The Defiance (Brilliant Darkness) (20 page)

Quietly at first, then with more assurance, the Lofties and Groundlings huddled in the cave mouth behind me agree.

Fox speaks again, his voice resigned now. "Then know that so long as I remain on the Council, you will always be welcomed here; it is your home.”

I find my way to Fox and Acacia and throw my arms around them. Eland follows.

"Be safe, Fennel, Eland. Take care of each other.” Tears muddle Acacia’s words.

"Fox. Always the peacemaker." Thistle's voice is harsh with derision. "I knew you didn't have the strength of will to make the difficult decisions for the Council. Now my boys will leave me, and the rest of us will die here, because the Three are too weak to lead."

"It didn't have to be like this.” I recognize Osprey’s cold voice in the treetops. "The Groundling girl led you astray, Peree. She's tearing us apart. And you—you broke your grandmother's heart."

"I can speak for myself," a woman says. I don't know the voice from the trees, but it’s timeworn and proud. "Peree, you are a disappointment to me and to your people. Your father would be ashamed if he were—" she falters, but recovers quickly, her voice strong again. "You chose a Groundling over the well-being of your own."

"I told you before, Shrike trusted me." Peree's voice is soft and sad, regretful. "He would believe in me now if he were still here. Your loss has twisted your heart, Grandmother."

Breeze?

"And love has blinded yours." Her bitter words burn my ears. It suddenly feels too exposed out here. I hunch protectively over Eland as I herd him back toward our group.

"Oh, no. You won't get away again, girl," Osprey says. "Not this time." If tongues could slice through flesh, his would flay me.

Words will never hurt you
, I remember Aloe telling me once, after another child teased me about being Sightless. Arrows, on the other hand, will.

Shouts and cries of alarm as an arrow whistles toward us from the trees. Peree yells at me to run. I try to propel Eland toward the cave mouth, but before I can get a good grip on him, someone pushes me, hard, in a different direction. I hear Eland cry out and fall. I scramble back to him, trying to haul him up by his arm. He screams.

“Eland? Eland! Get to the caves!” I yell.

My hands grope across his back. It’s wet. I don’t understand. How did Eland get wet? I rub my fingers together; they’re sticky and slick. There’s a rusty smell that I know well, but don’t want to identify. I rub my palms on my dress and try again to get Eland to his feet. He doesn't move, doesn't make a single sound.

"Eland?" I whisper.

An arrow skims by my ear, and an exceptionally heavy body crushes me into the ground. The breath rushes from my lungs. Eland’s hand slips out of mine. I gasp for air and cry out for him.
Why won’t he answer? What’s wrong with him?

Thistle shrieks. Arrows
thunk
all around me. I thrash my arms and legs, trying to free myself from the person pinning me, wanting to reach Eland.

"Stay down," Moray says in my ear, his voice unusually serious. "Unless you want to be dead, too."

I still at his last words.
No
.

"Cuda, Conda, get going!" he yells. The heavy footsteps of his brothers thump toward the caves. He shakes my shoulder roughly and moves his bulk off of me. "When I say go, you run. Got it?"

I croak, "Who's dead, Moray?"

"Go now," he says.

I don't move.

"Go!"

I try, but I can't.

"Have it your way." Moray scoops me up and runs, moving easily for a man his size. Arrows buzz around us.

He’s hit. He stumbles and grunts and almost falls. Someone cries his name from the caves. Frost, I think. I writhe in his arms, begging him to put me down, screaming for Eland.

A cold sensation builds inside me, as if the comforting fire that usually heats and lights my body has been doused. I pant like an animal in a trap. I can't breathe, can’t think.

Moray keeps moving, a little slower now, but fast enough. The darkness of the caves finally covers us. Other footsteps echo beside us, around us. Ragged breathing. Someone's lit a torch; the light dips and slides in front of us.

I want to shout, ask who was hit. But I'm afraid, so afraid, to hear who will answer. And who won't ever answer again.

Moray slows and transfers me to him without a word. We push forward again.

