Alexandria (31 page)

“Why not?”

“Don’t know. A bad feeling.”

Lia turns around, itching with paranoia all over again, and surveys behind her the vigorous stretch of lush country they’ve just covered. She scours the northern horizon’s multicolored highlands and along the shadowy folds of interior woodlands, searching for any sign of the last two horsemen from the decimated search brigade. A family of deer traipses through the grass, lowering their sleek heads to graze and then bounding off to other domains. She sees no warriors giving chase, but that itchy feeling still remains that she and Jack are not alone out here. She shifts around and settles in for a long ride. Away back in the distance, engulfed by a scruffy parcel of dense growth, shines that little flash of glinting light that had caught her eye yesterday, and she turns her head and does not see it.

“Hurry up, we’ll lose them.” Cirune dances his knife blade absently between his fingers. His clothes are still damp and his skin is paling.

“They have a map,” Halis says tonelessly, his voice coarse and gravelly. He sits astride his horse and peers off through his scope.

“Now you’re just seeing things. Give it to me.”

Halis canters back and thrusts the scope over. Cirune takes it and works himself around to a good sightline, then squints down into the eyepiece. The girl is folding something up and stowing it in the pack slung over her shoulder.

“Still think they’re just roaming around?”

“No. But I still think you’re scared of the boy.”

Lia giggles and her insides feel weightless as Balazir leaps over the top of an uprooted tree trunk and runs steeply down the ravine on other side. He careens around a bend in the shallow crick bed and speeds off again, his nostrils flaring and his stout-ribbed sides heaving splendidly. Jack grins and spurs him just a touch more and he responds fiercely, his heavy hooves pummeling the forest floor. Old oak and pine trees and tall waving grass streak by in a furious blur of green, freckled through with golden poppies and sprays of purple.

The old road is to their right and it meanders down through the cut rock and curves back along the precipitous rind that lines the coast, its far edge crumbling and falling away. Some stretches of it are simply gone, replaced by gaping chasms that cascade down to the sandy, dreck-covered beach.

“I hope they leave,” says Lia.

“They will.” Jack tells her about the brief conversation he had with the stern old woman. “Been walking most of thirty years, she told me.
Thirty years
. What was I thinking?”

“Huh?”

“Us,” he says. “I thought we’d just… I don’t know… settle down someplace nice. Build a house and live out on our own. But there aren’t any nice places.”

“Did she tell you what happened to her?”

“Her home is gone, that’s all she said.”

“Think someone burned it?”

“Burned it or stole it, I don’t know which.”

“Maybe it was another king.”

“I sure hope not,” says Jack.

“There must be more of them out there. They probably blew the world up to begin with.”

“I never heard of one before Nezra, but if there were others like him then they must’ve.”

“How could people do that? All the horrible things they’ve done. Burn people, Jack.
Burn people to death.”

“It’s because of what happened to them…”

“Bad things happened to
us
—we don’t go around burning people.”

“Well… no.”

“I just don’t understand how they can be so nice and so mean at the same time.”

“They’re wicked.”

“But they’re not,” says Lia. “They’re not wicked. In the kitchen, if Calyn saw me looking sad, it made her sad, too. But when I tried to tell her what happened to my parents, about that night they died… she just wouldn’t listen. She didn’t care. She didn’t want to know about it. And the other girls, too, they were the same way. They’re not wicked, most of them.”

“Do you think King Arana is good?”

“Maybe. If he was somewhere else, with different people, maybe he would be. Maybe he wouldn’t think everything belonged to him.”

Jack looks at her sideways and her face is full of bashful sincerity.
A good Arana
. The thought had never occurred to him. The only Arana he can envision is the one he has known, the one who ordered the slaughter of countless villages across the countryside.

“What if I was born in his place?” Jack poses. “What if I was born there, and I was told all those things about being everybody’s protector? Would I turn out like him?”

“No, you wouldn’t, you’re… oh…
ohh—”
She stops herself, chewing her lip pensively. “Maybe you
would.”

“I killed Feiyan and he didn’t have any weapons,” says Jack. “They were holding him on the ground, and I killed him.
I killed Braylon.”

“Yeah,” says Lia, “I know.”

“Do you think it makes me wicked?”

Lia softens her eyes on him and shakes her head. “No, Jack.”

“But, why not? Feiyan was doing what they trained him to do. I don’t know what choice he had, ever since he was little they told him what to do and he did it. They told him he’d be wicked if he
didn’t
do it. And he has a family and two boys and they love him, and I killed him.”

“When he did what they told him, did he feel bad after?”

“I don’t know.”

The steep, pine-covered mountains have been encroaching on their path, little by little, forcing them closer to the coast and the sheer drop-off that lies at its edge. Their shadows pool directly below them in the noonday sun, and the airborne moisture from the nightlong downpour makes their skin hot and sticky with sweat-grime.

Gradually the rising foothills force them back toward the old road. Jack can’t see it, but he knows it is there. Only the trimmed contours of the landscape betray its true path—the ground underfoot looks the same all around. Ahead of them lies a slender concourse that clings tightly along the slanted face of the mountainside. It snakes away for some distance, then curves out of sight. They look around behind them one last time before committing to the passage, then Balazir steps timidly forward onto the constricting pathway.

