Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series (21 page)

CHAPTER 22

I woke this morning to the feeling of Tynan untying my wrists. No matter how I protested last night, he insisted on binding my wrists and ankles. We found a small cave under a crumbled bridge, so we didn’t have to sleep in the boat. It was perfect—defensible and dry. We built a small fire inside, and the cave hid the light and captured the heat while allowing the smoke to escape through cracks between the concrete and metal beams overhead. I made a salad of dandelion greens, and at dusk Tynan caught four large fish. What a blissful change from days of dried venison.

It was also the perfect place for Tynan to tie me up and lie beside me, making escape impossible. I’d spent all afternoon planning how I would do it. I would wait until he slept, then I would take his knife and axe and creep away in the darkness. I would get to the boat and paddle away downstream, then I would land on the far shore and drag the canoe up into the reeds. He would think I went upstream, toward the safety of my friends. But I would take my chances here in the wild for a day or two, until he was well away. Then I would slowly and carefully begin making my way home.

I couldn’t do any of that tied up and pinned under his arm. At least the grassy ground was soft and comfortable, and the fire was warm. So when we once again climbed into the boat and pushed off, I felt stronger and better rested than I had in days. Just not strong enough to take on Tynan.

“Can you smell it,” Tynan asks after we’ve floated less than a half hour and the mists of morning are beginning to burn away from the river’s surface.

“Smell what?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “But the air. It feels different.”

I breathe in deep. He’s right. It’s thicker, heavier. The green, mossy smell of the river is giving way to something dryer and harsher, with sharp edges. “It’s familiar,” I say, breathing deep again but unable to think where I’ve smelled this kind of thing before.

“Look!” Tynan lifts the paddle from the water to point it into the air off to our right, to the west, splashing cold water droplets onto my back.

A white bird with gray markings, big and round in the chest, glides on a high draft. I haven’t seen anything like it before. It hangs on the breeze a few seconds, bouncing about like a plank floating on a lake, then descends out of sight. Not like a hawk or an eagle would, but almost clumsily.

“I wonder where it went,” I say. “Should we land and look for where it came down?”

“No,” Tynan replies without hesitation. “I don’t care about the birds. Not unless they can tell me where the Iron Fleet is.”

In the mountains, it was easy to fantasize about finding the Iron Fleet with Tynan, about climbing Reunion Mountain and discovering the Radio with him. Today, I’d trade that possibility and all the strange beauty around me to have Dane back.

That’s impossible, though, and by now everyone I love back in the city thinks I’m dead. If I had any hope of getting away from Tynan, I would fantasize about returning to my friends and family. I would fantasize about resigning myself to abiding my life, secretly wondering whether Reunion Mountain exists. But Dane is gone. And this is my only chance to know for sure if Prophecies is true.

As we approach the next bend in the widening river, I see that it’s not really a bend at all. It’s more like a falling away of the far shore, like a stream emptying into a broad lake. We stay near the western bank where the current runs fastest, and suddenly we break out from the river into a dizzying expanse of gray-green water. We turn due west to stay close to the shore on our right. The water stretches as far ahead as we can see, with hills in the distance. A half mile wide at least.

The dry, stinging smell in the air mixes with earthy, fishy smells, and I realize what it reminds me of.

“Pickle brine,” I mumble.

“What’s that?” Tynan asks, but I can tell by the absent tone of his words that he’s agog with the view expanding before us.

A thousand of those funny, gray-white birds wade in the shallows and watch us curiously. Another great flock of smaller, black birds winds and tumbles through the air, flowing away from us off toward the far shore. The water itself ripples with a punctuation of whitecaps, and suddenly I feel very, very small in this tiny boat. Like an ant floating on a leaf in the middle of the lake back home in Southshaw.

“What did you say?”

“Pickle brine,” I answer. “My mother never pickled, but Mrs. Dockinson did.” I twist in my seat to look at Tynan. “That’s what the smell in the air reminds me of. Brine.”

