Little One Page 13

  Eventually, Litty calmed down enough to stop crying, and Daniel wiped the tears from her face with his thumb. He opened the door that led out into the street. The sky was growing light—if fortune favored them, Ram would be on his way.

  For breakfast, Daniel and Litty shared the packs of dried fruits and nuts, and afterwards, Litty scampered off to play with Ducky. Daniel kept one eye on her and the other on the surrounding mountains. Ram had promised to return.

  They would wait.

  Chapter Ten

  All eyes fell on fourth-ranker Moriah as she stumbled into Preceptor Maravek’s command tent in the center of the cavern, interrupting a huddle of men pouring over a chart on the table. Sweat soaked through her uniform, and even as everyone jumped up at her sudden entry, she sank to her knees, completely out of breath and energy.

  Maravek nearly knocked his chair over as he leaped to his feet. “Get the medic! Don’t just stand there, for goodness’ sake. Someone help the girl!”

  A third ranker finally snapped out of his startled stupor and ran over to her. He helped her back to her feet and slid her arm around his shoulder to prop her up.

  Moriah waved him off. “I’m fine.” They guided her to a chair, and she dropped into it. She wiped sweat from her forehead and eyes.

  “Well? What do you have for me?” Maravek towered over her. “And where’s Kerrigan? I figured out her little scheme. Hung back to sketch an extra copy of their outpost, no doubt.”

  Moriah resisted the urge to kick him between the legs. “They took her.”

  Stunned silence fell upon the higher ranked occupants of the tent, including Maravek. His mouth parted, but nothing came out. After a moment, he shook himself and cleared his throat. “Explain yourself.”

  Moriah relayed the events that had taken place since she and Tess left the encampment. She talked as quickly as she could without tripping on her own words. “They let me go and made no effort to hide their plans. Their leader is a man named Nikolai.”

  Maravek’s eyes narrowed to smug slits. “So he’s the weasel that’s been taking potshots at me.” He strode to the table and gave one of the chairs a light kick. “I should have figured it was him. Well, what does he want from us—a ransom? Does he want us away from his mountain? You go back to him and tell him we’re—”

  “He wants you.”

  Maravek stopped in the middle of his sentence. His face darkened into a deep shade of crimson. “So that’s it.” He stared at the table, drumming his fingers on the wood. “Finally showing his face again, after all this time.” The smugness returned to his eyes, and he snorted. “The Akorites’ great war champion, reduced to petty kidnapping and fruitless prisoner exchange demands, eh?”

  Moriah straightened in her chair. “He—he wants you dead.”

  Maravek tossed his hands in the air. “Of course he does. I’m the reason he’s hiding away like a fox in a hole. When I get my hands around his grubby neck, I’ll squash him like a bug!”

  “Then you’ll comply?”

  “What do you think I am—a pushover? No, I won’t comply. He can stay in his cave and rot, for all I care.”

  Moriah jumped up from her seat. “But, sir! What about Tess? She’s in danger. They could kill her.”

  Maravek paused, but he lost none of his contempt. “What of it? Empty threats, nothing less. I know Nikolai better than you know your own mother. He won’t kill her. Besides, Kerrigan’s a clever girl. She’ll worm her way out.”

  Moriah protested, but Maravek turned his back on her and addressed the other Preceptors, who’d been following the conversation with mixed reactions. “From now on, no one leaves this camp without orders directly from me. Anyone sees so much as a whisker of that ferret, you report straight to me, understood?”

  Nods circled the tent.

  Maravek returned his attention to Moriah. “One of the miners’ wives caught a virus. We quarantined her so the bug wouldn’t spread, but she’s retching like a well pump. See to it that she’s tended to.” He marched towards the tent flaps.

  Moriah started after him. “But—”

  He whirled around. “Where are there clean cloths and buckets? Excellent question, but you’ll have to ask the medic, not me.” He raised an eyebrow at her, and a vein threatened to pop in his forehead.

  His point was clear. She swallowed her protest. “Yes, sir.”

  Maravek nodded, and then he was gone.

