In All Places (Stripling Warrior) (25 page)

Please enjoy the first chapter of

Th
e
Sp
y
of Cumeni

Chapter 1

I stole through the darkness next to Keturah, hardly believing what I had just done.

It wasn’t anything Keturah and the others hadn’t done, I assured myself as I pulled in a slow breath. And it wasn’t anything that hadn’t needed to be done.

I looked from Keturah to where my brothers glided quietly through the night ahead of us. It struck me that Zeke and Jarom had been doing this kind of thing for nearly six years—since they had joined with Helaman’s army and gone to war.

I had only been eight years old. They had been gone so long,
I hardly knew them now. We were almost like strangers. Jarom had been home for a few months, but Zeke had just returned yesterday.

I cast a secret glance to my other side, where Kenai walked protectively near me
. Kenai was our closest neighbor and Zeke’s best friend. He had been Jarom’s captain in the army, and I had heard Jarom talking to Father about him.

“
Kenai is still at war inside himself,” he had said, and Father had frowned deeply and put a hand on Jarom’s shoulder without looking at him.

I wondered what had happened to
Kenai that made him the way he was—sad all the time, not eating, not interested in anything, violent at random times, melancholy. I wondered if time would heal his heart.

And mostly, I wondered why he had held me so tenderly after I had stabbed that terrible Lamanite man.

I wasn’t discreet enough when I glanced at Kenai—I must have been staring—because he caught my eye in the moonlight. He didn’t smile at me, not even a little, just kept walking on. But he glanced at me now and then. I could feel it.

Or maybe I imagined it. It
had
been a long night.

The twilight had
already begun to wane into darkness when I decided I had better hurry home. Alone at my father’s tannery, I had been stretching some skins so they could dry overnight, though to be honest, that had only been an excuse to be gone from home. I started for the village and was moving swiftly through the trees when three men appeared on the trail before me. I knew immediately by their strange clothing and their shaved heads they were not the kind of men I knew in the village. I had never seen a Lamanite, but they fit the descriptions I had heard.

One of them, the one I had just stabbed in the gut with my tanning knife, had grabbed me and
dragged me back to the clearing near the tannery, where many men had begun to gather, some holding struggling girls or women whose bruises were already showing.

My eyes shot around to the other
captives in the clearing. I knew all of them. Some were tied. Some were gagged and staring at me with terrified eyes. A child began screaming for her mother.

Something in that cry set me off. Like Keturah, who had joined Helaman’s army when she was just fifteen and gone away to war, I wanted to fight anyone who sought to steal my people’s freedom. But Keturah fought for peace, and I was more interested in fighting for justice.

I kept a tanning knife strapped around my waist, but when the man had grabbed me, I hadn’t been able to get to it. I had wanted to slash at him, to wound him and make him sorry he had ever left his Lamanite lands, to make him sorry he had ever touched me. It wasn’t really a practical place to keep the knife, but it felt secure and reassuring tied there.

W
hile I had been tied up and marched through the trees, I realized that being unable to reach my knife had been a piece of luck. I hadn’t used the knife, so they hadn’t known I carried it. And while they slept, I had been able to slip it out and cut through my bonds.

Zeke and Jarom were talking in low tones ahead of us, but Zeke turned around after a while and
focused on me in the darkness.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m perfectly fine,” I said.

Jarom turned back too, and I saw him roll his eyes at my snippy comment before he turned them to take a long hard look at Kenai, probably, I thought, to determine how he was holding up.

Jarom had been through all the battles with Kenai, even up through the most recent they had fought under Moroni’s command in Nephihah, and I knew he worried about him—like he thought Kenai would do something reckless or dangerous at any moment, maybe harm himself or someone else. Since they had been home, I had seen Jarom surreptitiously watching Kenai. And secretly, I thought this watchfulness was the reason Jarom had gone with Kenai to Nephihah instead of coming home. I only wondered why it hadn’t been Zeke who went with him.

Zeke turned to Keturah then, and by his dismissive glance
, I knew she was the reason he hadn’t gone with Kenai. She had to be. I didn’t know it then, but in the days that followed, I noticed a rift between Zeke and Kenai. How could Zeke be friends with the brother of the woman who had rejected him?

Zeke
looked her over briefly and just turned forward again like it wasn’t his duty to ask after her welfare, like it wasn’t his privilege to know she was okay, like he wasn’t her intended husband.

Before the war, he would have demanded to know whether or not she was okay, babied and coddled her until she stomped off offended and mad at him. But something had happened between them. Earlier that night at his homecoming celebration, Zeke had announced to both our families that he would not pursue Keturah’s hand in a betrothal. He said they had come to the decision mutually, but Keturah had let him face everyone alone—she hadn’t even dared to show up.

This is what I had gone to the tannery to think over while I stretched and worked my hides. I produced the softest hides in Melek, even Father couldn’t make them as soft, and everyone wanted them. But that night, my work was only an excuse to get away and think.

Zeke and Keturah had been basically promised to one another since childhood. Everyone, themselves included, had expected them to marry. And one day, today, Zeke just announced that they weren’t going to.

It was so unfair.

I had to do everything my parents said, so why didn’t Zeke?

It wasn’t that I felt Keturah should have to marry my brother if she didn’t want to. I was heartily against that. But she was
supposed
to want to. All the other girls in the village wanted to. She was refusing him just because she could. She was spoiled and selfish and heartless, and most importantly, she got everything her way, and I never did.

