Unicorn Tracks (7 page)

I’d never tried to burn ivory before. I didn’t even know if it was flammable, but for her, I would try. I would build the biggest brushfire ever seen on the savanna if it made what she had just seen a little easier to deal with. I pointed to the line of trampled grass leading away from us. “At least those men won’t be hard to track. I don’t even have to dismount to look for hoofprints. That many riders will leave a clear trail leading right to them.”

She nodded. “Easy.”

I shrugged, hoping I wasn’t overselling my abilities. “Unless they split up. Then we’ll have to choose which trail to follow and pray we’re right.”

IN A
sense we got lucky. The riders stayed together, but we kept riding into the early dusk with no sign of their destination. Our horses started to tire, and the mules refused to trot on, leaning their weight against the leads that tied them to Elikia’s saddle. The mare pulled to a stop, looking over her shoulder at the live anchors dragging her back.

With the sun going down, we needed to find a place to stop and make a fire. Most of Nazwimbe’s hunters prowled the open plains in the haze of dusk and cover of the night. The riders had moved through the plains, along flat ground. I didn’t want to lose the trail, but I also wanted to avoid making our camp out in the open. As we rode under the cover of a lone baobab tree, I reached up and cut a branch down with my knife, sharpening it into a stake to drive into the trail.

I chose a spot for us atop an old cheetah’s den, a rocky outcrop with a dugout burrow beneath, and built our fire at the center. I fed it brush and heather, making it smoke so it would frighten the animals around us out of the underbrush. A smoky fire would also keep the insects that loved Kara’s blood at bay. Kara gave the horses water, took their tack off, and hobbled them so they couldn’t run away while we slept. True to my promise to Bi Trembla, I didn’t intend to sleep, but I didn’t think Kara would go to bed if she knew I was staying awake all night to keep watch.

I started to pitch the tents, assembling the first one in minutes. Our travel tents were simple, triangular structures with only four pegs. But as I put the first peg of the second tent in the ground, Kara walked up behind me. “I don’t want to stay alone after seeing those men. Just put up one tent. They’re not so small. We can cuddle close,” she said.

Her words almost made me choke. I paused, keeping my eyes fixed on the peg, afraid of what my face might show her. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” she said, her fingers wrapped around mine to pull the peg out of the earth. “It’ll be like when I was at boarding school. We can stay up late and tell each other stories. It might take our minds off what we saw today.”

I couldn’t help it. When she wrapped her fingers over mine, my whole body involuntarily shivered.

“You cold?” she asked. I couldn’t tell if her question was serious or not. “I packed an extra shawl in my saddlebag.”

“No,” I managed to squeak back. A whole night, alone in a single-person tent with her. How could I spend the night swapping stories in the firelight, when I wanted nothing more than to run my fingers through the flames of her hair and press my lips to the skin of her back? Those thoughts terrified me. Where had they come from? Part of me longed to be with her, to explore her. But a deeper part of me feared what it would be like to make myself so vulnerable, to let someone touch me and look at my scars.

Despite the warmth of her hand around mine, I felt frozen. I kept still while we held the peg together without putting it down. What did she mean, holding my hand like that? I swallowed. This was her adventure.
I
was part of her one adventure. But when she didn’t move to release my fingers, I let myself wonder, for just a second, if it were possible she wanted what I did and if she felt vulnerable too.

When I turned to face her, her grip on my hand tightened. Color had risen to her face. Her pale cheeks and freckled nose glowed a soft pink. Specks of firelight glistened in her eyes. Her lips were so full and wet….

I leaned in and pressed my mouth to hers. I felt awkward, unsure of what to do, or how she would react.

Once upon a time, a man kissed me on the mouth, and his tongue forced its way inside like a gag, drowning out my screams. I closed my eyes against the pain of the memory, damming up the flood of tears. I tried to relish the softness of her mouth pressed closed against mine and the tiny step she took toward me, her free arm curving around the lower part of my back.

Her tongue teased my mouth open. Instead of forcing, demanding, it suggested and coaxed. When my lips yielded, her tongue was cool with the water from her canteen. This time, it didn’t feel like an invasion, and I felt my body melt into her flesh.

She led me into the tent by the hand, and I lay down on my back, waiting. I still wasn’t sure what was expected of me. Or that I was ready. When my mama had told me about what women must do, in marriage, she had told me to do my duty, to wait for the man’s lead and let him take his pleasure. I could take my own if I could, but always, my job was to please him. What did you do if there wasn’t a man to please? What did you do if experience had already taught you to expect only pain? How did Kara get the confidence to do this? It seemed so natural for her. A knot formed in my throat, and I wondered if it would ever feel natural for me.

Kara began to kiss my neck, easing the tension. Her fingers slipped beneath my shirt to pull it off. I surprised myself by letting her, trying to relax as her fingers mapped my body. But when her eyes fell to the deep white scars spanning my stomach from the top of my ribs to below my navel, I crossed my arms to hide the marks.

“I can’t,” I said. “We can’t go further. Stop.”

She looked me in the eye, waiting. I closed my eyes again. My heart beat so fast it shook my entire body. With slow precision, she kissed each of the scars and laid her head down on my stomach.

“Your tiger stripes,” she breathed, tracing over the crooked lines with her finger. And in that moment of complete acceptance, I knew I would never be the same. “They show how you resisted. They’re like your battle scars. Don’t be ashamed of them.”

My fingers threaded through her hair, relishing the lightness of it, the sweet fragrance trapped within the layers.

A tear ran down my cheek, and I was glad her head was turned so she couldn’t see. All this was just temporary—her one adventure—and she could never be mine.

