Blightborn (48 page)

But then enough corn gathers at the front that the boat suddenly crawls to a stop, lifting up and then slamming back down before going still.

Evening begins to settle in around them. Crickets begin to chirp.

Ahead, two bodies lie silent, unmoving. Eben Henry is slumped forward. Boyland to the side.

Cael coughs. Rolls out of the skiff. The rope still anchors him. He feels around on the ground for something, anything—he palms a rock. He brings it down against the rope. The rock cracks, shatters—not a rock at all but a dang dirt clod.
Sonofab—

He keeps feeling. There.
There
. A rock. A real one. Flat. Hard. A sharp edge that doesn’t come apart as his thumb presses against it. He jams the rock against the rope, which doesn’t do a damn thing. Panting, he takes it and turns it, sharp edges down—

And begins to saw back and forth.

The rope frays. Eventually, it cuts.

I’m free
.

He turns to look back at the skiff—

Boyland’s still in the front.

But Eben Henry’s gone. Like a ghost turned to vapor.

Oh shit.

His Blight-vine—cut off at the tip, now weeping white fluid—suddenly writhes and begins to panic, and Cael realizes,
It’s warning me. It knows something is wrong—

He spins around just as the vagrant comes at him with a knife.

Cael launches himself to the side, the knife coming down on the edge of the skiff and tearing open one of the seats. Puffs of white stuffing float out. Cael drives a hard punch to Eben’s kidneys, but the older man takes it like it’s nothing—then cracks an elbow across Cael’s jaw.

A bitten cheek. A loose tooth. The taste of blood. He was already woozy, but now he’s slipping on a carpet of rotten corn, falling backward—air knocked out of his lungs as if with a hammer.
Oof
.

He tries to will himself to stand, tries to put all of himself into his Blight-vine, but it just flips and flops like a snake with its head cut off. Cael can’t even get a proper breath into his pancaked lungs.

Eben Henry stalks over to him.

Knife in one hand.

With his free hand he unwraps the bandage around his head. It
peels
away, stickily, noisily, like pulling a dead leaf off drying paint. In the fading light of the day Cael can see that the man’s skin is red and raw, the wounds popping open with every
miniscule muscle flex of his face. He clacks his teeth, blinks his eyes, both so white against the burn-blistered face.

“You scarred me,” Eben says, dropping to his knees on Cael’s chest. What little air Cael pulled in is gone again, and all he can do is make a whistling, squeaking gasp. “Your family burned mine.”

“Who . . . I don’t . . .” His words are bare whispers.

“You still don’t know, Little Mouse. Do you know who your father was?” The vagrant spreads his legs, moves his knees so that they pin Cael’s arms to the ground. Then he takes the tip of the knife, presses it against Cael’s forehead.

“He was one of the Sleeping Dogs,” Cael says. “One of the first.”

“That’s right. And so was I.”

“What?”

“He was Swift Fox. Your mother was the Bride of Hatchets. The others—Iron-Red Ned, Creeping Charlie, Bellflower, Corpse Lily. And me. Black Horse. The Sawtooth Seven. I’ve killed two of them. Creeping Charlie died in the washtub, his throat slit. I betrayed Iron-Red on Blanchard’s Hill, shot him in the back. But it was
your father
and
his family
I always wanted. Because your father killed my son.”

Cael manages to draw a small breath—it enlivens him, a small whorl of embers turning into a full-bore campfire.

He won’t abide these lies any longer.

He wrenches his Blight arm free—

Here’s my chance—

Eben slams a fist into his nose. Everything is white light. His eyes water. The fight is sucked out of him, a puddle of water
drying fast beneath the hot sun. The hobo takes his pigsticker knife, presses Cael’s hand to the ground, and stabs the knife clean through the palm.

Red, hot pain. As if he’s holding the lit end of a torch. Blood crawls between his fingers. Pain lances like a thrum-whip to his shoulders.

Tears creep down the sides of his face.

