda sent you two out here hoping that one of you would kill the other and she would only have one of you to deal with. Lilac, I'm afraid you came too late.”

Lila's heart sank. “She was bit. The bite is infected. She'll die without it.”

“Josef, give her the medicine. That's our sister. Surely we can spare enough.”

Josef's blue eyes did not waver from Lila's face. “What bit her?”

“A wolf.”

There was a clatter, and Lila looked over to see the silent brother catch Aran as he went suddenly pale and tried to sit down, but missed the chair.

“Then she's dead already.” Josef's eyes were filled with pain.

“She was still alive when I left!”

“She's pregnant, Josef. We have to try.” This was from Aran, who had found the chair.

Josef shook his head sadly, sitting back down in his chair. “Aran, if she was bit then the wolf fever is upon her already. There is nothing we can do.”

Was this what Katie had tried to speak of before? “Wolf fever?”

“The illness that the wolves bring. No one survives once the fever starts.”

So she knew the whole time, and I wouldn't let her tell me!
Lila's heart sank even further. Nausea began to twist in her stomach. The walls felt like they were closing in on her head.

With a choked gasp that sounded like a sob, Aran slumped in his chair, scrubbing at his face with his hands. “Josef, at least let the girl take us to our sister's body so that we can bury her.”

“You can't give up!” Lila cried. “She was still alive when I left!” She started up from her chair, but had to sit back down with a hand to her head when she was overwhelmed by a wave of dizziness. Nobody seemed to notice.

The silent brother made several unfamiliar gestures with his hands to Aran. “Elan says he wants to go back with the girl, to see Katie―before...” He trailed off, his voice thick with emotion.

“Hang on,” The red-haired man piped up, his voice squeaking on the last syllable. He cleared his throat. “We don't even know she's telling the truth.”

“If she wasn't, she wouldn't have known Katie's name. Stay out of it, Fell.”

Fell opened his mouth at Josef's words, then subsided with a resentful look on his face.

“Aran, Elan, we've already been in the forest long enough. If you two go back with Lila, you could be infected as well.”

“The girl hasn't been, and she's been in the forest longer than any of us. Maybe Jarda's wrong about that one-week thing.”

“Do you really want to take that chance?”

Elan gestured quickly. “He says we don't all have to go. He would go alone with the girl. I would go too,” he added when his brother's hands stopped moving. “Our lives are our own―we can go if we wish.”

Josef jumped up from his chair, fire blazing in his eyes. “You would throw away your life, and that of your brother, on this chance?

Why doesn't he speak?
Lila wondered, trying to distract herself from the turmoil in her head and in her belly. She pressed a hand to her stomach, trying to force down the nausea. Her head felt as if she had stuck it into the fireplace.

“She's the only family we have left. We can't leave her to rot somewhere in the woods!”

“You know how swiftly the fever burns once blood poisoning has begun. Lila, how long did it take you to get here?”

Lila's sluggish mind could barely be forced to recall the information. “Two days,” she managed, swallowing back the bile in her throat. Maybe she'd eaten some bad food.

“Too long. Aran, I'm sorry. We have to go back―the village needs the medicine. The village needs you two―we've lost enough good men in the last year. I don't want to add two more to that list.”

Lila would never know what prompted her to blurt the words that came tumbling out of her mouth. “I might have found a way out!”

“Out of where?”

Lila swallowed hard, feeling as if she was about to vomit. She crossed her arms over her stomach. “T-the Arena. I live in a tunnel in the Cliffs. There's a cave in.” She eyed the door to the mudroom, longing to feel the breeze on her face, to escape the confining walls and the hostile stares. She gasped for breath, dimly feeling Seeker nudging her hand. The room began to spin and she lurched to her feet, falling against the table. Her legs trembled so badly that she feared she couldn't make it to the door.

She vaguely heard someone ask “What's wrong with
her?”
Before strong arms scooped her up and she was being carried cradled against someone's chest. The movement made her head spin so badly that she couldn't tell which way was up.
No! No, put me down!
She writhed against the hold but the arms held her without faltering. There was a keening in her ears, cries of pain that would not stop. She barely recognized them as her own screams. There was a frantic barking in the distance, then a dull thud and a yelp.
Seeker! No, Seeker! Don't hurt her!

