Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) (8 page)

Her head came to his chin, and her slender body couldn’t weigh much more than half of what his did, but she stood her ground, firm. “I know that.” Her voice quivered a tiny bit. “I’m not going back now, not until I feel like myself. Do you know what I almost did? Do you know Klia?”

He shook his head. “I know who she is.”

“She… Klia was the last straw. Last year, she refused to even talk to me, to acknowledge my presence. But I could hear her. I could hear what everyone there said, anytime they were near a node. So the data chattered in me, and the town chattered in me, and I couldn’t turn any of it off.” She stopped and stared at me, as if willing me to understand.

How could I? What would it be like to have so many conversations in your head? But I nodded.

She continued. “She told her father, who is in line for a Town Council position, that he should kill me. She said they don’t need any holier-than-thou special people to help with anything, and insisted I’d go crazy just like Bryan and start beating people up. She said she’d seen me clench my fists around her, and that I was like a paw-cat living in town.” Words tumbled quickly out of her mouth now. “He told Klia she had to wait, but he didn’t tell her no. He didn’t tell her no. And I wanted to kill her right then, to go down there and rip her throat out.” She paused, breathing fast, looking at each of us for a moment.

The Kayleen I grew up with would never have wanted to kill anyone. Never. Maybe it had been shame that kept her from asking me for help.

Kayleen continued. “I’ve hunted, like you two. I never told anyone, but I’ve done it, run out of town as fast and far as I could and killed djuri. I even killed a baby paw-cat.” She pushed up her sleeve, showing a long scar on her forearm. “See—it scratched me before I killed it. I could have killed Klia. If I’d stayed there long enough, I would have killed her or someone else.” Her hands shook, and her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

Her pause stretched into a long silence. I shivered at the image of her hunting a paw-cat. What need drove her to put herself in so much danger? Finally, I stepped in close to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t turn into it, didn’t step away, just stood, quivering.

Liam watched us both, looking awkward and stiff. I pursed my lips. Couldn’t he see her pain? I swallowed, willing him to unbend.

He didn’t change his position or his gaze. He was close enough for me to hear his breath quickening as whatever inner thoughts that warred in him escalated.

And Kayleen watched him too, still standing with my hand on her,
still not turning into it to let me hold her. Her shoulder felt like a rock. I spoke to her, keeping my voice soft and slow. “Did you tell your mom? Did you ask anyone for help?”

Her lower lip quivered and she unclenched her hands, leaving them hanging loosely at her side. “Paloma is one of them. She wouldn’t hurt me, she loves me. But she doesn’t understand. She can’t. I don’t even know if you can since you’re not Wind Readers. For the first whole day that I can remember, there aren’t a thousand thousand messages screaming at me through the air. I can only feel the perimeter and the ship, and they’re like nothing.”

We were all in the middle of tough choices. Some kind of hunting bird screeched off to our right, and something small gave a death cry, making me shiver. There had to be a compromise. “Liam?”

He didn’t stop staring at her. “What?”

“We can’t make her take us back. Until she does, we’re stuck here. This is a hard place. Kayleen can’t make us happy to be here, and we can’t become happy to be here. Not easily.” I swallowed. I didn’t want to even try to be happy here. “But can we promise to stay for a few days, get some breathing room?”

He turned and looked at me, his eyes bright and hard in the firelight. “Do you expect me to be happy about that?”

“No.” I said it softly, holding his eyes with my own.

Kayleen stood silent, waiting. Firelight played on half her face, touching her dark hair with gold. She licked her lips, then stepped back, giving him space.

I watched him, his jaw tight, his eyes still on me. I smiled, softly, willing him to see that giving her even a small concession in some way gave us more power. He turned to her. “We’ll find a place to camp tomorrow night. But I’m not giving up on fixing the skimmer, and I want your help.” He looked over at me. The price of backing down shone in his eyes, like a pool of loss that he couldn’t quite cry out. “I don’t want to winter here.”

I nodded, thanking him silently, mouthing the words, “I love you,” so that only he could see. A slight smile warmed his lips for just a second before he turned back to Kayleen.

She took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly. “Thank you.”