“There we go,” Eben Henry says, “the little mouse has his tail trapped, doesn’t he? Little Mouse isn’t enjoying the bedtime story. Alas. For the tale continues, and you ought to listen to this accounting of his sins. Your father and I were mates. We did everything together, Arthur and I. We were a
team
. He didn’t think we were the leaders of the Sawtooth Seven, but we were,
oh
, we were. We were bound together in our hatred for the Empyrean. The skyrapers were just starting to really seal the deal, taking things away from us that we’d always assumed would be there: our farms, our education, our
choice
. We’d already had to put up with them floating above us and telling us who to marry, but now we had no choice as to what we did with our lives. And the way to the sky was
shut
.”

The vagrant’s words reach Cael—but he retreats from the world. He pulls into his own head. Tries not to listen. Tries futilely to unstick his stuck hand from the ground. Eben slaps him.

“Come back to me, Little Mouse. Be present in this moment. As the Lord and Lady said to their son, Jeezum Crow,
Be not the rat that flees the justice of the fire—be the hawk that flies proudly toward it, for only then will you prove yourself our son
. Ah. But you’re not my son. My son is dead. So is my wife. So is everything I
was. Came a point in our reign as the Sawtooth Seven when your father began to have second thoughts about all the bad things we’d done in the name of the Heartland. We’d hurt people, you see.
Killed
folk. But suddenly your father grew a conscience—a soft fruit hanging on a crooked branch, that conscience. Was it your mother who breathed such weakness into his ears? Was he just a weak man coasting too long on the strength of others? I still don’t know. All I think about when I think of your father is my son’s face. My
young
son’s beautiful face. Splattered with his mother’s blood. And then his own.”

“I . . . You’re lying. . . .”

Another hard slap.

“Don’t tell me I’m lying, you little shit.” He bellows, “My son is dead! Your father betrayed me. He didn’t like what I’d been doing on my own. He didn’t
approve
of my tactics. I said the Empyrean were cruel, so we needed to be
crueler
. I said the Empyrean would kill one-tenth of us, so we needed to kill
nine
-tenths of them. Your father told them where I was living.
He sent them to me
. They came. Eager to get their hands on one of the Seven. But I wasn’t there! My wife was there. My
son
—a boy I named after your godsdamn monster of a father!—was there. I buried them both under the rising moon. That was the last night of the Sawtooth Seven. Your father destroyed our fellowship. Everyone went their separate ways. But the movement continued on. Those who followed us were inspired by what we’d done. They became the Sleeping Dogs. But I didn’t care. I still don’t care. All I care about is
this
.” He waves his hands above him, as if to behold the bruise-dark sky, his arms circling back around to Cael. “I care about having Arthur McAvoy’s son in front of
me. A sacrifice to the gods. A just killing in the name of all that’s sacred and true. Son for son, sin for sin. Are you ready to die now, Little Mouse?”

“Go . . . to . . .
hell
.”

Another hard punch to the nose. Cael’s head slams into the unforgiving earth. Eben laughs. Loud. Bold. Brash. The burns around his lips splitting like the ground with lava beneath, his face a mask of scarlet skin and weeping pus—

Crack
.

An oar-pole slams the vagrant’s reared head.

Eben Henry topples to the side, clutching his skull.

Boyland stands. His right side and arm soaked with blood. Hair mussed. Face pale. He drops the oar-pole.

Cael tries not to whimper as he moves—even now he cannot abide the thought of Boyland thinking he’s weak—but he fails to stifle the cry as he reaches over and wrenches the knife from his palm.

Fresh pain blooms like fire in the darkness.

New blood flows. Spattering into the dirt.

He stands. Face throbbing. Woozy.

“Kill you,” Eben growls, getting up on all fours and staring at them with a blood-slick face. “Kill you both.
Kill you all
.”

“What—” Cael has to cough past what feels like a dry bird’s nest in his throat. “What do we do with him?”

