The Girl of Fire and Thorns Complete Collection (17 page)

He nods up at her. Already his face is sallow and his breath comes fast. He says, “Thank you, Mara.”

She gives his chin a gentle squeeze and lets it go. Hando is such a beautiful boy, with a delicate cast to cheek and chin, and eyelashes so thick that his eyes seemed rimmed with kohl. He will break many hearts someday, if he has a chance to grow up.

“We got us some snake meat,” Reynaldo says at her shoulder.

She turns to find him holding up a limp viper, its scaled white belly glistening in the sunshine, and she flinches back.

“How many did you kill?”

He grins. “Five.”

Heat spreads across her neck and shoulders, and she can’t seem to get enough air. Some venom got inside her after all. Or maybe her body is merely rebelling against the fact that these children risked their lives so they could eat well tonight.

13

M
ARA unloads the second packhorse and distributes everything among the remaining healthy children to carry. Then she helps Hando mount, hoping and praying that no one else becomes injured, for they are out of horses.

By nightfall, his arm has swollen to twice its size. Everyone else feasts on roasted snake, but Hando can’t keep anything down. He thrashes on the ground, moaning, only half conscious.

She checks Alessa’s feet. They are badly blistered, but the blisters seem to have drained well, and Alessa claims they only hurt when she walks. Mara orders her to keep them clean.

Next she settles beside Julio. He lies on his side by the fire, unable to sit up. “Hello, beautiful,” he whispers weakly.

She traces his lips with her forefinger. “I have to check your back.”

He nods.

Carefully, she unwraps the bandages. The entry site has puffed out like a cauliflower, and something that is part blood, part pus leaks from the gash. It’s badly infected, in spite of her earlier efforts. If they don’t get help soon, he’ll die.

“How bad is it?” he says between gritted teeth.

Mara is glad the dark hides her tears. “I think it’s getting better.”

“Liar.”

She rewraps the wound. There is nothing she can do for it.

He says, “If I don’t make it, promise me—”

“You’ll make it!” Her voice comes out angrier than she intends.

“Mara. Love. This is a bad wound. A death wound. I need to know you’ll look out for Adán.”

“I . . . of course.” Then she reaches over to flick his nose. “But I’m not giving up yet, you idiot.”

He grins. Then his eyes flutter closed, and she hopes with all the hope in her heart that it’s a natural sleep and not a sickly one.

14

I
T rains again the next day, but Mara orders them up and moving anyway.

“A day’s rest wouldn’t hurt,” Adán says, as she fills her water skin with brown runoff water.

“We’re exhausted,” Reynaldo agrees. “And the little ones had a big fright with those snakes.”

Mara shakes her head. “We have to find help soon,” she says. “If we don’t travel, Julio and Hando will die. Maybe all of us.”

Adán and Reynaldo exchange a look, but they say nothing more.

Within an hour, they are covered in mud and chilled to the bone. Rosa complains again that her feet hurt. Quintoro is hungry. Tiny Marlín, toddling barefoot beside her, begins to cry softly.

Mara looks down and frowns. “Marlín? What’s the matter?” Of all of them, she is the one who has complained the least. But somewhere along the way, she lost her shoes. Or maybe she never had any. Not every child in the village had good shoes.

The little girl sniffs. “Muffin was
not
bad.”

“Muffin . . . Oh. Your goat?”

Marlín nods. “Mamá said she was a bad goat. Because she ate our carrots. But she wasn’t bad. Just hungry. Like me. She had to be outside in the mud a lot. Do you think her feet hurt all the time? If I have another goat, I will make shoes for her.”

Mara sighs. “Would you like me to carry you for a while?”

Marlín reaches chubby arms up, and Mara hoists her onto her hip. They’ve gone several steps when Marlín says quietly, “She screamed.”

“Who?”

“Muffin. When the fire came.”

“Oh.” Mara snugs her a bit closer. “I know you miss Muffin, but I need you to be brave for just a little while longer, all right?”

“All right.”

Such an ordinarily simple task lies before them—get from one place to another. But they are in bad shape. She catalogs their injuries: Julio’s arrow wound, Hando’s bite, the gash on Teena’s head, Alessa’s badly blistered feet, and now this tiny girl who has been walking barefoot through mud and mesquite for who knows how long. How will she keep them all going?

Mercifully, the slope levels off a bit as they near the desert floor, and Mara lets her eyes rove the jagged desolation below them. It’s a warren of buttes and gullies that glow coppery red in the sun, almost as far as the eye can see. Beyond it lies the deeper desert, a sea of sand, but at this distance it is only a yellowish haze on the horizon.

The place is as barren as it is beautiful, yet the nomads of Joya d’Arena make their home here. And she will, too, if they’re to have any chance of surviving this war.

“I should lead from here,” Reynaldo says.

“It’s a maze down there,” Mara says. “No wonder the rebels chose this for their hideout.”

“Someone should hang back and make sure we’re not followed,” he adds. “The perimeter watch won’t let us pass if there is any chance we’ve led the Inviernos to their camp.”

The back of her neck prickles. She had not considered that their enemy might follow them unseen. “Any volunteers?” she asks.