"Where's Eland?" I whisper to Peree. There's no answer, only his breathing. "Peree? Talk to me!" He crushes me against his chest. I start to shake. My hands are freezing and slicked with—I don't want to think about it. "
Where is he
?"

"Breeze was aiming for you, Fennel, not him.” His voice breaks. “They were aiming for you."

A scream tears through my head. The sound drowns out every other thought I might have had. I go rigid in Peree's arms, solid and unmoving, a living stone.

He sets me down when we reach the cache of supplies. I think that's where we are. I can't be sure.

Peree squats next to me and puts his hands on either side of my face. "Fennel, listen." He pauses, swallowing. "How can I tell you this?" His voice wavers like it might splinter any moment. That's how I feel, too. Like I will break apart. A tiny, weak rock under the foot of some terrible creature with the power to shatter me.

"Don't tell me. I don't want to hear it," I whisper, rolling onto my side. I can't listen to him say the words. The words are the terrible creature. If I hear them, they'll destroy me.

His lips brush my hair. "Okay."

This can't be happening.
I scramble up to sitting. "Where is he now?”

"I couldn't get to him. I tried—"

I start to rise. "I have to go back! He might be injured! I can't leave him there, I have to—"

Peree holds me firmly. "He's gone, Fennel. He couldn't have”—he swallows hard again—"survived that.” His words come faster now. They spill out of him like blood from a wound. I rub my hands over and over on my dress. "Moray pushed you out of the way, and the arrows hit Eland instead. I didn't know they were planning that. Of course I didn't know. And Breeze . . . I can't believe she would . . . She didn't want to come. Wouldn't even discuss it. She tried to talk me out of going. But I didn't realize . . . she must have blamed you for everything. I didn't know." He says more, but his voice fades until I can no longer hear him.

I feel the rock under my hands, rolling the small bits of gravel under my fingers. I want to curl up and go to sleep. Maybe if I sleep none of this will have happened. But I can't sleep. I have to move. We all have to move. It's time to go.

Someone places a pack on my shoulders. It must be mine. I register the additional weight, but it doesn't feel real. Nothing does. I'm floating somewhere above and beyond this moment, listening.

That's not me down there, retching in the black passageway as Peree tries to comfort me. That's not Eland outside—dying alone. That's not us.

The girl below me starts walking, putting one foot in front of the other. I listen to her short, dull responses as people speak to her, horror and sympathy in their voices. Words with no meaning that offer no relief.

They talk and talk and talk.

We walk. And rest. And walk again. I smell the trail of crampberries. I hear the echoes. There's hard rock beneath my feet and cold rock against my fingers and tears that refuse to fall from my eyes. The scream builds inside me, over and over, only to perish on my lips.

Then I don't hear or smell or feel anything. I walk until I'm lost in a vast labyrinth, silent and dark. I wander from passage to dead-end to passage.

I don't really care to find my way out.

Young one.

Go away, Nerang
, I whisper.
I don't want you.

Perhaps, young one, but you need me.

No, I don't. Needing people means you care about them. The people I care about die. And I don't want to lose you, too.

He doesn't speak.

It hurts so much, Nerang.

I know, young one. I know.

I wait for some other pearl of wisdom.
That's it? You know?

Yes, I know. It does hurt. There's nothing I can say that will make that not true.

At least Nerang won't go on about how time will make it better. That I have to carry on. That Eland would want me to. How does anyone know what Eland would want?
I
don't even know what he would want.

I force myself to think the words: Eland is dead.

The shrieking starts up again, like a thousand fleshies crowding inside my head.

I can't have lost Eland, too.

If he's not with me, all of this will have been for nothing.

I keep putting one foot in front of the other. But I don't let myself think anymore. And I definitely don't let myself feel. Feeling is deadly.

We spend the first night in a cavern.

I can't eat, and I barely drink. The few sips of water Peree cajoles me into taking taste stale and make me sick. I can almost smell his concern, like the breath of a sick person. If he smells sick, I must smell dead.

I don't speak to him or anyone else. I lie with my back to the group, before the fire even goes out. Peree lays a blanket over me.

But I can't sleep.