“Dead fish,” Tynan replies with a wrinkled nose.

“That too,” I answer, realizing there are smells here I’ve never encountered before. I try to recall the maps from Prophecies, but they’re confused in my head. I remember at the far western edge there was an ocean, such a vast expanse of water that it’s like the world ends there. This is not the ocean, I’m sure of that, but the air is so different that maybe we’re near it. Micktuk talked about the ocean and great sailing ships that crossed the empty expanse. Salty brine, he said the books called it. We must be nearing the ocean. I feel sure of it.

Gazing in awe at the expanse before us, I realize we have to paddle across all that treacherous tumult. Even though it’s no bigger than the lake back home, the swells and waves that crisscross the water rise as high as any I’ve seen in worst winter storms.

“Tynan, please stick close to the shore, okay?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know if there are... animals... or something... out there.”

“Right,” he answers, steering us toward the northern shore, the closer shore on our right, and along into the shallows among the gray-white birds that float like goofy ducks and scoot out of our way as we approach.

Throughout the day, I ride along while Tynan paddles. The way he breathes hard, the river’s current must have disappeared and now he struggles to keep the pace. His shoulder may still be hurting from where the dog mauled him.

When we stop for a short lunch, he sits hunched on the beached boat watching as I cook two fish we caught by simply wading into the shallows with a big cloth and wrapping them in it like a net. He never takes his eyes off me. Even when we gather fuel for our fire—dried grasses and sticks from the washed-up wood littering the shore—he stays nearby and watches me like a cat watches robins hopping in the grass.

I act happy and cheerful. I try to think of the perfect weather and ample food. Sitting in the boat earlier, feeling the cool breeze and warm sunshine, tasting the tangy mist off the waves... I came up with dozens of plans for escape. It was easy to be fueled by courage when I couldn’t actually do anything.

On the shore, though, with Tynan ready to pounce, and with a wild unknown lurking just on the other side of these tall grasses... courage looks like foolhardiness. If Tynan didn’t kill me, something out there would. I’m now so far away from the city that I’d never make it back alone. I need him.

And there’s no way anyone is coming to save me. I’ve gone over the events of that night, and even if anyone thought I survived the fire, the torrential rain melted away any tracks we left before getting on the river. No one but Dane, Tynan, and I knew about the instructions to follow the river to the Iron Fleet, so even if they thought I was alive, they wouldn’t know where to look for me.

As I watch Tynan douse our little cooking fire and kick sand over it to dampen what little smoke it sent skyward, I admit to myself that I am fully, totally alone with him. He is my only protector. He is my only survival.

The only way I can continue is to cling to that one thing that connects us: a burning desire to find the truth. Our reasons may be different, but we both crave the same clarity. Once we find it... no, I can’t think about that. Those thoughts will only lead to despair, and I need Tynan to think I’m with him.

We paddle along for miles, hugging the northern shore and chasing the descending sun westward. The huge channel constricts before us again, and we stop to overnight on a wide, grassy meadow populated by a few hundred drowsy cattle. We settle ourselves well away from them and have a late night meal of the last of our dried venison.

For hours I lie in the dark, gazing up at the brilliant stars and watching my breath cloud silver in the moonlight. I stare at the silhouettes of hills to the north, turn and look across the wide bay to hills that line the far side of the water. Tynan’s breath is heavy and slow in the darkness beside me. He must be exhausted. I’ve seen it in his eyes. The paddling has been more difficult since we left the river’s current, and his shoulder seems to pain him when we stop.

Sleep comes eventually, and again I wake to my bindings being loosened. When I open my eyes, Tynan’s grim gaze bores into me, searching and analyzing.

“Good morning,” I say as I smile and stand. I put as much cheerfulness into my voice as I can when I ask him, “Did you sleep well?”

He does not answer, and I pretend not to care. I know he is studying me, watching for signs of redemption or duplicity.