“I’ll do it,” says Adán.

“No!” She needs him nearby and safe, for Julio’s sake. “I . . . er . . . I may need help carrying the little ones, and you’re the strongest.”

“I can do it,” says another boy. He is the next oldest after Adán, a quiet one who prefers whittling with his knife to conversation.

She searches her memory for his name and snags it. “Thank you, Benito. Don’t hang back too far—it will be easy to get lost once we’re down there.”

His lips turn up in a cocky half smile. “I’ll be fine,” he says, and then he disappears into the brush.

Reynaldo leads them west, away from the Shattermount’s flooded fault line. The sky is still drizzly and gray, their journey slippery with mud. Marlín grows heavy in her arms.

Late in the afternoon, the sun breaks through the clouds, sending streamers of gold onto the earth and causing a bright rainbow that stretches the length of two days’ journey. They exchange relieved smiles and pick up the pace. They will rue the relentless desert sun soon enough, but for now they glory in the way it steams away the soaked terrain.

Reynaldo calls a halt. At Mara’s questioning look, he says, “Did you hear something?”

Mara orders everyone to silence. Quietly, she lowers Marlín to the ground, then stretches her aching arms as she listens for anything unusual.

“Mara!” comes the voice, faintly. “Help!”

“Is that Benito?” Adán asks, but Mara is already sprinting back the way they came, swinging her bow from her shoulder.

She hears the sounds of struggle before she finds them—crunching gravel, a grunt, a sharp yell of pain. She nearly trips on them as they roll around in a tangle of hair and limbs. Yellow hair snarled with black, pale skin against dark. The Invierno’s anklet bones rattle as they wrestle in the mud.

There’s no way she’ll get a clean shot. Her hand flies to the knife at her belt, but their grappling bodies move so fast, and she doesn’t trust herself not to stab Benito by mistake.

The Invierno’s yellow braid whips around, and she sees her chance. She lunges into the fray, grabs the end of the braid, yanks it hard. He yelps, his head snapping back. Benito takes advantage and sends a fist into his stomach, then another. He rolls the Invierno onto his back and starts to pound at his face. Something crunches.

“Benito, that’s enough.” Mara’s belly squirms with wrongness.

But the boy is blind with fear and rage, and he sends his fist crashing into the enemy’s jaw, his ear, his eye.

“Benito!” she yells.

A shape blurs past her. It’s Adán. With a roar, he plunges his skinning knife into the Invierno’s chest. Mara senses the other children coming up behind her, even as Adán wrenches his blade from the Invierno’s bloody chest and raises it to strike again.

“No!” Mara darts forward, grabs Adán’s arm. “Stop!”

Adán lashes out blindly with his other hand. His knuckles crack against her cheek, and she tumbles backward, landing hard on her rear.

Red spots dance in her vision as her eye socket blossoms with pain.

“Oh, God. Mara, I’m so sorry. I . . . oh, God.” Adán throws his knife away from himself and stares at his hands as though they belong to a stranger. Spatters of blood cover his shirt.

Mara gets shakily to her feet. “Adán and Benito,” she says, her voice like thunder. “You are responsible for this, therefore you will dispose of this body.”

“He surprised me!” Benito says. “We stumbled onto each other, and all of a sudden, he was on top of me, and I—”

She holds up a silencing hand. “If more scouts discover him, they will know we passed this way. So you will bury him thoroughly and clean up any blood. The rest of us will set up camp and wait for you.”

Soft crying trickles up to her ears, and Mara looks down to see Marlín at her elbow, the girl’s horrified gaze fixed on the bloody corpse of the Invierno. Mara bends over and picks her up. “I need you to be brave for me, Marlín,” she says.

Marlín sniffs. “You say that a lot.”

“Only because it’s the truest thing I know right now.”

“No fire tonight,” Reynaldo says. “There could be more scouts nearby.”

“Did he track us, do you think?” Mara asks. They haven’t even bothered to disguise their trail.

“I doubt it,” Reynaldo says. “But after we break camp tomorrow, we should get rid of any footprints, cover the site with brush. Try to make it look like we were never here.”

“Good thinking.” To Benito and Adán, she says, “No shallow grave. We don’t want coyotes digging him up.”

“You’re punishing us,” Benito says. “Even though he is the enemy!”

Mara stares him down. “You and Adán were not wrong to kill. This is war, after all. But you were wrong to lose control. Join us in camp only when you’re certain you have it back again.”

Mara has survived this long only by remaining in control. If she is going to keep these children alive, they will have to learn it too.

15

T
HEY haven’t eaten in two days. They have all thinned noticeably, no one more so than Julio. His cheeks are gaunt, and his eyes are dark, sunken shadows in his otherwise pallid face. At least once per hour, someone complains about hunger.

Mara begins to practice with her bow in the evenings and early mornings. Several of the others have slings, and she makes them train together. She tells them they all need to practice so they can hunt as they go. But really, she needs something to distract them from their aching, empty bellies.

And she knows that if they encounter another Invierno scout, she’ll need more skill with the bow to protect them. She practices a quick draw and notch, over and over. Next, she’ll teach herself to hit a moving target.