The Outworlder (7 page)

“From K’ilenfir.” She slammed her elbow into
Jared’s side. He grunted and staggered back a step, losing his hold
on her. “I was sentenced to life in the prison-camp of the
Dragon-Lords, all right? But the crew abandoned us. The ship
crashed. Everyone died. Everyone except me.” She stood panting,
both knives at the ready again. “And that’s all you need to know
about me.”

“Jared…” began Arnauld, a warning in his
voice.

Jared moved to take hold of her again, but
she was ready for him this time. She ducked under his grasp, jabbed
him in the stomach with her elbow and then spun and kicked the
knife out of his hand. As she came around, she drove her weight
into him, propelling him back against the wall. She pressed the
edge of her dagger against his throat.

“How do you like it?” she hissed. “Do you
like this feeling? The feeling that I might just decide to slit
your throat?”

“Put it away, Sahara,” Jared murmured, his
eyes locked with hers. “Just put it away.”

“Sahara!” Arnauld shouted. “Release him!”

Sahara dropped her hand and stepped away from
Jared. Then she turned to face the horrified stares of the people
in the hall.

“I’m a convict,” she told them with a lift of
her chin, “and you better believe that I earned it. So just stay
away from me, all of you, if you know what’s best for you.”

She stalked out of the hall, replacing the
knives in their sheath as she went.

*****

By the time Jared found her again, the sun
was already low on the horizon. She was sitting in the orchard near
the river, her back against a tree. She was scowling fiercely at
the dancing water.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Jared said,
crouching next to her.

Her knife, a single blade once more, was
buried up to the hilt in the turf, and he jerked it free.

She didn’t even glance at him. “And?”

“And I wanted to talk to you. About this
morning.”

“Why? What’s done is done. Leave me
alone.”

“Yes, the past is in the past, but if you
want to avoid making a similar mistake in the future, it helps to
reflect on things, don’t you think?”

At last she looked at him, a languid, annoyed
roll of her eyes in his direction. “Who taught you this stuff? I’m
not a child, and I don’t need your preaching. Go back to playing
castle with your friends and leave me the hell alone.”

Jared shrugged. “At least I was taught. Is
that part of what’s the matter here? You never had any
education?”

Sahara rolled her gaze back to the river,
where the ripples blazed in the dancing light. “Oh, I had an
education all right. Or didn’t you notice that earlier?”

Jared sighed and settled himself more
comfortably on the grass.

“Look, Sahara,” he said at last. “If you’re
going to live here, you’re going to have to learn some things. Your
display of martial skills this morning did not impress. Well, it
impressed, but not in the right way. I don’t think you want to be
an outcast.”

“I’m a convict, Jared. I’m not fit to be
anything else.”

“That’s ridiculous. You keep saying that.
You’re not a convict any longer, you realize. If you were, you’d be
in prison.”

“I’m an
escaped
convict. I
should
be in prison. The fact that I’m sitting here and not
in some cell doesn’t change who I am, Jared.”

“And who are you, exactly? What did you ever
do to land you on that ship in the first place?”

Sahara’s eyes snapped to him, and for a
moment he thought she’d tell him. But she just shook her head. “I
don’t want to talk about it.”

“It might help you if you did.”

“What is with you and your crusade to save
me?” she snapped. “I never asked for your help out there in the
desert, and I’m not asking for it now!”

“Well, if I hadn’t helped you in spite of
your attitude, you’d be dead. A desiccated skeleton buried under
heaps of sand.”

“And maybe it would have been better that
way.”

“Oh, I forgot. You have a death wish. Does
that explain your behavior this morning?”

“No. That was instinct. I didn’t even think
about it. That man touched me, and that was it. I couldn’t control
it.”

“And what about me? Was that controlled?”

A smile flickered on her lips for an instant.
“Yes. That was a little payback.” She turned back to the river and
added, “I don’t like having a knife held to my throat, Jared. No
one takes me down without a fight.”

“So you wanted to prove you could handle me,
is that it? That no one can hold you, at least not for long?”

“That’s right.” She fixed her eyes on his.
“If you don’t kill me the first time, I will come after you. That’s
the message.”

