Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series (15 page)

CHAPTER 16

“Freda!” Tom is the first to notice our approach, and he bolts up from where he sits and runs to me, yanking me into a tight embrace. It lasts only a moment, and I’m glad when he releases me and steps back. He looks older, and tired, and his pale skin has darkened from its snowy white to more the color of aged porcelain. Wrinkles have formed around his eyes, and his shoulders sag just the tiniest bit.

The others are slower to rise, but they come to us with no less enthusiasm. Smiles shine from every face. A round of hellos, how-are-yous, where-have-you-beens follows. Susannah, Ginger, Ryne. My father and mother grab me tightest and hold me longest, and kiss my cheeks.

It’s elation, standing here on this golden threshold between the hills and the plain, between our past and our future, with the sun warming us from a cloudless sky and love flowing so freely.

Lupay stands to the side talking closely with Garrett, Patrick, and Kitta. She glances our way, catches my eye, and nudges Patrick with her elbow. Patrick looks over our way and grins wide when he sees me. His grin falters when his glance flicks to Tynan behind me, but he recovers and looks at me with an almost sincere smile again. He pushes Lupay, and the two saunter to us.

Patrick speaks first. “How wonderful to see you, First Wife!” He looks hale and robust, his beard grown out and his eyes filled with life.

Lupay stands beside him, hands on her hips. Her face is serious but her eyes sparkle, and I think she’s glad to see me. She’s wearing fresh clothes—newly made trousers and a snug shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Four small, gleaming knives are clipped to the front of her shirt, and her black hair is tied back away from her round face. Her bronze skin is aglow with light perspiration, and she stands solid, looking stronger and leaner than I’ve ever seen her. The new shirt softens her feminine curves and hardens her powerful shoulders. It’s clearly the handiwork of my own father, and I can’t help a little jealousy at the thought that he’s been making clothes for Lupay but not for me.

Lupay surveys me and says, “Hello, Freda. You are looking... underfed.”

The insult startles me until her lip twitches into a playful grin.

“Been fasting again?”

She’s teasing me, and I laugh aloud because now there’s no doubt that she’s glad to see me.

Tynan steps up to my side and interrupts. “No, we haven’t been fasting. You shouldn’t make fun of things you don’t understand.”

He doesn’t say it, but we can all hear the word “mutant” underlying his tone.

Patrick steps up, right into Tynan’s face, as if he’d been waiting for an excuse. “Tynan. I’m surprised to see you here.”

“Don’t I have a right to go where I want?”

“Of course you do. That doesn’t mean you should, though.”

He turns his back on Tynan, slipping his body between Tynan and me, and faces me with a broad smile that I can tell is both genuine and forced at the same time. “Freda, it really is wonderful to see
you
. I’m sorry that Lupay and I can’t stay to visit. We have some things to do to prepare for tomorrow.”

Before I can ask what happens tomorrow, he stalks away toward a group of horses grazing a little way off. Lupay assaults me with a quick, startling hug before saying “there’s food over there” and hurrying off to join Patrick.

She points to where they’d all been sitting before we arrived. Susannah and Ginger are busying themselves cooking  over a small fire in a cleared patch of dirt. The others have returned to where they’d been sitting. Kitta motions to come with her, and I follow to the group. We find a comfortable-looking area to sit, and it feels a terrific relief to settle to the ground and rest. Kitta and Garrett sit on my right, and Tynan takes a spot on my left.

Kitta says, “Patrick said that Dane has gone ahead with Micktuk to scout out our best route.”

“Best route?”

“I don’t know. That’s what he said.”

Garrett says, “Best route to what, I wonder.”

“I can’t wait to find out,” I say, and I mean it. The river? The iron fleet? Reunion Mountain? Already some of the details of the maps in Prophecies are fading, even though I try to find a private moment every day to scratch them out in the dirt. To remember. I wonder if Dane has told anyone, but I don’t dare raise the topic.