DESPITE MY
promise to myself and Bi Trembla, I dozed off. When I awoke, Kara’s head was still resting on my stomach, and I could feel the warmth of her sleeping breath on my bare skin. Carefully I moved her head down to rest on the tent floor, arranging her thick hair like a cushion around her.

In Nazwimbe, the day’s heat vanished with the sun, and the air outside was crisp and wet. Our fire still simmered. Scanning the grazing horses, I counted them and breathed a sigh of relief. At least I hadn’t been asleep so long that our fire went out and a predator snuck up on them. I knelt to feed the fire fresh kindling and brush, poking it gingerly with the sole of my shoe to stir it up again.

The flat plains spanned around the cheetah’s roost. Somewhere far in the east, a soft glow loomed on the horizon. The light didn’t flicker the way a single campfire would, and it was larger, spanning an area, though I couldn’t make out any buildings. As far as I knew, there were no towns in this part of the savanna. The plains were a dangerous place to build: exposed, bare, full of the predators that stalked in the night. When I’d started guiding for Tumelo, I had memorized the maps of the area. A year ago no towns or villages had existed out here.

When I’d marked our trail with the peg, we’d been heading east. My heart started to pound with fear. The light looked too bright to come from the campfires of even two dozen men. I had to be looking at a town, but where had it come from? And why had it been built?

The tent flap opened behind me, and Kara climbed out. She had a wool shawl wrapped around her otherwise naked body. She sat down next to me, the peach fuzz of her legs brushing against my arm as she began warming herself at the fire.

“It’s so quiet out here,” she said, drawing the shawl tighter about her shoulders. “I’ve never been somewhere so quiet. In Echalend, people are always rushing about, even at night. Dogs bark. You hear the horses outside on the cobblestones.”

I nodded. It was quiet at the camp too, but not like this. The smoke of our fire drove away even the crickets. Out on the savanna, at night, it was almost like the world stopped.

Almost. I pointed to the east, and Kara’s eyes followed the line of my arm. She looked at the light in confusion and asked, “Is that a town? I thought most people in Nazwimbe lived in the mountains.”

“It wasn’t here a year ago, when I learned all the routes and maps.”

Her mouth set into a grim line. “It has to be where those men went.”

“Could be. Let’s hope. Because if they went through it and didn’t stop there, finding their trail on the other side is going to be a whole lot harder.”

“Maybe the town’s people would know where they went. A group that large, someone would have to know.”

I shrugged, not wanting to tell her that if the men really were a gang of poachers, no one would tell us about them even if they did know. Villagers feared men who carried guns, enough to keep secrets for them in exchange for the illusion of protection. Men who carried guns
and
captured wild unicorns would terrify them.

“You’ll have to cover your face and hair,” I said reaching out and giving one of her red curls a light tug. After last night, it suddenly felt easy to touch her. “Full sleeves. I have some gloves in the saddlebags. If they see your hair or your features, the whole village will talk about you. We need to blend in.”

Kara raised her eyebrow. “How am I going to blend in? In this heat, with all these clothes on?”

“A lot of merchants from Sylbaia come dressed like that. It’s their culture.”

Kara nodded. Then she rose to her feet. She went to the saddlebags, taking out my gloves before fishing out the unicorn’s horn as well. She sat down again, turning it over in the firelight. Then she pushed it into the flames.

The horn itself held its shape, blackening without burning. But as we peered deeper into the fire, the lines of silver twisting around it unfurled. Starting from the wide base, a strip of pure silver filament unwound in a curled spiral. The glistening metal started to glow orange and red with heat, and suddenly, it exploded. The pieces hovered in the air around us, like stars suspended in midair. We watched them twinkle for a moment, before a low wind came and brushed heaven’s dust away.

THE CLANK
of iron greeted the dawn with us. As the sun rose, and I prepared the mules to leave, we heard the sound of metal and the low groan of a hundred men working in the rising heat.

Kara wrapped her shawl around her hair like a headscarf, donning my gloves and jacket. Only her eyes were visible through a narrow slit in the fabric. But as long as no one saw too much of her tapered features, hair, or body, people would assume she was a foreign merchant or a leper. At least I optimistically hoped they would, since we had no better method of disguise.

“I’m going to sweat to death wearing this,” Kara complained. She lifted the back of her blouse, using the material to fan her sweaty body.

“Once we get through to the other side of the village, you can take it off,” I promised. “We’ll have a quick look around. Our towns aren’t big, and this one can’t be huge. It’s been here six months at the longest.”

I boosted her up onto Elikia, letting her step up using my knee. My mare was tall and narrow, difficult to mount from the ground. But her wiry frame and bay coat were more typical of horses here than the glossy black of Kara’s chunky gelding. Better to have one less thing to attract attention to her.

We rode across the fields. Flower petals and old leaves whipped around us on the morning breeze. I reveled in the cooler morning air, letting it kiss the bare skin of my arms, while Kara sweltered in silence. I’d warned her not to speak once we left the relative safety of our little camp. Nothing would draw attention faster than her strange language and accent. And who knew if the poachers would have scouts lurking.

As we drew nearer to the village, it became clear that it wasn’t a town at all—but a giant camp. I could see that none of the structures were permanent. There were no huts or chieftains’ builds, nor farm animals and crops. Instead, hundreds of tents stood clustered together on a flat plain of mud. Each tent had only a single post, and they looked flimsy, like thin blankets that had simply been draped over sticks. Meat bones, half-smoked cigars, and molding bread littered the ground. Skinny pack mules picked through the garbage for scant mouthfuls of grass and leaves. A few men smoked pipes outside their tents or played cards. A few lay immobile on tattered pallets. Their cheeks were drawn together and their eyes bloodshot. Most didn’t even look up as we passed them. One of them sported fresh whip marks across his back and shoulders.