Boyland shrugs. “You kill him.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Weak,” Eben says, chuckling. “Weak like Arthur. Faggot.
Faggot
.”

“Kill him, Cael. Just get it over with.”

“I’m not a—”

The vagrant launches himself up—

—grabs Cael hard—

And then freezes. His body stiffens. The knife in his gut is sunk all the way to the hilt. A hilt held in Cael’s hand.

Eben Henry peels away from the blade. Then falls backward. Eyelids fluttering. Lips forming words that are not spoken. Spit froth. Black blood.

And his eyes go unfocused.

His body goes still.

Cael looks at the bloody knife in his hand. “I didn’t . . .”

“You did,” Boyland grunts.

Cael turns to face Boyland. They’re both bloodied. He sees now that one of Boyland’s eyes is swelling shut—an injury from the crash, maybe. Cael sticks a finger up toward Boyland’s right shoulder, pulls at the hole in the fabric right below his collarbone. Where the knife got him.

“That hurt?” Cael asks.

Boyland nods. “Your hand?”

“Like a sonofabitch.”

The two of them stare at each other for a while. Each listing a little like a boat sailed by a drunken captain. Each bleeding. Eben Henry’s dead eyes stare up at the darkening sky.

“Now what?” Cael asks.

Boyland sniffs. “Now we get in that boat, and I drag your ass back to the proctor.”

“That ain’t gonna happen.”

Boyland’s hands form into mallet fists. “Gonna have to.”

“You love her.”

“What?”

“Gwennie. You love her. Isn’t a question, so you don’t need to answer it. I know you do. I could see it back in Boxelder. I saw it on your face the day of the Obligation. You love her.”

“That’s right. And you’re in the way of all that.”

Cael nods. “Be that as it may, Barnes, she’s in danger.”

“What?”

“She’s on a flotilla, and the raiders are aiming to bring that city crashing into the Heartland. I bet you’d like to save her.”

“You’re lying to me. To save your own hide. No way raiders can bring down a flotilla. Never been done.”

“Not a lie. And maybe they can’t do it, but they sure mean to. Something about some code. Planning on using that to crash it. And she’s on the flotilla they plan to crash. Hell, she’s helping them
get the code
. She doesn’t know she’s in danger.”

Boyland’s cagey now. Cael can see he’s alert, aware, as if the thought of Gwennie in danger has pushed the pain aside. “I need to help her.”

“
We
need to help her, dumbass. I know how to find someone on the flotilla. Esther . . . the . . . woman back there, she told me how to find her son. We can use
him
to find her. But we have to go. Now.”

Boyland looks at the skiff. “I think she’ll still fly.”

“She’d damn well better, Barnes, or Gwennie’s going to die.”

PREDATOR AND PREY

THE
OSPREY
EASES TOWARD THEM
. No fast lurch, no burst of its engines or pulse from its hover-rails. Just a slow, steady drift.

Because time, Gwennie realizes, is on the peregrine’s side.

From the
Osprey
, little floating cameras release—they pop out and hover, lens-eyes staring and pointing.

Her mother says something truly startling. “We can jump.”

Gwennie wheels on her. “What?”

“They’re going to kill us. They’re going to
humiliate
us. We can jump. We can be with your father and rejoin the Heartland. The Lord and Lady will see us through—”

“The Lord and the Lady are bullshit!” Gwennie shouts. She doesn’t even mean to say that—is that what she believes? She knows suddenly that yes, it
is
what she believes. The gods aren’t real. They’re just characters, like in a book. Except people put everything onto these characters. Hopes and dreams. Fears and
failures. Reasons to dismiss, hurt, even destroy. “We’re not doing that. He wants to kill us, let him kill us. Let the world see.”

Her mother begins to cry. “But we still have power here—”

Gwennie points a finger toward the others. “You shush. You’re scaring them.”

It’s true. Even Squirrel looks scared.

Her mother says, “We’re all scared.” She stares at her feet.

Merelda steps next to Gwennie. “He will kill us, I think,” she says.