The surf below foams and slushes up onto the rocks and the gulls call out and swirl shiftlessly overhead, and all around them is white noise and insolent squawking. The steady jet of ocean wind dries their damp foreheads and cools them considerably, and they pass the sloshing skin back and forth and take long drinks of the stale water. As the sun tracks downward, it throws light on the towering western face and brightens the tips of the close-packed pine trees, stretching above them like an armory of green arrows.

Jack rides along the ascending shoulder, keeping as much distance from the edge as he can manage, picking their way along the thinning shelf like a couple of long-lost sherpas.

“Anything coming up behind us?” He speaks quietly and keeps his eyes trained on the line ahead.

“Nothing,” she says after a spell. “So this is the way they came, Ethan and Renning?”

“I guess so.”

“They came up this way, going north… and they found Kas and her family, and they stayed with them… and then they went to the Temple…”

“And they got caught.”

“Will they really kill them?”

“Probably. They don’t like it when people get close to the Temple.”

“What were they doing?”

“I have no idea.”

“Has it ever happened before?” she asks.

“Not for a long time. Just these two, I think.”

“Do you think they were running, too?”

“Running?”

“Like us. I mean, if they came from such a good place, why would they leave it? Why didn’t they just stay?”

“They weren’t running. Could’ve been looking for something, though.”

“Looking for the Temple?”

“Why not? If they did know the prophet, he might have told them about Arana… maybe they wanted to go up and see for themselves.”

“If they knew what Arana does, that’s enough reason to stay away. They’d be stupid to go there and sneak around.”

“I hope they’re not stupid,” says Jack. “That’d make us pretty stupid, too, following their map and doing all this for them.”

“True,” she says, looking around at the precarious situation they’ve gotten themselves into, plodding along this degenerate trail. “But this does feel a little stupid.”

“A little. I think Kas thought we were crazy.”

“You’re still thinking about Kas, huh?”

“I’m not. I’m just—”

“I don’t think I like the way she looked at you.”

“Yeah,” says Jack, “me either.”

Lia squawks louder than the circling gulls and doubles over onto his back, laughing. “Yes, you did. I saw you blushing.”

“No.”

“Ohh,”
she gasps, “you’re blushing again!”

“It’s the heat.”

“It’s Kas running around with no clothes on.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I know. And you’re blushing.” She pokes his cheek.

“Stop it.”

“No,” she says, and pokes him again.

Jack looks back over his shoulder at her crooked smile. Her hair is matted and filthy, dark hollows under her eyes, ripped and bloodstained gown, and she looks as pretty as she did at the Temple parade. She looks back with mischievous sweetness.

“Jack…”

“Yes?”

“The road is gone.”

“Huh?”

He swivels back just as Balazir rounds the bend, and up ahead a landslide has carried off an entire section of road. The face of the mountain runs down slanted, like an enormous dirt ramp, into the ocean. Stunted trees sprout from of the muddy incline, half as tall as the surrounding pine forest. Jack halts Balazir.

“Oh no.”

“What are we gonna do?”

Jack puts a hand over his mouth and looks despairingly at the missing terrain. “We can either go back the way we came… or we can try to go up and around.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

Jack nods.

They dismount and grope their way up the first couple rises, then urge Balazir to follow. He treads the steep pitch with more agility than either of them. They grab roots and branches and pull themselves along in tiring little bursts, and as the road diminishes with the sickening height, Jack and Lia fall back on an embedded slab of rock and lie panting and shaking. Only a few scant drops fall from the mouth of the waterskin when Lia tilts it back and drinks.

“Okay,” says Jack, “now we just have to get back down.”

“I’m so thirsty, I almost miss the rain.”

“Don’t say that. We’ll find water when the road widens out.”

“How far is that?”

“Not sure, really.”

Lia crawls off the mossy slab and descends with a controlled slide. Balazir stands sideways to their bearing and takes slow, measured steps that angle down the face of the mountain. He is not as sure-footed on the descent, dangling his hoof out before him as if he doesn’t quite know where to place it. Halfway down, his hooves slip and he churns his great hind legs in search of ground that does not shift or crumble, and to no avail. He falls to his side and rolls, his legs kicking out above him in a wild panic. They stop and watch breathlessly as he struggles, hoping against all else that he does not maim himself as he slides frantically down toward the chasm.

“Balazir!”

He grinds to a halt, a hair’s breadth away from careening over the edge and tumbling to the broken rocks on the shore. The fear in his face sends harsh pulses through their nerves. Balazir props his hooves in front of him and slowly rights himself, then pushes his massive body onto a flatter tier. He stops and breathes for an instant, then skitters down the rest of the slope and looks back up at them with watery black eyes.

Jack scrambles down, sliding from tree to tree as fast as he can. He jumps off the last boulder and goes to Balazir and takes his lead and walks him forward.

“Is he okay?” Lia calls.

“I think so,” says Jack, rubbing his side and looking him over. “He’s not limping.”

They stop there on the western edge of the world and take the last of the fruit from their pack and sit looking out over the expanse. Jack works his knife around the core of the remaining apple and quarters it and feeds two quarters to the horse, then splits the rest with Lia.