Tom plops himself onto the dirt next to Garrett. “The city,” he says through a mouthful of whatever Susannah and Ginger have cooked up for lunch. He points off to the northwest.

“The city? What city?”

“The maps are old and faded. Hard to tell what it was called before the War. We’ve been calling it just ‘the city,’ though its name looked something like Cramen.”

Garrett perks up. “Cramen? A city? That’s like a really big town, right?”

“Bigger. Dane has the old maps with him, or I’d show you. This one city is as big as half of the entire area of Tawtrukk. Take Sikwaa all the way to Lower, down to Lodgeholm, around north to the point... huge.”

Tynan sounds unmoved when he asks, “Dane intends to take us there?”

Tom answers, “Not just Dane. It was a council decision. Dane doesn’t want to decide things for everyone. We all agreed to that pretty early on.”

“But you’re leading everyone there?”

“Yup.”

Garrett looks off to the northwest and whispers, “An ancient city. I wonder what we’ll find there.”

Tom says, “Too bad Lupay and Patrick left, or they could tell us. They’ve seen it. They’ve been scouting ahead for some time.”

Kitta scootches a little closer to Garrett. “You probably wish you could be out there with her—with them, don’t you?”

Garrett shrugs. “A little, I guess.”

Tom says, “They say it’s deserted. No one knew what to expect, and we weren’t about to march everyone right into that kind of place without knowing a little about it.”

Tynan says, “We shouldn’t march anyone into a place like that, under any circumstances.”

Tom peers around us to see Tynan and assesses him in silence for a moment. This is the first time they’ve met. “You aren’t the least bit curious what the world was like before the War?”

“No. All I need to know is that the War happened because those people lived the way they did. We shouldn’t go snooping about. We’ll end up just like them.”

Garrett says low and soft, “
We
seem to have done that on our own, just fine.” Everyone knows he means Darius’s war. We don’t need to be reminded of the bomb.

I can tell Tynan is about to argue, so I discretely touch his arm to hush him. He takes the hint and just stares tensely off over the plain.

I don’t know what I feel about going to the city. Too many things. Will it be filled with leering skulls? Will it tell us anything about our history? I don’t fear it the way Tynan does, don’t believe God wants us to stay away. But I do fear it, more than Dane and the others do.

Kitta chirps, “We’ll get there tomorrow?”

“Yes,” says Tom.

Ginger tromps toward us through the grass holding two bowls of a stew, followed closely by Susannah with two more, and suddenly we all have lunch.

Garrett says, “Such a big place. How come we can’t see it from here if we can walk there in a half day? There’s nothing but open plain out there.”

“Not a half day,” Tom replies. “We’ll cross a lot of the plain this afternoon and rest overnight just beyond the city’s border. We’ll enter in the morning. It’s a long walk from the edge to the center, where the river runs right through the middle of the biggest buildings. Or so Lupay said.”

Garrett sighs, and Kitta takes his hand. “I’m sorry you’re not out there with Lupay,” she says.

Garrett relaxes and smiles at her. “It’s okay. It wouldn’t be the same without Shack anyway. He’d have loved to see an honest to god ancient city—”

“Nothing honest about them, and certainly not honest to God,” Tynan growls.

Tom turns to Tynan again and asks with a clear, cold voice, “What’s your name, son? I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

“And I don’t believe I’m your son,” Tynan says, staring hard at Tom. He says nothing more, just staring.

It appears Tom may be about to say something more, but Garrett interrupts as if the other two hadn’t even spoken. “Without Shack, it just wouldn’t be fun like it used to be. Besides, I have everything I want right here.” He kisses Kitta on the cheek.

Tynan plunks his bowl on the ground and lurches to his feet, turning and stomping away. I fight the urge to jump up and run after him to calm him down. He just needs time. He’ll see these are good people. He’ll come to love them all as I do.

“Guess he didn’t like Susannah’s cooking,” Tom mumbles.

“Or he didn’t appreciate the company,” Garrett replies.