At least she had it in her to see what he gave her. The demon dogs
bayed again, still far away. Windy bugled, and Kayleen turned to look at her.

Liam looked over toward the foothills where the high calls of the dogs came from. “I’m serious. I don’t want to winter here.”

Kayleen nodded, then turned and walked to Windy, burying her face in the hebra’s neck. I watched her go, wishing she had let me hold her instead of going by herself to Windy.

Liam enclosed me in his arms, leaning his chin on my head. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he whispered.

I glanced at Kayleen and Windy. “We’ll do it together.”

He squeezed me harder. “Might be the only way.”

K
ayleen’s voice—singing just outside the open tent door—woke me from dreams of chasing Windy endlessly around the perimeter, never reaching her. Golden dawn light threaded its way in through the shredded tent windows. I pushed myself up, blinking sleepily. Across from me, Liam’s covers lay tumbled into an untidy lump over his empty cot.

We’d made it through the night without losing a second round of gear. Maybe we had earned enough respect for one night’s peace.

I crawled outside to a warming morning with clear blue sky directly above us and out toward the north ocean. South, piles of white clouds blanketed the mountaintops.

Liam walked toward me, lugging a bucket of water he’d filled from the closest stream. He set the bucket down in front of Windy, who plunged her long nose into it and drank noisily.

Kayleen squatted near the dying fire, cooking goat’s-milk pancakes and singing one of the songs we had loved as children, about a djuri baby lost in the woods, having adventures. I shook my head uncertainly at the signs of fragile domesticity on both of their parts, and walked to the stream to wash. The shallow water ran down from the mountains through a small depression, singing lightly as it tumbled over pebbles. The cold water stung my fingers.

“Come on!” Kayleen called, setting out three plates of hot pancakes, cold djuri jerky, and some dried apples from Artistos’ stores. As we sat down, she asked, “Which way shall we go?”

At least she was asking and not telling. I squinted at her face. She
looked relaxed and happy; no sign of the crazy Kayleen who had kidnapped us showed. She didn’t stare at us—either in mistrust or with naked need written all over her.

“Not in the direction of the demon dogs.” Liam took a bite of pancakes, his brow furrowed. I’d heard the dogs again during my watch last night, far off, but either the fire or the previous night’s explosion had kept them away. Their calls had all come from the low hills between us and the mountain, to the southwest. Liam set his fork down. “We’ll go toward the forest, where there’s likely to be more game.” He pointed southeast, toward the mountains still, but about forty-five degrees away from where we’d heard the dogs.

I swallowed, wanting to go in the opposite direction entirely. “Wouldn’t we be better off heading toward the north shore? On our way down, it looked like there were plains, and we’d be able to see anything coming our way better.”

Liam continued as if I hadn’t even spoken. “We should leave as soon as possible.”

I cleared my throat, demanding his attention. “I don’t want to go into the hills. It’s safer in the open.”

Liam looked at me as if I had two heads, and it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t about the direction of our travel at all. He expected to make the decisions.

Kayleen appeared to share my observation. She stopped midbite, her fork poised in the air. “Wherever we go, we need access to wood. We’ll need wood to build a house and corral. And we shouldn’t go too far. If we can’t get the skimmer unstuck we’ll need to carry everything.”

I grinned, pleased she understood about making decisions together. “But you also need to keep Windy safe from packs of those demon dogs,” I countered. “And we can see them better if we’re in the open.”

Liam waved a hand back in the direction he’d first proposed. “We won’t go more than a half-day’s walk anyway, so we can come back here at night. I don’t want to leave the skimmer unattended.”

I frowned at him. “There aren’t any people on Islandia. The Burning Void should be safe enough.”

“I don’t know yet if there is anyplace safer for us to be.”

He still wasn’t getting it. “We need to make decisions together.”

Liam raised an eyebrow at me. “And that means?”

“That means you sound like you’re telling us what to do.”

He stared out over my head, his jaw tight. I spoke softly into his stubbornness. “You are the most experienced of us, being raised in the roamer band. I listened to you there, because you are Akashi’s second. But Akashi doesn’t lead by giving orders unless it’s an emergency. We’ll generally follow you, and we’ll listen in an emergency, but we all get voices in major decisions.” I’d be damned if I was going to train Liam to give me orders.