  Moriah mulled over a few choice words she wanted to shout after him, but instead of voicing her thoughts, she settled for giving the tent canvas a swift kick before storming out into the night.

  * * *

  Darkness was quickly settling in. Koldin led Ram at an urgent pace through the winding forests, never once stopping. It was as though he were following a map in his head. Ram, however, had lost all sense of direction. They had dipped through low valleys so thick with trees that the sky was lost to them and splashed across several of the myriad of streams that cut through the Untamables.

  For the first stretch of their venture since joining forces, Koldin remained silent, and Ram didn’t prod him with questions, though of these, many flitted about his mind like moths at a lamp. Koldin looked at nothing but where his next footstep would fall, and seemed to care little for the forest around him. Ram decided that, since he was of no help on the tracking side of things, he would keep his eyes on the looming trees, and that if danger leaped out at them, he would be the first to scream.

  Presently, however, Koldin heaved a long sigh, as though expelling a heavy burden, and he slowed his pace enough to ask Ram how he had come to team up with Kora, what she had told him about herself, and what had transpired in the past few days. Ram answered all these questions, and Koldin took great interest in hearing how he and Daniel had saved Kora from the snapjaws, and how they had protected her on their journey to Obenon.

  “She thought you were dead.” Ram said, when recounting their first run-in with the Akorites, “What happened?”

  Koldin put his hand to his injured shoulder. “She spoke the truth as she saw it. When we attacked the Preceptor train, I was hit. The bullet went clean through my shoulder, but it knocked me out. Kora panicked. She saw my blood, and it drove her out of reason.”

  “She was terrified when we found her,” said Ram, “And not just of the snapjaws. I’ll have you know, I could tell something else haunted her the whole time. I guess now I understand a little more what it was.” He paused, worry gnawing at his stomach. “Is her life really in danger?”

  Koldin averted his gaze. “She swore an oath, and bound herself to our cause. As did I; as did we all. When she fled, she broke that oath. There are those who see her actions as betrayal. Not only that, they cost Riona her life. According to our law—Nikolai’s law—she must be put to death.”

  Ram blinked. “Who’s Nikolai?”

  “He was a commander during the war—one of the best. They say he was the only Akorite the Order truly feared, and I believe it. They killed his family and burned his village. They thought it would break him, but it only made him more dangerous. Now he seeks justice, and where he goes, we will follow.”

  “But he sentenced Kora to…” Ram trailed off. “You still trust him?”

  “Nikolai is my leader, but he is also my friend. I will reason with him, and while Kora will surely go punished, he may well spare her life.”

  Ram did not press the issue, and Koldin lapsed back into silence. The pain in Ram’s arm had not lessened, and he wondered how much longer they would have to trek through the woods. Still, he was encouraged, if only a little. With Koldin’s help, the chances of saving Kora increased more than he had dared hope, and his decision to leave Daniel no longer seemed so foolish.

  They hit a series of bluffs that rose above the trees, and Koldin veered his course to follow them at their base. The continued along the bluffs for some time, and then Koldin stopped at the mouth of a narrow gorge hidden behind a wall of thorny brambles. Ram could have walked right by it wi
thout seeing it had he been by himself. Here, the trees stopped, replaced by thick beds of ferns red and green, and hefty boulders blanketed with moss. The depths of the gorge were veiled by the descending night.

  “At the end of this ravine,” said Koldin, gesturing with his hand, “Lies the entrance to our outpost. We have a skilled medic—she’ll tend to your arm, and you’ll be safe with us.”

  Ram hung back. “You’re not worried I’ll tell the Preceptors where you’re hiding?”

  Koldin pierced him with his gaze. “Are the Preceptors any more your allies than they are ours?” When Ram didn’t answer, he added, “It’s worth a thought.”

  They headed into the gorge. Though the terrain was fairly level, the ground was so riddled with loose stones hidden by the ferns that Ram had no little trouble placing his feet in steady places. Before long, though, they reached what looked at first to be a dead end. The walls of the gorge, nearly vertical in most places, closed in on themselves, and tangled vines hung from the trees above like a static, leafy waterfall. Camouflaged in the vines was an archway of mossy stone blocks.