“Shall I make a fire? It’s so cold here by the water. The mist seems to have gotten into my bones,” I say. That much is true, but the morning’s light has also rekindled some hope that throwing a plume of smoke skyward might alert others who could be out looking for us.

“No. No fire,” Tynan replies.

“Very well,” I chirp. “I’ll gather our things so we can get moving.”

Tynan sighs as he rises. “You seem to be returning to the Freda I truly love,” he says with both pride and affection in his voice. “I knew if I gave you time, your true heart would emerge.”

As I tie up the bundles and bring them to the boat, I avoid looking at him. I don’t know if I can keep my act going all the time. I don’t want him to see the part of me that recoils in disgust when I see him as the murderer of my husband, as the one who binds my ankles and wrists each night. I want him to see only the part of me that craves the truth as he does. My problem is that I can’t always control which side of me shows in my eyes.

After a few minutes, we push off and are back into our routine. The open bay constricts ahead and becomes a tight, high-banked river again. I will miss the open water with its great flocks of tumbling birds, its gray-green waves topped by white spray, its vast expanse ringed by rolling, golden hills.

As we approach the narrows, I turn to get one last look at this lake’s dramatic expanse. The sun is climbing in the east, behind us, in a cloudless blue sky. I can just make out the snow-painted peaks of the mountains in the distance. It’s hard to believe we’ve come as far as that. The peaks are barely visible through the morning haze, and they look like a line of clouds on the horizon. That’s where our home was.

The southern shore rises in sharp, brown hills that are turning green after the recent rain. I can’t see what’s beyond them. It could be more hills, or more of the great plain, or even the ocean. Who knows? The northern shore, which we track closely in our little boat, slopes away gradually in brown, open hillsides spotted by occasional gatherings of oaks and taller trees I don’t recognize.

In one final glance back as we round the corner, my eyes catch movement far away, miles away, on top of one of the hills on the southern shore. It makes me gasp just a little, causing Tynan to look, too.

With the sun behind the hill, and the fleeting moment I have to squint at it, it’s impossible for me to tell if what I really saw was just a couple of trees, silhouettes shimmering in the hazy morning glare. If they were trees, though, my imagination did a very good job of turning them into riders on horses. They were so, so far away.

“What? What did you see?”

I feel shaken. My heart is racing. Did I see people? Perhaps it was horses, just wild horses without riders. Perhaps I saw nothing, or only trees.

“I...”

I can’t tell Tynan. He’s already too suspicious.

“It was just...”

“Freda, what was it?” He’s stopped paddling and twists to look back, but we’ve already passed around the corner and no longer can see the hills.

“Nothing,” I gasp at last. “It was just... nothing.”

“No,” he replies. “It wasn’t nothing. What did you see!” Anger flashes in his eyes, the same anger I saw moments before he struck me in that dark shed.

“It was nothing,” I insist. “I just saw the mountains in the distance, and I thought of all those people who stayed behind. All those people who might already have frozen to death.” I force myself to imagine it, to recall how frigid the weather was around that frozen lake. An involuntary shiver shakes me as I force myself to imagine the families lying frozen under thick snows and the sad, slow horror they faced as they ran out of food and watched their children starve...

Tynan stares at me, then turns back again. We can’t see the mountains or the hills anymore.

I turn forward in my seat and look ahead, glad that he can’t see my face while he’s sitting behind me in this little boat. I have a few moments to compose myself before he guides the boat to the shore and interrogates me.

But he doesn’t. And after a few seconds, I venture a few more words.

“Did you see them, Tynan? The mountains?”

“No.”

“I think they were blocked by the hills until we got to this end of the lake. When I looked back, the peaks were there in the distance. The sight brought all that back to me. The hardship. The cold. The hunger. The fear.” I twist and look into his eyes, and now the sadness he sees there is genuine. “All those people, Tynan. They should have come with us.” I face forward again. “I wish they had.”