Her heart was pounding so hard it felt like it would burst from her chest and her head was on fire, burning from the inside out. Her limbs tingled with pins and needles.
Let me go!
She cried, not sure if she had managed to speak aloud.

They moved from shade to sun, blessed sun, beautfiul open space. The arms that cradled her set her on the ground, but the waves of dizziness overwhelmed her and her legs collapsed beneath her. Her stomach spasmed violently and she was suddenly thankful that it was empty. The same strong arms caught her as she fell and gently lowered her to the ground. Her entire body felt as if it belonged to another, kicking and thrashing against her will. Sweat was pouring from her skin, and the arms around her struggled to hold her still. She wracked by chills at the same time as she felt like she was being burned alive.

Vaguely, as if from a great distance, she heard Josef's voice shouting for help, and the thud of booted feet running. She forced her eyes open, seeing Aran's blurry form crouched in front of her. Even the small motion sent waves of agony through her head. “What's wrong with her?” Aran asked, reaching out to place a hand on her forehead, which he quickly snatched back. “She's burning up!” Lila flinched, crying out at the pain from that light touch.

Her world begin to spin into the blessed darkness of unconsciousness, and the last thing she heard before everything went black was Josef's voice speaking two words.

“Wolf Fever.”

Dreams and reality blurred together until Lila barely knew which was which. Her head burned and throbbed, and the thuds of footsteps and leaves crunching all around.

She was climbing up the ladder into her tunnel. The ladder was shuddering and she looked down to see Josef climbing below her, with Aran and Elan waiting their turn on the ground. The twilight of the yawning concrete mouth held a sense of foreboding. As the dream Lila let Seeker hop onto the tunnel and climbed over the top of the ladder, the dog was unusually subdued. This was the heavier, well fed Seeker from the other dream. Josef followed her, then the other four men climbed up behind. She was prepared for the stink of death, but the air was warm and clean. Her eyes swept the dim light, expecting to see Katie's body lying on the bed, but it was empty. The fire in the pit was long dead and cold. As she moved farther back into the tunnel, she could see that the deer meat she had left pinned under rocks in the stream was gone. She turned to Josef.

"This isn't right. She should be here."

Josef moved in front of her, farther back into the cave. Suddenly he beckoned to LIla at the same time that Seeker's hackles rose and she growled, her eyes fixed on a point farther down the tunnel. Lila hurried forward to Josef's side until she saw where he pointed. There was a figure sitting on the gentle slope on the left side of the space, shoulders hunched, hair over her face. It was 'her', because Lila instantly recognized Katie, more by the swell of her belly than anything else. Her hair had grown several inches and obscured her face. When they drew nearer, Katie drew back with a whimper. Coming a few feet away while the rest of the men gathered around Josef, Lila crouched down in front of the cringing girl. Aran cried out, making Katie flinch, and tried to move forward, but Josef's arm held him back.

At the sound, Katie's head shot up and she stared straight at her brother. There was a collective gasp as her eyes opened. Even in the semi-dark of the tunnel, with her hair falling over her face, they could all see the brilliant, glowing yellow of her irises, the horizontal oval of the pupils. The faint light of the sun reflected off of eyes they all saw in their worst nightmares. Wolf's eyes.

Lila swam toward conciousness, groaning at the searing ache in her limbs. She was being bounced and jostled around. The motion only added to her pain and the dizziness in her head, but when she tried to say something, her cracked lips would not form the words. Her eyes fluttered open for a few seconds and she could see the bright green of leaves and branches above her, but the brightness was too much and she closed them again quickly. There was a low hum in the air which she eventually identified as voices.

Aran's voice spoke, the mellow tenor harsh with emotion. "So we leave my sister in some unknown place to rot, but we bring along this girl, whom none of us knows or trusts, and has the same disease which she has probably already passed on to all of us! How does this make any sense, Josef?"

Josef's voice was calm, without any evidence of emotion. "Think, Aran. How do you ever expect to find your sister without her? If we get her back to Antoch the healers might be able to keep her lucid long enough for us to find out where your sister is. That is, if you are still intent on this madness of trying to find her."

"She is my sister!"

"Whom Jarda exiled," interjected Antonio's voice.