  “It’s an underground outpost, built many centuries ago,” explained Koldin. “When the Order pushed my people back into the Untamables soon after the war started, we found refuge in this very place, and since then, it’s been renovated to functionality—for the most part.”

  He pushed through the vines into the corridor beyond the archway, and Ram stuck close behind him. The dark passageway swallowed them like an open maw, and the sounds of the forest were cut off as though someone had pulled a switch on the birds and insects. The floor was solid stone. The tunnel had been cut right from the side of the mountain.

  A light appeared ahead of them, flickering yellow and orange. A man came towards them holding a blazing torch out in front of him. His shadow danced along the walls of the corridor behind him. Matted hair hung down to his neck, and he walked with hunched shoulders. “Koldin,” he said in a slow, slurred voice as he drew near, “You’re back.”

  Koldin clapped him on the shoulder. “Tarvin. I must speak with Nikolai right away. Where is he?”

  Tarvin’s eyes widened, and he sucked in air between his teeth. One of his eyes wandered. “He is…in the low levels, with her.”

  “With Kora? He has her?”

  A sly grin spread across Tarvin’s leathery face. “No…” he drew out the word, laughed like a small child, and then scurried back down the corridor, once again sending his shadow bouncing along the walls.

  Koldin leaned in to Ram. “Tarvin has suffered more than most people deserve. He might rub you the wrong way, but an injured mind has not dulled the kindness of his spirit.”

  At the end of the passageway, a second arch opened up into a structure the likes of which Ram had never seen before. A stone walkway ringed a perfectly circular hole that burrowed down into the earth like a giant rabbit’s hole. A spiral staircase, of the same brown stone, wound its way down along the wall of the hole, and every few revolutions, it would break off into small platforms, and each platform had a hall branching off it, like the spokes of a wheel. It reminded Ram of a hollow beehive set in the depths of the mountain.

  He gave a low whistle. “I’ll say, I would have never guessed there were places like this in the mountains. How many people do you have here?”

  “Eleven, if you count Kora,” said Koldin, “All offering themselves under the same oath.”

  Ram peered over the rail that lined the inner perimeter of the walkway. Seven or eight levels below, he could make out the rough stone bottom of the pit. “You keep mentioning the oath. What do you mean by that?”

  “We want justice.” With that simple answer, Koldin turned to Tarvin and spoke in hushed tones, pointing down towards the lower levels.

  While they spoke, Ram noticed a young woman standing on the far side of the gap, leaning against the inner rail, staring directly at him. He averted his gaze, but when he chanced another glance, she was still there, still looking, a curious expression on her face.

  “Right,” said Koldin, drawing his attention back. “Now your arm.”

  Ram looked back across the way, but the girl was gone.

  Koldin led Ram down to the second level, to a room a ways down the hall that at some point must have been the living quarters of one of the Akorites. The room was simple, but the mere sight of it—a clean bed, a sink, a mirror, and a floor that wasn’t layered in pine needles—nearly made Ram tear up.

  “Wait here. I’ll send for our medic. She’ll fix your arm up. In the meantime, I need to speak with Nikolai. I’ll come for you when I have more information.” Koldin left Ram in the room and closed the door behind him. His footsteps bounced off the walls of the corridor outside.

  Ram waited until the footsteps faded before collapsing on the cot like a corpse. The mattress, though not the softest in the world, felt simply divine, and he felt the weariness from the last few days flow from his extremities like air from a punctured tire. His head dropped back, he closed his eyes, and for a long moment, simply enjoyed the silence. Koldin was right—he felt safe here, and he decided that for the next five minutes, that’s all he would think about.