Except, well, there was the tannery.

When Zeke and Jarom had left for the war with Helaman’s army, I had only been eight years old. But the next day Father said, “Isabel, I could use your help at the tannery.”

I
sat in our yard milking the goats that long ago morning. I had to milk, Sachemai, and to make matters worse, I now had to milk Mui, Keturah’s goat, while she was away with the army. I liked that her family had entrusted me with this responsibility, but I hated milking the goats.

“Steady now,” I said to
Sachemai as I patted her side. But she wasn’t steady, or I wasn’t, and what milk I had gotten went everywhere.

Chloe giggled.

I ground my teeth. I sat and stared at the mess and the stupid goat that was now cropping the grasses at the edge of the yard.

I might have started to cry if Father hadn’t come from the hut then, surveyed the scene, and decided he had too much work to accomplish alone.

That one moment, that one statement from him had changed my life.

Or at least it had changed my chores. After that day, Sarai and Chloe cared for and milked the goats, and I went with Father to the tannery.

It turned out that he actually did need my help at the tannery. He had too many orders he couldn’t fill without help, because he had given almost every scrap of leather he had to the militia for scabbards, tents, legging pants and kilts, satchels and so forth.

It smelled at the tannery—that was my first impression. And I was sure I smelled of dead animal carcass when I went home that evening because Father and my brothers always did. Zeke had always gone immediately to bathe in the creek, even when it was cold, because he hated the smell of it. Secretly, I thought he didn’t want Keturah to smell it on him. Father
and Jarom had never seemed to care quite as much. We girls and Mother made a lot of soap, an extra chore, all because Zeke wanted to impress Keturah.

And that brought me back around to being upset with them both. All that soap making for nothing!

The sun was dawning and the light was increasing. I glanced around. We had come quite a ways while my mind had been wandering. At the pace we were traveling, we would be home in the village in a quarter of an hour. I had thought the younger children might hold us back, but they were all understandably eager to get home.

Keturah moved ahead to talk to Muloki. She slugged him in the arm and he laughed heartily.

My brothers still walked side by side ahead of me, but they weren’t doing much talking. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but it seemed there was a rift between them too, possibly bigger than the one between Zeke and Kenai. When Zeke had arrived home in the village, he had exchanged a hard look with Jarom, even while Mother embraced him. They seemed to have studiously ignored each other since then except in Mother’s presence, and then they acted normal, even joking with each other like the best of friends. But if I was any judge, they weren’t.

Most of the other captives travelled at the front of the group led by the man called Jashon and his brother, who Keturah was even now staring at as she walked beside Muloki and tried to appear interested in what he was saying to her.

I watched her closely for a time. How was it that she had gained her freedom, earned her freedom from marriage, and yet she clearly pined after this strange warrior when she was supposed to be pining after my brother?

“You think she’s crazy,” Kenai broke into my thoughts.

“Oh,” I said, surprised. He had noticed I was staring at his sister. I blushed at the thought of him noticing anything about me. “No…I…”

“He’s asked for her hand, you know,” he said over my pathetic stammering. He put a finger to his lips. “It is a secret. She doesn’t know yet.”

“Oh,” I said again. I looked back to her. “Will she accept, do you think?”

“Without a doubt,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter. Micah has already done so on her behalf.”

This sparked my temper. It didn’t matter? Micah had already accepted on her behalf? I did not think women should be given in marriage, as was the custom. I thought a woman should give herself.

“That is absolute nonsense! It is so inf
uriatingly belittling when men—”

Kenai broke in with a chuckle, the first I had heard from him in the weeks since he had been home.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, annoyed.

“Those were a lot of big words for a little girl like you.”

My jaw went slack, and then I stuck out a foot and tripped him.

He stumbled and looked back first in confusion and then in amusement to where I had stopped and drawn my knife, ready for a fight.

I was a little girl, but how dare he call me one!

He chuckled again, low in his chest. “Put that knife away, or I’ll take it from you,” he warned calmly. And I might have, except that he added with what looked like a deliberate smirk, “That knife is not a play thing like your dolls.”

Oh how I wanted to hurt him in that moment. I didn’t move, but not because I didn’t want to. I was holding my ground. I would never cut him with the knife, but after what had just happened, after being bound and abducted, I felt safer holding it. I would never use it on him, but I wanted to make a point. I was not little. I was not helpless.

“Come on now,” he said. “Put it away.”

By now, the others were a distance ahead of us and no one, it appeared, had noticed we were missing. Some rescue mission, I thought as I watched my brothers move on down the road with the others.

Why couldn’t my brothers be as protective of me as Keturah’s were of her?

Not that I would particularly want that.

And of course they thought Kenai was protecting me. They knew I did not need protection from Kenai.

Suddenly, I was on my back in the dirt, staring up into Kenai’s face and he had taken my knife from me.

“I warned you,” he said quietly.

“Give me my knife back,” I said with irritation.

He smiled. “You’re not old enough to play with this knife.”

I struggled, trying to get up, trying to retrieve my knife from his hand where he held it just out of my reach.

Kenai forced me to stop wiggling by allowing more of the weight from his chest to rest on me. My panic must have shown in my face because he went very still and then quickly withdrew until he knelt up on his heels at my side. I didn’t move, and he stared down at me.

“Sorry, Isabel,” he said uncomfortably and handed me my blade with the hilt extended toward me. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He glanced up ahead, got to his feet, and offered me a hand. I grudgingly took it.