Liam swallowed, then looked down at me, his dark eyes softening. “All right. We should make a list of what we need. A place to land the skimmer. A sheltered place we can protect from demon dogs. Safe food storage. We need to be near water.” He looked from me to Kayleen. “What else?”

Good.

Kayleen suggested, “Shelter from weather. I don’t know what kind of storms there are here.”

I nodded. The band’s winter shelters were all near protected cliffs and one was in a shallow cave. Nothing like the multiple rooms in the Cave of Power, but enough to huddle inside during a cold wind. We survived by living lightly. Not cowardly, just… sliding through the balance of the wild as best as possible. Blending with it, leaving it unchanged unless we had to fight. That’s how we always won the stick-dance, too. Blending with the movement, the rhythm. We would have to do that here.

Kayleen shrugged, looking over at me apologetically. “We do need to go toward wood. We’ve picked most of the perimeter clean of anything that will burn, and we’ll need to bring back firewood.”

We’d need more than one trip’s worth of wood to keep a big fire going all night. But she was right. I sighed. “Okay, Liam, we’ll brave the forest.”

Liam used the last of the water from the bucket he’d given Windy to douse the fire, which spouted a gush of white smoke and steam. We shouldered our packs, Kayleen grabbed Windy’s lead, and the three of us set off, shortly passing the perimeters. “Wait,” I said. “Should we take the perimeter with us?”

Liam stopped, a thoughtful look on his face. “We’d just have to take
the devices—we could find wood or stones to mount them on.” Then he shook his head. “It’s a lot to carry, and it’s only a warning. Besides, I’d like to have the bells go off if anything comes here, whether we’re here or not.”

Kayleen looked thoughtful. “We know more now. I can tune them better, at least to the dogs. Maybe I can set the warning bells to dissuade them, like the ones around town.”

I looked at her doubtfully. We’d taken portable perimeters around Little Lace Lake, and they hadn’t done that. But who knew what her abilities were like now? “We don’t have time to tune them today,” I said. “We’d better leave them, in case we get back too late to set them tonight.”

“We won’t,” Liam said.

Kayleen raised an eyebrow.

“Besides, we brought weapons.” He grinned, a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “Let’s go.”

We started out with Liam walking in front, Kayleen and Windy between us, and me in the rear. I kept my silence, still not entirely happy with the direction we were going.

We crunched across a long stretch of rocky surface like we’d landed the skimmer on, walking slowly, since we had to pick our way through the rough footing.

After about half an hour, we started winding upward. The ground turned to dirt and sandy loam. Without an actual path, we made a few wrong starts as we pushed through vegetation, turning back when small cliffs or rock piles stopped us. I watched Windy’s ears, hoping she’d warn us of anything we didn’t want to encounter. She kept them up, swiveling them around, sometimes turning her head all the way back to look at me, as if to say, “Keep me safe.”

The greenery grew steadily bigger as we gained altitude. Pairs of twintrees twisted their reddish bark together, rising taller than most of our twintrees back home. Tiny green circles hid in the long, thin pointed leaves. The fruit had yet to grow the spikes that protected it from birds once it began to ripen. Near the high tops of the twin-trees, red and blue and yellow birds with long beaks watched us quietly, chattering to each other after we passed.

Twintrees seemed to be the only familiar big trees. I didn’t see any
tent trees, or lace-leaves. Here and there, unfamiliar tall evergreens with long spikes for needles towered above us. Denser underbrush than Jini’s threatened our progress regularly. Big-leaved bushes grew as tall as our heads. Long ropy ground-huggers with nasty spines tried to trip us up, and twice we stopped to pull spines from the thick fur just above Windy’s hooves. One of the thorns came away with blood dripping from its wicked, clear point

Liam wandered back and forth like the lead camp dog, Ritzi, sometimes putting up a hand for silence, bending his head, and listening to the forest.

He called a rest stop when we came across a clearing. A stream meandered through it, and a large pile of tumbled stones seemed to rise up out of the ground near the middle of the open space. After we watered Windy and found a way to lead her a little way into the rocks and still have a view, Liam pulled a notebook out of his pack and started taking notes.