Where Serpents Strike (Children of the Falls Vol. 1) (15 page)

By the time the soldier shoved Brynlee back
into the wagon cage, her right eye had almost swollen shut. Her lip
felt puffy too. She pulled Scarlett close to her and held her
tight, crying tears for Othella.

The sky darkened. The moon rose higher.

Captain Fess looked furious as his soldiers
searched the area for the escaped prisoners.

“I want them back before midnight!” he
shouted. “We must cross The Divide before sunup.”

Seven more girls were found and returned,
including Maidie, who climbed into the wagon cage on shaky legs, a
large bruise on her cheek. She sat down in silence and curled
herself into her maroon dress, which was filled with a dozen new
tears and rips.

“Maidie, are you all right?” Brynlee
whispered.

The girl didn’t answer.

Brynlee hugged Scarlett close, fighting the
horrifying images that lingered in her mind of Othella and Efrem.
She hated Efrem now. Hated Captain Fess. Hated the Black King.
Hated the wagon cage and the whole army of soldiers. She shut her
eyes and wished for home, her mother’s warm voice and her father’s
protective embrace.

The shuffling of tiny feet on the forest
floor prompted Brynlee to open her eyes. She looked to the
torch-lit darkness in the west and saw the shape of a small girl
stumbling through the shadows. She walked like she was in pain,
with slow, short steps, her shackled wrists held out away from her
body.

“Cadha?” said Maidie.

The girl was burned from head to toe, her
brown skirt and tunic in charred rags. Blood seeped from peeled
rolls of burnt skin that hung from her face, neck, and arms like
shreds of old fabric. She walked up to the cage, wheezing. She’d
lost some of her hair and her eyebrows were gone.

“What in all the hells?” whispered one of
the girls.

“H–h–help,” Cadha said. “H–help.”

One of the soldiers walked up behind her and
spun her around. “There’s the little instigator.” His words came
mumbling out through a white strip of fabric tapped across his
split bottom lip. “Walked too far out into The Divide, did you?
Serves you right, you filthy whore!”

Cadha yelped as he lifted her up over his
shoulder.

“Rope!” he barked.

Soldiers gathered around, unrolling a long
coil of rough brown cord. They fashioned a noose and fitted it
around the girl’s neck. After looping an end over a tree branch
they lifted her body into the air. Cadha kicked and wheezed, but
was already too far dead to put up much of a fight.

Brynlee’s stomach lurched. She averted her
eyes, fighting down the waves of panic and nausea that wafted
through her little body.

“Behold the cost for trying to escape!”
shouted a furious Captain Fes. He rode up next to the wagon cage on
his regal black stallion. “This is what will happen if any of you
try anything like that again.” He clicked his horse’s reigns and
ordered the company to move out.

Brynlee pushed back the fearful lump in her
throat, despising the hopelessness she felt burgeoning inside her
chest. She sank to her knees, face pressed against the bars of the
cage, desperately wanting to be someone else, someone stronger,
someone, anyone, other than the terrified little girl she was.

Just as the wild dog’s sharp yellow fangs bit
into her arm Lia’s entire body jolted and she awoke with her face
in the sand. She pushed herself up, coughing and gasping, her
entire body sore and damp. She checked her right forearm for teeth
marks, but no dog had bit her. Only a bad dream.

When Lia rolled over onto her back,
shielding her eyes from the blinding sun overhead, she realized
that she had woken to a whole new nightmare. It all came back to
her in a sickening rush—the death of her father, the attack on
Aberdour, the pursuit of dozens of refugees through the eastern
woods by savage soldiers of the high king. She shivered as her mind
recalled the echoes of attack dogs and the high-pitched screams of
the young children they ripped to pieces.

Lia sat up and held her head with her hands.
She licked her lips and groaned at the briny taste of the sea.

She stood up on stiff legs and saw Khile
lying face down on the beach, eyes closed, unconscious. He still
lay atop the section of broken boards from the trade ship, the
faithful planks that had kept them afloat through a vicious storm
that, as far as Lia could tell, had claimed the lives of everyone
else on board.