“Give him time,” I blurt before I can stop myself. “This has been difficult for him.”

Garrett looks at me with a curious disbelief in his scowl. “Difficult for him?”

“Yes,” I reply, sounding more defensive than I want. “It’s a difficult time for all of us. Don’t you realize that every single person here is hurting in his own way? You may not understand it, but at least you can have a little compassion.”

“Compassion?” Garrett looks from me to Kitta and back. After a moment, he shakes his head and stands. “Freda...” He sighs as Kitta stands and puts her hand on his to calm him, but he shakes her off. “Maybe it’s just that you’re a better person than I am.” He turns in the direction opposite of where Tynan went and walks away.

Kitta watches him for a moment. Then, she turns to me, her blonde hair floating like a glowing halo backed by the gorgeous blue of the sky, the same blue as her eyes. “Do you even know what his father did? Tynan’s father? Do you even know?”

“He was a farmer,” I reply, embarrassed at the meekness of my answer.

“Yes, before...” Kitta’s face is dark because of the  bright sky behind her, but I’ve heard her on the verge of tears before, and I can tell she’s torn apart inside.

She turns and runs off after Garrett, catching up to him quickly and falling into step close at his side, drawing him tight as they walk, her head tucked against his shoulder.

I am left with just Tom, who quietly finishes his stew, smiles once at me, and returns to the cooking fire to talk and laugh with Susannah and Ginger, who are busy serving others who sit away in other groups.

Why won’t they forgive? They would learn that in his heart he’s a good man if they only stop judging him before they really know him. Don’t they understand he is my friend? Don’t they understand that he shouldn’t bear the responsibility of what Darius did? Don’t they understand that Darius was a madman? Tynan isn’t crazy. He is smart, and he’s faithful. He’s just a little rough. And he just needs time.

I sit looking out at the golden fields before us, emptying my mind. I fall into that nice feeling of forgetting all the anger around me, all the distrust and resentment. I just watch hawks and eagles float high in the sky, occasionally screeching. I just stare at the purity of the golden plain and the blue, unblemished sky. After a while, I lie back onto the soft earth and close my eyes, letting the sun’s warmth drape itself over me and seep into my skin.

“Freda?”

With a start, I open my eyes to find Dane standing over me. Have I been asleep?

“It’s time to get moving.”

My mouth is dry, and I try to swallow away the puckered feeling while willing myself awake. I am so warm, and my back hurts from lying on the ground.

“How long was I asleep?”

“I don’t know,” says Dane as he offers me his hand. “I’ve been back ten minutes or so.”

The sun is still high in the sky, and Ginger and Tom are covering the embers of the lunch fire with dirt, kicking at the coals. It couldn’t have been long. It wasn’t terribly refreshing.

“Oh,” I say, taking his hand and allowing him to help me up. His hand is rough and scarred, calloused across the palm and on all his fingers. He pulls gently, and his confident strength surprises me.

As soon as I’m standing, I mumble, “I’m a mess” and release his hand to brush the sprigs of grass and specks of dirt from my pants and shirt. He stands and waits, but his closeness feels awkward. I had been excited to see him, but a part of me now feels uncomfortable. I stop myself from looking around, but I know somewhere Tynan is watching us.

“It’s great to see you,” he says. “I’ve missed you. A lot.”

He seems taller. He’s already taller than Linkan was, even though he’s not yet seventeen. His hair has grown down to his shoulders again, and he’s allowed a thin beard and mustache to cover his jaw with dark stubble. His skin has darkened, and he looks more like a farmer, or more like a Tawtrukker, than a Semper. His rough pants and shirt are dirty and stained, and the hems are frayed and tattered.

He looks happy.

“I’m glad to see you, too,” I say, and I mean it with every bit of me that is not thinking about Tynan and the things he said. Tynan would have had different reasons for selecting me. What were Dane’s reasons?

Dane’s smile falters a little as he watches me. “Come on,” he says as he takes my hand again. “I think it’s time you rode with me for a while.”