Fire Country

“Yeah…” I say, urging her to get to the point.

Wilde says, “Siena, did you see anyone before you got to Wildetown? Did anything happen?”

I stop breathing and my heart skips a beat. The Cotees. Feve. I never told them ’cause I didn’t want them to think I was so weak I couldn’t even make the trip without help. But what does that hafta do with anything? I let out a slow breath. “Why?” I ask.

Crya charges at me, fists knotted, but Skye bars her path. “You don’t get to ask questions!” she screams. “You put us all in mortal danger!”

I shrink back, my face awash with horror. What? Danger? But how?

“Back off,” Skye growls. “We’re all on the same burnin’ side ’ere.”

“Are we?” Crya says, looking over Skye’s shoulder at me. “Because she’s keeping something from us. That’s what enemies do.”

“Crya,” Wilde says, her voice as controlled as ever. “This isn’t helping.”

Crya shoots me one last glare and then casts her eyes downward, backing off. She almost looks embarrassed at her outburst. Skye turns back to me, her eyes almost as sharp as Crya’s. “Are you hidin’ somethin’?”

I nod. “I didn’t think it was important,” I plead. “I was embarrassed.”

“It’s okay, Siena,” Wilde says. “Just tell us what happened.”

Keeping my eyes fixed on a splotch on the ground, I spill my guts. Tell them ’bout the Cotees, getting caught in the trap, thinking I was dead. Waking up to Feve, the Marked One, his bandages, his herbs, his rapid disappearance. Everything.

“He tricked you,” Crya says when I finish.

I glance up, shudder when I see the scowl on Skye’s face, and settle on Wilde’s gaze, the only one soft enough to bear. “He followed you,” Wilde explains.

“What? No! He saved my life!” I protest. There was no lie in his warmth, in his gentle care. I’d be dead if not for him.

“Maybe so,” Wilde says, “but he was only there because he was following you. Tell them the rest, Lye.”

’Fore I have a chance to consider what Wilde just said, Lye says, “I hung around the village for a few days more, being thorough, making sure your father and the other Greys weren’t going to take any further action to track down the runaways. That’s when he showed up.”

“Who?” I ask.

“The Marked One.”

“Feve?” I ask.

“I didn’t take the time to ask him his name,” she says sarcastically, her eyes narrowing, “but it must’ve been him.” I close my eyes, knowing exactly where this is going. “I knew it was serious though,” she continues, “because the Grey’s were in one of the hut’s all day with the Marked One, with Feve. Under the sunlight I couldn’t hope to sneak into the village, but when night fell, I crept in. I arrived just as Feve left the hut—I was searin’ lucky he didn’t see me when I ducked into the shadows. And then he was gone, like he’d never been there at all.”

I feel ill and hungry and angry. How could the man whose very presence was filled with so much warmth betray me like that? Easy—’cause my father probably paid him well, with skins and meat and wood. The baggards!

“The hut walls were thin enough to hear everything if I put my ear up to it,” Lye says. “They knew everything. The location of Wildetown, the approximate number of Wildes, the most direct route to get there. It didn’t take them long to decide what to do.”

“Yeah, hunt us down and kill or capture every last one of us,” Crya says, her words clipped and laced with anger.”

Lye nods. “They were going to organize the Hunters the next day, take as many men as they could spare.”

I count backwards in my head. “But then…shouldn’t they already be here?”

Lye sits down, as if her legs won’t be able to keep her up as she tells the next part of her story. “I was about to leave the village, to turn a five-day trek across the desert into two days to hopefully warn everyone before it was too late.”

“What the scorch happened?” Skye asks.

“The Killers attacked.”

~~~

The Killers bought us some time. According to Lye, they came by night, dark shadows with one thing on their mind: satisfy their namesake; kill. Lye had just slipped out of the northern edge of the village, probably through the same gap I escaped from, when the alarm sounded. She thought it was for her, so she ran hard, dove behind the biggest dune she could find.

She heard blood-curdling screams and hair-raising cries, and when she peeked out, the village was in turmoil. The shadows had broken through and were biting, slashing, clawing at anyone in sight. They killed many Heaters ’fore the Hunters were able to maim enough of the beasts to drive the rest away.

Lye waited until it was over, crept back in. No one noticed her. They were too busy carrying the injured to MedMa, dragging the dead to the center of the village where they’d be burned at dawn. Sixty four were killed, including forty six Hunters. In a village as small as the Heaters’, losses like that are catastrophic.

When Lye finishes her story about the Killer attack, I let out a deep sigh. Profound sadness rests upon me like a dark cloud. So many i

“The Hunters are on their way,” Lye says, and I gasp.

“What? But they’ve just been slaughtered by the Killers. How can they…?” My voice is high and quivery and draws stares from everyone.

“Your father’s hatred for us runs deep,” Wilde says. “The Killers may have killed many of his people once, but we take girls every six full moons. And not just girls, Bearers. Those who have the ability to add to the population. Without Bearers, the Heaters will wither away to nothing, like a carcass picked clean by scavengers. He’s coming to take us back.”

“They left three days ago,” Lye says. “I managed to get around them as they slept and arrive here ahead of them. We might have two days, but it could be less. They were ru

It’s all my fault. I led them right to us. I hid the truth of my stupidity from the very people who coulda done something about it. My heart’s as hard as stone, cracking and crumbling away. “What do we do?” I ask.

Wilde meets each pair of eyes in the tent. “We fight,” she says.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Fighting against friends, where the victor extends a hand to help the loser up at the end, is one thing. Fighting to the death is another.

But that’s what we’ll do. Not just for our freedom from the oppressive Laws that my father stands for, but for each other, for ourselves. For those we’ve lost: for me, Circ and my mother.

To the death.

With his typical arrogance, my father’ll expect to catch us by surprise. That’s our advantage. So we’ll play into it, pretend to be caught unawares, with our britches down so to speak. Really we’ll be ready, with tricks a-plenty up our sleeves.

By Lye’s estimation, he only brought fifty Hunters with him, less’n half our numbers. Again, his arrogance playing right into our hands. Either he doesn’t realize how many we have, or he thinks he’ll crush us like a powder moth under his treads.

Our turf. Ours. We’ll let him come to us.

We expect the Hunters to appear at dawn over the horizon, ru

After a long day of preparation, we’ve just sat down to eat, when the scouts run into the camp, preceded only by their shouts. “They’re here!” they yell. “The Hunters are here!” A shiver passes through me. The night air is warm.