She walked over to Khile and tried to wake
him. He groaned, but wouldn’t rise.

Lia plopped down on her rump in the sand as
panic threatened to overcome her. Ahead of her she saw nothing but
rippling ocean with the peaks of its waves glittering in the sun. A
narrow strip of beach ran along each side of her, stretching
endlessly to the south and rising up over a grassy hillside to the
north. At her back a hill capped with leaning shade trees and
shrubbery rose steeply.

Khile groaned again, and Lia noticed that
below his right knee his leg bent at an unnatural angle. She lifted
his pant leg and saw, about halfway down his shin, the broken bone
pushing out against the inside of his flesh.

She found a couple pieces of wood and a bit
of torn sail on the shore and made a splint. She knew little about
making splints other than what she had seen done to a castle guard
named Koal when he fell down the front steps last summer. A doctor
had bound his leg between two boards and wrapped it tight with
fabric to keep the broken part of the leg from bending.

By the time she finished the crude splint,
Khile, to her relief, had not yet regained consciousness. He needed
to be moved though because from the look of the wave patterns on
the sand the tide would soon wash over them. It took a great deal
of effort on her part, but she managed to drag him off the beach to
the shade trees up the hill. She placed his head on a patch of
grass and then sat down with her back to the tree to catch her
breath.

Water and fire. That’s what her father used
to tell her. Were she ever lost in the woods the first two things
she would need were water and fire, water to feed herself and fire
to keep her warm. She had never liked starting fires, and without
flint it would be almost impossible, but water, she knew, was
essential.

She gathered some dried driftwood and put it
in a pile next to the tree. Then she left Khile lying under the
shade of the foliage and ventured east to the next ridge where she
looked at the countryside. Without her boots, which Khile had
removed before the ship went down, she had to tread carefully over
the rough terrain.

Once she was beyond the reach of the ocean
breeze, mosquitoes found her and began nipping at any exposed
pieces of flesh they could find. She walked for some ways swatting
at the air before she came across some purple and pink aster.
Abigail had once shown her how to use it as a bug repellent and so
Lia picked some and smeared it on her skin. She tucked some into
her pockets for later use. It didn’t keep all the bugs away, but it
did seem to help.

She perused the inland hills for some time,
scouring the earth for plants and herbs, including some thistles
and winter savory.

She was drawn to the next hill by the sight
of a massive chestnut tree. Its high sprawling branches and thick
leaves made a crater of shade under which was an abundance of
chestnuts, some still in their spiky pods. Lia couldn’t believe her
luck. She knelt and began gathering the ripest nuts.

Another sight caught her attention on the
ground just two steps away, an imprint of a giant paw—or was it a
hand? The ground around the tree, she noticed, was rife with
imprints, some human like, others more akin to hooves, but all of
them were big enough to swallow her whole. Troll? Dragon? She had
no idea what sorts of creatures roamed this part of the land.

Abruptly, she stood, and glanced around. She
hoped that whatever creature had stomped over this hillside was
long gone. She wondered if it ate chestnuts, or, more importantly,
ten-year-old girls.

Lia decided not to explore ahead any
further. The giant paw prints had spooked her, and it was getting
dark.

She gathered as many ripened nuts as she
could fit into her pockets and left the hillside.

Then she caught a glimpse of something large
and brown moving across a field in the distance. She studied it for
a moment before concluding that it was a horse and wagon. There was
a road out there beyond the forest. She estimated it would take a
half-day to hike there, but it was there nonetheless. Civilization.
Hope.

Lia returned to the beach and followed it
north, picking through the various piles of scrap wood and debris
she found along the shore. She unearthed a leather water satchel
that was, unfortunately, empty, and found a leather belt and a torn
shirt washed up in a trunk with a broken lid. The rest of its
contents, she guessed, were strewn along the bottom of the
ocean.

She froze when she noticed something
floating in the surf just ahead of her, face down, limbs sprawled.
A corpse. He was a sailor by the looks. She stood and approached
the body as waves pushed it back and fourth on the cushy sand. The
skin of the corpse had grayed and was beginning to bloat. Lia left
the body on its face, too timid to roll it over and see the
lifelessness in its eyes.

