Jase hovered over me, his hand protectively pressing on my back. Mije and Tigone pranced nervously on either side of us. Jase stood quickly, grabbing our quivers and bows from our packs, and dropped back to the ground beside me. We scanned the plain. There was nowhere for someone to hide. Where had the shot come from? There was no doubt the Valsprey had been shot from the sky. No bird changed its direction that dramatically then fell to the ground without something making it happen.
“I didn’t see an arrow,” Jase whispered. “Did you?” “No. Nothing.”
But if not an arrow, what? A stone from a sling? But I didn’t see a stone either. A predator? But a Valsprey was large, with a five-foot wingspan. To take one down, the predator would have to be far larger, something like a racaa. There had been none.
We both eased up a bit on our elbows, looking for someone to emerge from a hole dug in the plain, but no one emerged. We finally stood, back to back, both of us nocking arrows, synchronizing our turns as we searched and waited to see something. The only thing that greeted us was the quiet hush of a gentle breeze sweeping the plain.
We went to where the bird had fallen, a white twisted splotch on the crimson landscape. One of its broken wings angled skyward as if hoping for a second chance. There was no flopping or lingering last movements. The bird was dead, which was no surprise. But as we neared and got a closer look, something about it was wrong.
“What—” Jase said. We both stared at it.
The bird was quite dead. But it was clear it had been dead for weeks.
Its eyes were sunken leathery holes, and its ribs poked through decayed paper-thin skin, its breast mostly featherless. We both looked around,
thinking there had to be another bird somewhere else, but there was none.
This was the bird we had seen fall from the sky.
A trick of the eyes?
Carried here by some baffling wind current?
We guessed at possibilities, but none made sense.
Jase nudged the dry carcass with his boot, flipping the bird over. A message case was attached to its leg. It was a trained Valsprey, after all. I bent down and pulled the case from its leg, then picked at the thread that sealed it shut. It came apart, and a small piece of parchment unfurled in my hands.
The words I read wrested the breath from my lungs. “Who’s it from?” Jase asked.
“I don’t know.” “Who is it for?”
I stared at the note, wondering how it was possible, but somewhere deep inside, I knew. Sometimes messages had a way of finding people. The ghosts, they call to you in unexpected moments. This wasn’t a message sent by a Valsprey. It was sent by a different kind of messenger. I held it tight, not wanting to give it to Jase.
“Kazi? What is it?”
No more secrets, we had promised.
I held the note out to him. “It’s for us,” I said.
Jase took it and read it carefully, several times, it seemed, because he just continued to stare at it. He shook his head, his lips paling. He blinked as if trying to clear his vision, trying to make the words reorder themselves into something that made sense.
Jase, Kazi, anyone,
Come! Please! Samuel is dead. They’re banging the door.
I have to—
In an instant, his expression went from lost to angry. “It’s a hoax. Some kind of sick hoax.” He crumpled the paper in his fist and whipped around, scanning the landscape again for the perpetrator. “Come out!” he yelled. Only a haunting whine of wind answered back.
“Do you recognize the handwriting?” I asked. It was a desperate scrawl, written in haste. It didn’t seem like a hoax.
He looked at the message again. “I’m not sure. It might be Jalaine’s. We have Valsprey at the arena … The office door there is…” He paced, shaking his head. “I had Samuel working there while his hand healed. He—” Jase grimaced, and I could almost see his thoughts spinning out of control, while mine were leaden, plummeting to one conclusion—
“Samuel is not dead,” Jase growled as if he had read my mind. “Jalaine overreacts. She thought I was dead once when I fell out of a tree and the air was knocked out of me. She ran to tell my parents and caused a panic.” He scanned the landscape again, thinking out loud. “Maybe Aram wrote it, or maybe someone we don’t even know, someone trying to trick you, to convince you to release me. Maybe they didn’t get the message that I was coming home and think you’re still holding me? Or maybe—” He stopped midthought and his shoulders slumped. He leaned forward, resting his arms on Tigone’s back like it was the only thing holding him up. “Samuel is not dead,” he said again, but this time so quietly only a ghost could have heard him.
I looked past him to where the bird had been and saw Death hunched over, his back bowed, lifting a body from the valley floor. He looked over his shoulder at me, and then bird, body, Death, they were all gone.
 |
Who wrote the note, how it managed to get to us, or if it was even true became secondary questions. Getting home was what mattered now. We stopped at watering holes only for the sake of the horses. For us there was no rest until the evening when darkness closed in.
I looked back at the long path we had trampled in the sandy soil, a crooked line on the red landscape. Dying rays of sun puddled in our tracks.
We built a fire in silence, gathering twigs and sticks and breaking off branches from a dead bush. Jase wrestled angrily with one branch that refused to break free. “Dammit!” he yelled, yanking furiously.
I reached out and touched his arm. “Jase—”
He stopped, his chest heaving, his nostrils flared, his eyes still fixed on the brittle bush. “I don’t know how it could happen,” he said. “Except for his hand—” He turned and met my gaze. “Samuel was strong and sharp- eyed, but his injured hand—” His voice caught.
Was. Samuel was.
“It will be all right, Jase. We’ll figure it out together.” Every word I uttered was hollow and inadequate, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. I felt pathetically useless.
He looked away, and his chest rose in a slow, deliberate breath. He raked back his hair and squared his shoulders, and I could see him stitching back together whatever had come undone inside him, refusing to give in to despair. I opened my mouth to speak, but he shook his head and walked away, rifling through his gear. He pulled out his ax and in one fierce swing parted the branch from the bush.
“There,” he said and threw the conquered wood onto the fire. Sparks danced into the air. He turned his attention to the dead stump, hacking away at it with the same ferocity. The noise was bleak in the emptiness, and every whack juddered through my bones.
“Jase, talk to me. Please. Do you blame me? Because you weren’t there?”
He stopped mid-swing and stared at me, the fury draining from his face. “You? What are you talking about?” He lowered his ax to the ground. “This is not your fault, Kazi. This is us. Ballenger history. This is what I’ve tried to tell you all along. It’s always been the wolf at our door. Our history’s been riddled with violence since the beginning, but not because we want it that way. Now we finally have a real chance to end it. No more power plays. No more black markets. No more paying taxes to an absentee king who never does anything to improve the lives of people in Hell’s Mouth. Lydia and Nash are going to grow up differently than I did. They’re going to have different lives, ones where they’re not always having to watch their
backs. They won’t need straza trailing them everywhere they go. Our history is about to change. We are going to change it, together, remember?”
I nodded, and he pulled me into his arms, the bush forgotten.
The wolf at the door. I couldn’t help but think of Zane. My history was about to change too.
Lest we repeat history, Let the stories be passed,
From father to son, from mother to daughter, For with but one generation,
History and truth are lost forever.
—Song of Jezelia