"You know Jarda hated her ever since she married the woman's son. The toad couldn't stand that Rolan wasn't her puppet anymore. She probably found some stupid reason to have Katie killed."

"Watch your mouth," Antonio growled. "She's led Fox to victory after victory over the Snakes. She obviously knows what she's doing, even if you don't agree with her methods."

"
Methods
?" The hotheaded Aran shouted, his voice causing Lila's head to throb even more. She groaned again, but no one seemed to hear. "Sending innocent girls to the wolves is not 'methods'! It's murder!"

Josef's voice cut across the argument. "That's enough! Aran, quit shouting before you wake every wolf in the forest. Antonio, switch with Elan for a while. Aran, find a waterskin and give the girl some. Fell, switch with me. I'll take the dog for a while."

The jostling increased for a moment and Lila whimpered in pain. She felt a cool hand on her forehead. "The fever burns oddly," she heard Josef's quiet voice, almost a whisper. "You have a strange strength to you, little Lilac. Rest, we will camp soon." Then the hand was gone, and Lila missed its coolness fiercely. Soon after, water was dripped into her mouth and she swallowed as well as she could, trying not to choke. She was so thirsty, but her stomach recoiled from even the small amount of water and she retched, the pain of her movement bringing tears to her eyes. There wasn't enough of anything in her stomach to come up, and no more water was offered.

Lila fell into a restless doze, half between waking and sleeping. It seemed like an eternity of pain, nausea and heat before the air began to cool and the harsh light on the other side of her eyelids became more bearable.

Instead of the party climbing into a tree as she expected, they camped on the ground. Lila struggled to speak, to find out why.
Don't they know we will be attacked? We've got to get into the trees!
She could hear wolf howls in the distance, though they seemed to be miles away. She moved her lips, but her vocal cords would not respond. She opened her eyes to the deep auburn sky of twilight, and noticed there were no trees above her. All around their little camp site was the knee high grass of the plains. She must have been unconscious for a while if they had traveled this far. She moved her head as much as she dared lest the dizziness overwhelm her troubled stomach.

Josef loomed above her and sat down on the ground near her head. The mouth of a waterskin was pressed to her lips, and despite her raging thirst, Lila swallowed the cool water as slowly as she could, hoping her stomach would let her keep it. She managed a few mouthfulls before she had to turn away. Josef poured a little water into his hand and wiped it on her forehead. Lila sighed at the blessed if temporary relief from the burning of the fever.

"You know, most people never wake up once they fall into the fever sleep," Josef said in a conversational tone, as if he was discussing the weather.

"Why are we on the ground? The wolves will attack us!"

"We are several miles from the edge of the forest. The wolves fear sunlight too much to venture this far out. Don't worry."

"But Katie! I have to get back. I have to take her the medicine..."
As if you could do that anyways,
the pessimistic part of her mind thought.

"If blood poisoning had already begun, there was nothing you could do to save her. Wolf fever burns hot and swift."

Lila remembered the words he had greeted her with. She rolled onto her side to look at Josef better, realizing that her muscles were not as agonizingly sore as they had been, even though her head still burned. She was covered with a blanket much softer and thicker than her poor little threadbare one back home.
Home...
"Where are you taking me?"

"Antoch. Aran wants the chance to find his sister, and you can give him that. I didn't expect you to get
better
, though." His expression grew faraway as if he was reliving a memory, and his voice was slightly sad. "I have known many to catch the wolf fever, but none made it through. I thought it was impossible."

"Won't you all catch it from me?" The words spilled from Lila's lips as soon as the thought sprang into her head.

"I don't think so. Jarda always tells us that the wolf sickness has gotten into the air and that no one can live in the forest for long. When I first saw you, I wondered if by some miracle you were immune. Obviously you aren't, but that means that you most likely contracted it from contact with Katie. I assume you helped her care for the wound?"

When Lila replied with the affirmative, he nodded. "Katie wasn't the type to deal with that sort of thing herself. Her brothers have treated her like a princess ever since they lost their parents."

Lila's heart ached for the girl she had left behind. She knew Josef was right, but some irrational part of her still thought that if she could just get back fast enough, she could save Katie.