Jared never blinked. “That’s not very
congenial. How do you expect to live in a civilized society with a
wild animal attitude like that?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, what do you plan to do, then? Live in
the trees out here? In the desert? Like it or not, Sahara, you’ve
got to tame yourself. You aren’t in prison where you have to fight
for your survival at every moment, where it’s either kill or be
killed. You have to learn how to
live
.”

His breath caught in his throat when her eyes
suddenly filled with tears.

“Tell me how I’m supposed to do that,” she
spat. “How am I supposed to just let go of what has been part of me
since…” Her voice died, and he watched her wrestle with her
emotions. When she gained enough control, she added, “How do I do
that without utterly losing myself?”

Jared picked up a stick and began to shave
the bark from the smooth yellow wood inside with her knife. “You
have to realize that there’s more to you than the killer-convict,”
he said. “And there is, Sahara, much more to you than that. It’s
just that you’re afraid to let it show.”

“It makes me weak.”

“No. It makes you human.” His eyes never left
the wood in his hands. “Like this stick, you see? The bark is
rough, hard, and protects the tree from damage. But on the inside
is the living wood—soft, beautiful, malleable. I can take this
stick, without the bark, and make it into anything I like. It’s
like you. Shed the bark and you can become anything you want.”

“Don’t you mean anything
you
want?”

He studied her, his fingers still working
deftly with the knife. “Why do you ask like that?”

“Well, your analogy seems to head that way,
right? I’m like the stick you think you can peel and shape into
whatever you want.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know
it.”

“I just want to be clear. Anyway, the only
thing I know how to do with a knife is kill people.”

Jared planted the knife in the ground beside
her and handed her the carefully whittled stick, now carved into
the shape of a curious bird. “Then perhaps it’s time to learn a new
skill.”

“Is this for me?” She gaped at it, rubbing
her thumb over the intricate etchings.

He rose. “Think about it,” he said. “You’ve
got a second chance. A new life. So who will you choose to be?”

It took her three months, but Sahara had
finally found a way to participate, if still awkwardly, in the
civilized life of Albadir. She took her meals with the other lords
and ladies of the Great House without assaulting anyone, much to
Jared’s relief. But as hard as she tried to fit in, she still felt
like there was an invisible but impossible barrier between her and
Jared’s world. The women seemed to never quite forget that she had
a killer side lurking somewhere under her slowly improving manners.
And the men usually patronized her—she was “Jared’s girl” or
“Jared’s outworlder”, and they treated her accordingly.

Her first few weeks in Albadir, Sahara had
spent much of her time in Jared’s company, but she soon tired of
feeling like a tag-a-long kid sister. His days were filled with
training and meetings and councils and sometimes he would disappear
for days without telling anyone where he was going.

One day, two months after Jared had carried
her out of the desert, she was prowling around the training grounds
looking for Jared. A few men were setting up for target practice,
and she stopped to watch. They each took a handgun and a single
magazine, and that was it. Fifteen shots.

Sahara stepped forward as they began cleaning
the weapons.

“That’s it?” she said to the man closest to
her. “That’s all you’re going to do?”

She glanced downrange at the targets. The
edges were shredded, but very few bullets had actually found their
mark. The man didn’t even look at her, so she touched his
shoulder.

“I asked you a—“

“Get lost,” the man growled, shaking her hand
off his arm. “Jared’s not here.”

“I’m not looking for Jared right now,” Sahara
said, her temper flaring. “I’m trying to talk to you about your
pathetic aim.”

They all stopped their work and stared at
her. Sahara folded her arms across her chest as the man beside her
finally raised his head to meet her gaze.

“We all hit the targets,” he said. “We hit
the targets, that’s it. We don’t get more ammo.”

Sahara glanced downrange again and pointed.
“Only one of those is a kill shot,” she said. “You can’t be
serious…you can’t be done. You’ve got to do better than that!”

“Orders are orders. We’re supposed to hit the
targets. And we get fifteen rounds. That’s it.”

“You’re just wasting your ammo,” she said.
“And your time. Who’s in charge of these drills?”