Before I became the Water Bearer, things weren't perfect. Not by a long shot. But I had Eland and Aloe. Calli and Bear and Fox and Acacia. I had people I cared for and people who cared for me. Now, I have only Peree.

And what does Eland have? An eternity of nothing.

My breath halts its tortured march in and out of my lungs and my heart convulses. I was wrong before, when I thought I was being selfish; I wasn't going to Koolkuna only for myself. I didn't even realize how much I was doing this for Eland. What's the point without him? Why go on?

Don't take that dark path, young one. There is always a reason to go on.

I ignore Nerang's gentle, insistent voice, listening instead to the fire mutter and hiss.

Moray curses. "Leave me alone, woman."

"Let me help you," a female voice says. Frost. "We need to change the bandages."

"I'm fine. You just focus on growing my baby."

"Is that all you care about?" Her voice is glum.

"Yeah, pretty much," Moray says.

"She's only trying to help," a quiet male voice says. It sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.

"Butt out, Conda," Moray growls. That's why I don't quite recognize the voice. It belongs to the brother I can't ever remember.

"She's not a receptacle for your child, Moray. She's a person," Conda hisses, almost whispering.
Whispering
. . .

"I said shut it, brother." Moray's voice is a knife at his throat.

I bolt up. Peree touches my back.

"It was you. You set the fire." I'm accusing Moray’s brother of trying to kill me, but my voice is anything but indignant. It's frayed and worn, like fabric beyond its useful life.

"I wouldn't have hurt you," Conda says. He actually manages to sound remorseful.

"Why did you do it?" I ask.

"My mother and Frost's father, Osprey, planned it. He set the fire in the trees to confuse things and agitate their people, and we did the same in the caves," Conda says. "They blamed you for the Reckoning. And they didn't like the idea of us all mixing. It was the one thing they agreed on."

"Osprey is Frost's father?" I'm too worn out to be shocked.

"He found out about Moray and our baby," Frost says. "He was furious."

So Thistle and Osprey formed an alliance. Osprey set the fire in the trees, then blamed me for it, while Conda set the fire in the caves. Moray, or one of his brothers, must have killed those poor animals, too. And of course he poisoned me.

But I don't hate Moray for any of that. I hate him for keeping his word and saving my life.

My fingers unfurl one by one. It doesn't matter now. Nothing matters now. I lie back down.

Peree rubs my back. "You okay?"

"I didn't know Osprey was Frost's father."

"I didn't think it was important," he says, regret strong in his voice. "He always hated Groundlings, and she didn't tell me he knew she was pregnant. I'm sorry."

I shrug.

"Why do we have to sleep in the caves?" An older-sounding man—a Lofty—complains. "It's bitter cold in here. And I don't want to sleep with a bunch of stinking Groundlings."

"Get used to it," Peree says in the voice he uses when he's frustrated. Maybe I missed something between them. That wouldn't be a stretch. I don't remember much about the day.

"You don't smell that great yourself, bird man," Cuda says.

"Okay, okay, none of us smell good," Bear says, his voice coming from the other side of the fire.
He's alive, too
. The thought drifts away as soon as it enters my mind.
Doesn't matter.
"Now the lot of you shut up and go to sleep."

"Hear, hear," Vole says, sounding thoroughly annoyed.

"When we get to the new place, will we have to sleep with the Lofties?" Dahlia asks her mother loudly. Ivy shushes her.

I tune out their voices, but sleep won't come.

I never imagined my life in Koolkuna without Eland. Never. He was always there, in my dreams of what it would be like. Peree and I would have built a little house for us and for Eland. On the ground, or in the trees, if I could've overcome my tree sickness. Nerang might have taken an interest in him. Eland would have had a whole group of people to show him how to be strong, compassionate, kind, generous.

Peree is my Keeper. He watched over me, tended me. After we lost Aloe, I wanted to be that for Eland, until he became a man. But our people, Peree’s and mine, took that chance from both of us.

And we were all complicit. For generations, we carefully nurtured our feelings of superiority, protected our obsolete traditions, and held close our conviction that the Scourge was evil.

We’ve all been the Keepers of hate, of prejudice, of violence. We’ve all been the Keepers of the dead.