Josef poured more water into his hand and let it drip onto Lila's face, then offered her the skin to drink from. "Drink. You were unconscious for more than a day." He stood up. "I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere," he added, with a hint of a smile.

Lila, with a mouthful of water, contented herself with shaking her head.

The young man moved away to where a small fire burned, the rest of the men gathered around it. He spoke quietly to Aran, who jumped up and joined Josef on the way back. Josef sat down by Lila's head, while Aran crouched beside him. "So, Sleeping Beauty's awake, huh?" he asked.

Lila didn't understand the reference, but she nodded slightly.

"Oh, hold off, Aran. She just woke up. Let her eat before you interrogate her."

This was obviously a continuing argument, and Lila tried to recall the conversation she'd heard earlier, but dream mixed with reality to the point where she couldn't sort out the details. The only clear picture she got was the sight of yellow eyes in a human face.

"Minutes matter, Josef!"

Anger flashed into Josef's eyes, the strongest emotion she had yet seen on his face. "She was already gone by the time the girl left, you fool! You know how fast the fever burns. Let her alone."

"Why's
she
still alive then, and not my sister? How's that fair?"

"Are you Fell? You aren't a child. This world isn't fair. Go back to your endless bickering with Antonio, if you have nothing useful to say."

Aran mumbled angrily and strode back to the fire. Lila opened her mouth to speak, but Josef filled a metal spoon with soup from a bowl in his hands and held it up. Lila was about to refuse, but instead of nausea her stomach growled loudly. She let the young man feed her the broth spoon by spoon, feeling quite undignified.

I shouldn't even be alive.
Not only did she have to live with the fact that she had let Katie die, here she was, recovering from the same illness that had stricken the other girl, and she was recovering.
Why me? She was the one with a baby!
She thought angrily.
But if I got better, maybe she did...
She couldn't manage to conjure any hope though, just the reocurring image of yellow wolf eyes in a human face. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't connect the image to anything.

"You don't talk much," Josef's voice intruded on her thoughts.

"I...I just feel like if I tried hard enough to get back..."

"You can't move forward if you spend life looking back. The skills you must have learned to survive alone for this long will be invaluable to Fox. You could save many people's lives, but you can't do that if you hold on to regrets."

I've never had reason to regret before...
Lila sighed. It was amazing how easily she could converse with this young man after so long living alone. It was like she had known him her whole life. The others...well, the others didn't trust her. Maybe that was why their presence felt so much more oppresive than Josef's. "Why
do
you trust me?" she asked after a moment.

"Well," Josef looked down at the bowl of soup in his hands, as if it would yield the answers he sought. "You remind me of someone I once knew, I suppose. You have strength, but you don't seem to know it. And others would never think you a threat. But that is your greatest strength, I think."

"You sure seem to know a lot about me..."

Josef's lips twitched in a smile. "You talk in your sleep. I heard more than you think."

Lila's cheeks flushed and her head burned with a different sort of heat. "I...what did I say?"

"Nothing
too
horrible...oh, come on. I'm just joking," Josef added quickly when Lila cringed. "I helped carry the litter most of the way. Aran doesn't call me Sharp-Ear for nothing. You were constantly whispering about how you had to get back, you had to save her. It's like you were making the journey in your head. You talked to your dog a lot. It drove her pretty crazy, honestly. We've had a hard time controlling her."

Lila pushed herself up. "Seeker? Where is she?" Her head swam and she laid back down.

Josef whistled and Seeker came bounding over, a rope trailing from where it was tied loosely around her neck. She nearly attacked Lila when she saw the girl awake, licking her face while Lila laughed, weakly trying to fend her off.

"Hey! Warn me next time!" Antonio grumbled from the area of the fire. "Stupid dog nearly pulled me over!"

"Yeah, fat chance of
that
," Aran retorted.

Josef set the bowl of soup aside before Seeker's frantically wriggling body could spill it all over him, and wound his hands through the rope to keep her from smothering Lila.

Lila was surprised and somewhat annoyed to feel the prick of tears in her eyes. Her emotional control must be weakened by the fever. Her hands found the rough rope and she fumbled to untie it as quickly as her shaking hands could manage. "You didn't have to tie her," she said accusingly. "She would never hurt anyone."