“Captain Armon Heger,” said one of the men
further down the line. “Take it up with him if you’ve got a
problem.”

“Get lost,” said the first man again. “Last
time I’m asking nicely.”

Sahara held up her hands and backed away.
“I’m not here to cause trouble,” she said.

She left the range and headed down the
stairs. As she reached the turn, voices floated up the staircase,
and she slowed her pace to listen before she realized that she
probably should mind her own business.

“You’ve had no word from our suppliers?”
asked a man’s voice.

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

It was Arnauld. Sahara crept down a few more
stairs and edged toward the bannister. She could just glimpse
Arnauld, standing a flight below her, with a tall, heavyset man she
didn’t recognize.

“My men are running low on ammo. I’ve capped
them at fifteen rounds for practice. We can’t afford more than
that…and even that’s probably too much. We need supplies, Arnauld.
We can’t fight off the Dragon-Lords with swords…not when they have
long-range weapons.”

“They have a damn dragon, Armon,” Arnauld
snapped. “What the hell kind of weapon do you think we can use
against that anyway? I don’t have any supplies, and we have no
suppliers. We haven’t for years. And yet, every month, here you
are. Asking me the same questions, over and over again.”

Sahara heard Arnauld’s boots echo on the
stone steps, and then they stopped.

“You better just get it through your head,
Armon,” he said. “No help is coming. We’re on our own.”

A moment later, Armon stomped up the stairs
and pushed past her, muttering something under his breath. Sahara
watched him go, weighing whether she should run after him and tell
him that his soldiers were wasting what ammo he did have. She
hesitated, then decided that he wasn’t in the mood to hear it.

I’ll tell Jared instead
, she thought.
He knows these people and the politics here. He’ll know what to
do.

Three days later, she had her chance. She
stopped by the firing range again and watched Jared and a troop of
ten other men fire their fifteen rounds of ammunition at the
targets, then wrap and carefully pack away the weapons. While
Jared’s shots were clean, only two of the others could boast any
kind of accuracy.

“Why aren’t those out in the guard rooms?”
she asked as they headed down the stairs for the evening meal.
“They don’t do anyone any good locked in safes like that. And why
doesn’t anyone teach these men how to shoot with accuracy?”

“We train with them so we can stay sharp,” he
said. “But they aren’t for routine use.” He glanced at her. “What
do you mean, accuracy?”

“You didn’t notice that most of the men don’t
even hit their targets?”

Jared frowned. “No…I was focused on my own
target.”

“These men are just wasting ammunition,
Jared. If you’re going to practice, then they should be practicing
how to actually kill something if they needed to.”

“I’m not in charge of the training, Sahara.
That’s not my call.”

Sahara stopped and caught his arm. “Jared.
You have to say something to someone. I would do it, but…well,
people don’t like me.”

“Not yet.”

“Whatever. They don’t trust me, and they
won’t listen to me. But they’ll listen to you. You have to say
something.”

“I’ll bring it up with Armon next time I see
him at the council meeting.” Jared started down the steps again.
“And listen, maybe you shouldn’t spend so much time hanging around
the range. Some of the men are complaining.”

Sahara snorted. “Why? Because I told them
they couldn’t shoot?”

Jared grinned at her. “That probably didn’t
help. But I’ve arranged for you to help the Lady Aliya in the Halls
of Healing. It’ll give you a nice change of pace.”

Sahara jogged down the steps to catch up with
him “I’m not a healer, Jared,” she said. “I’m a warrior. Let me
help you!”

“They won’t accept your help,” Jared said.
“I’m sorry, Sahara. It’s just not the right time. Not yet.”

Sahara sighed.
I just hope the right time
isn’t too late
, she thought.

Since Jared had warned her away from the
training facilities, Sahara had taken to exploring the city when
she wasn’t helping Aliya in the Halls of Healing. To her surprise,
she’d discovered places within Albadir’s walls that made her feel a
peace she had not known in years. One was the orchard, with its
scent of ripe fruit and ribbon of gushing water. It was something
like her favorite haunt on her own homeworld, and it brought back
memories that she both feared and cherished.