  Presently, he peeled himself off the cot and hobbled over to the sink and mirror, where he ran his hands under the cold water and stared at them, entranced by the simple pleasure of watching the dirt swirl down the drain from his palms. For a moment, he was even able to forget the pain in his arm. But then the doubts and the fears came crashing back like a wave, and he staggered away from the sink. If they could not save Kora’s life, then he had failed and had left Daniel for no gain. Right now, he could only hope Daniel had succeeded. He still fully intended to keep his word—he would rejoin Daniel, and together they would set out on new paths.

  Another concern also gnawed at his mind. While he was here solely to help Kora, and Koldin had given him no real reason to fear, what about the others? They were Akorites. They were dangerous. If they knew he was under the authority of the Preceptors, what might they do to him? Then Koldin’s words about the Preceptors came back to him, and he wondered as to their meaning. He put his washed hands to his temple. He was getting a headache.

  The heavy door opened behind him, interrupting his thoughts. Ram whirled around and came face to face with a girl standing under the frame—the same girl that had been staring at him from across the central hall. Eyes like deep emeralds silently surveyed the room, landing lastly on his bandaged arm. Dark locks cascaded over delicate shoulders, and the shade of her jacket matched the color of her eyes. She held up a satchel of medical supplies. “My name is Myra. Koldin told me I would find you here.” Her voice was soft yet rich, like untouched silk. She crossed the floor with barely a sound and directed Ram to sit on the edge of the cot. “Let me see.”

  Ram held out his arm, and Myra unwound the bloody bandages. Her fingers moved deftly and gently, proving both experience and care, and the sight of the exposed wound didn’t seem to bother her in the least. He wished he could say the same for himself. The wildcat had done quite a number on his forearm—the gash was deeper than he originally thought, and though the bleeding had stopped, the wound still oozed.

  Myra motioned for him to keep his arm elevated. “You need stitching.” She splayed open her satchel and pulled out a fishhook needle, which she sterilized with rubbing alcohol. While the needle dried, she dabbed at the wound and washed away the dry blood. “It’s a clean cut,” she said.

  Ram watched her work, fascinated. “You’re different.” The words came out without him meaning them to.

  She glanced up at him, her round eyes hinting at a smile. “What do you mean?”

  He opened his mouth, shut it again, and repeated the process. His face beamed red.

  The smile spread to her lips. “Not all hands are made to carry guns, Ram.”

  For a moment, he wondered how she knew his name, but it only made sense that Koldin would have told her. He already had a feeling her mind was as sharp as the sur
gical blades in her satchel.

  She made no indication of expecting an immediate answer. Satisfied that the edges of the wound were clean enough to stitch together, Myra threaded the sterilized needle. She pushed the point through his skin, pressing the parted flesh together. In another short minute she had stitched the wound top to bottom, and she bound his forearm with fresh bandages. Her hand traced down the length of his arm, and she twisted his wrist and tapped his palm with her oval fingertip. “Koldin told me the wildcat got the worse end of the deal.”

  Ram blinked. “I guess. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way.”

  She laughed, and it was like honey dripping from the comb. “You’re going to be alright.”

  “Thank you,” he said, “You know—for patching me up.”

  She gave a nod, and after a moment of silence, asked, “Why are you here?”

  The question caught him off guard. “I found Koldin in the forest—or he found me, I’m not sure which—and after—”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Myra. A cloud passed over her emerald eyes. “I know about Kora. I was there when she ran; I know what fate awaits her. This is a matter that presses on all of us. Why do you want to help her?”

  Ram rubbed the back of his neck and sighed a long sigh. “Would you think I’m a fool if I told you I wasn’t entirely sure? When Daniel and I—”

  “Who is Daniel?” She interrupted him again. She sat on the cot with her legs crossed, her eyes ever earnest, as she listened to him recount his adventures for the second time that night. This time he held nothing back. With Myra, it seemed pointless to try and hide anything. As he spoke, he found himself more and more drawn to her deep eyes. Though he thought his storytelling was clumsy at best, he saw all the emotions that he had felt over the last few days ripple over them, as if she felt every pain he had felt as he retold them.

  When he had finished, she remained in thought for a span. “You’re a fighter.”

  Ram snorted. “Daniel’s always the one to take action, to do the hard things. I’m no soldier.”