Holding her breath from the stench she
patted down the pockets, finding nothing. She reached under the
corpse, feeling along the belt, until her fingers touched hard
metal. She yanked the belt around, tugging on what she hoped was a
weapon casing.

“Please don’t be empty. Please don’t be
empty,” she muttered.

The handle of a small dagger protruded from
a dull brown copper casing. She unfastened the belt and removed the
sheath. When she pulled out the dagger she found a shiny silver
blade sparkling in the sunlight. Whatever kind of man this corpse
had once been, he had cared for the weapon well. She smiled,
satisfied.

With her arms full of her trophies, Lia left
the beach.

When she finally returned to Khile she found
him awake and struggling to stand.

“What are you doing?” she asked, hurrying up
to him.

He looked at her, appearing relieved. “There
you are. I was afraid you’d run off and gotten captured.”

“Captured? By who?”

“Black vipers will soon be all over these
shores,” he said. “We shouldn’t stay here.”

He sat back down with a great deal of effort
and stretched his busted leg out in front of him.

“Thanks for this,” he said, tapping the
splint.

“How is it?”

“Unfortunately we have to take it off. The
bone isn’t aligned properly.”

Lia didn’t like the sound of that, but Khile
appeared to know more about splints than she did. She followed his
instructions, untied the fabric, and removed the two braces.

“See that,” he said, pointing to the bump in
his shin. “That needs to be pushed down.” He showed her how to
position her thumbs against the protruding piece of bone, and then
braced himself against the back of the tree. “I’m going to count to
three, and then I want you to push down as hard as you can until
that bone snaps back. Understand? If I pass out, just put the
splint back on like you did before, but make it as tight as you
can.”

She forced back the nervous lump in her
throat.

Khile started counting. At two he took a
deep breath. At three Lia pressed down with all her weight on the
piece of bone. She felt it grind back into place as Khile’s entire
body tensed and he grit his teeth and growled.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry, sorry,
sorry.”

He shook his head, panting. “Well done. Now
put the splint back on.”

Again she followed his instructions, but
this time he helped her tie the fabric around the splint much
tighter. He collapsed against the tree, his face pale and covered
in new sweat.

“I don’t know your full name,” Lia said,
trying to get her mind to relax.

“Khile Alexander.”

“Pleased to meet you, Khile Alexander.” She
emptied her pockets of the many herbs she had collected and offered
him some of the chestnuts. She made a conscious decision not to
tell him about the giant footprints. “I found some sage. It should
help with the swelling. And I found some alfalfa. I’ve never tried
it, but Abigail used to say it was good for you.”

Khile smiled, impressed. “Aren’t you the
resourceful little scavenger. Who’s Abigail, your tutor?”

Lia thought it offensive that he had already
forgotten. “She’s the pregnant woman that was killed by The Raven.
Remember?”

Khile’s smile faded. “Right. The man you’re
going to kill.”

Lia looked at him, her eyes coming to life
with hot fury. “I am going to kill him. Someday I will return to
Edhen and I will find him and I will slit his throat just like he
slit Abigail’s.”

Khile didn’t look like he believed her.
“Very well. But first I think we need to focus on getting off this
beach.” He took a moment to look around. “I’m guessing we’re pretty
far north, on the western coast of Advala. Have you heard of
it?”

“It’s the western most province of
Efferous.”

“We need to move inland, or find some place
to hide until we can get help. We’ll need water, and it’ll get
chilly at night so we’ll need fire.”

Lia pointed to the pile of driftwood she had
collected earlier.

“Good work.”

“I can’t get a fire going without flint,”
she said.

“Leave that to me. Did you find any water
while you were pillaging the countryside?”

She shook her head. “But I saw a road.”

He looked at her skeptically. “Where?”

She pointed southeast. “About a half-day’s
walk that way. I should go there tomorrow and see if—”

“No. Stay away from the road.”