2. One step ahead
2
ONE STEP AHEAD
Nothing on land runs faster than a titan drake. The reason was simple enough: titan drakes were fifty-foot-long, six-legged, twenty-ton mountains of pure muscle and appetite. When a titan drake wanted to run, few forces could stop them. Not trees, not other animals, and certainly not rock wyrms.
But this wasn’t a normal situation. Overbite’s injury forced her to return to a walk. If Anahrod didn’t do something, Overbite soon wouldn’t be capable of that much.
Her passengers had pulled their mantles from their shoulders and were using the woven squares as a shelter from both wind and insects. More sensible than she’d expected, honestly.
They should’ve have been miserable in the heat, but they weren’t acting like it. Did they have inscriptions sewn into their clothes? That was the only explanation that made any sense, even if it was an expensive solution. Inscribers weren’t cheap and the clothes would wear away to nothing in weeks or months. It was a smart move—and it suggested that this trip hadn’t been an accident.
Overbite walked for an hour before she started making whining noises and slowed even further. Anahrod winced in sympathy for the titan drake’s pain. She unfastened her own spring hook from the harness and jumped down to inspect the wound.
She wasn’t surprised when a Skylander followed her, but hadn’t expected it to be the boy, Gwydinion.
“That was lightning!” he said, far too loud. “What’s its name? Can I pet it? Do you have to clean its teeth? How did you tame it…?” His voice trailed off as he noticed the open wound. “Oh.”
Oh, indeed. The injury was as ugly as it looked. That one man had stopped the bleeding, but he’d done nothing to close the gash, which had torn through skin and muscle. It was a miracle that Overbite had limped as far as she had. Even with five working legs, the jungle wasn’t kind to those with such a disadvantage. If they were lucky, the wound wouldn’t fester, but Anahrod had long since abandoned hoping for that sort of felicity. She needed to take the time to treat the wound properly, or Overbite would pay the price.
And yet that was exactly what they couldn’t afford to do.
Overbite nudged Anahrod, a gentle bump that shoved the woman several feet to the side. The message was clear enough: fix it.
Oh, how she wished she could. She rubbed a hand across the drake’s brow ridge, although she had to stretch a little to do it.
“Is it going to be all right?” Gwydinion whispered.
“No,” Anahrod said. “I don’t think so.”
Everyone came climbing down the titan drake’s side then. The redhead placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder, but her attention remained focused on Anahrod. “Do we need to press on without the titan drake?”
For a moment, Anahrod thought the woman was suggesting she put Overbite out of her misery. She started to snap at the redhead to mind her own damn business.
Except the woman was right.
Not about killing Overbite. Anahrod didn’t have the means. Maybe these Skylanders possessed the magical power necessary to take the giant monster down, but Anahrod didn’t.
No, the woman was right about needing to leave Overbite behind.
The Scarsea were fantastic trackers. It wasn’t a question of whether they’d find Overbite, only when. Anyone still with Overbite would be discovered, too.
Anahrod pursed her lips. She didn’t know what these people were after, but she knew she didn’t want to be involved.
“You should, yes,” Anahrod said to the redhead. “I’ll take her and travel west, toward the Bay of Bones.” Anahrod pointed appropriately. “That will throw them off your scent; they’ll follow me. Head north, northeast, you’ll reach the highlands—”
“You can’t do that!” Gwydinion said.
Anahrod stared at the boy.
He flushed and fidgeted. “I mean… aren’t they mad at you, too?”
“Didn’t kill two of their people,” Anahrod told him. “Which, yes, they’ll know, because they know what it looks like when I kill someone.”
She didn’t want to go back to Sicaryon; she hadn’t forgotten that the damn tricky tidefisher had ordered his men to kidnap her.
That didn’t equal trusting these people.
“Even so—” Gwydinion gave the redhead a pleading look.
The redhead in question rolled her shoulders, stretched an arm. “Gwydinion has a point. You may have noticed we’re not exactly natives. A guide would be useful.”
“Find a holler and hire one,” Anahrod said. “Haven’t heard a good reason it has to be me.”
“What’s a holler?” Gwydinion asked the redhead.
“Small communities in the valleys,” she answered, “but I don’t know enough about them to find one, and even we did”—she laughed—“we’d have to understand the language. I can’t imagine many of the locals speak Haudan half as well as she does.”
Anahrod’s mouth twisted. The woman had a point.
“As for why you should agree, I can give you a reason. I can give you fifty good reasons.” The redhead pulled a bag from her knapsack and tossed it to Anahrod.
Anahrod checked the contents: Seven Crests coins, the oh-so-humorously named “scales.” Probably fifty, although she didn’t stop to count. Fifty scales went a long, long way in the Deep.
The offer of payment set the younger woman off. “Oh, come on! Why are we acting like we’re scared of our shadows? We can always just kill anyone who catches up to us. Keep things simple.” The scarred woman pulled out the knife, spun it in her hand for emphasis, rolled it over, then caught the handle again before sheathing it.
Anahrod had a feeling she’d be seeing that trick a lot from this woman. It was meant to look dangerous, and it did, but by Anahrod’s estimation, it also made the woman look young . Young and hotheaded, too eager to prove herself to everyone, too rash to understand why it wasn’t always wise.
“No,” the fat man said.
The girl rolled her eyes. “ Yes . You know we’d win.” She tilted her head in the redhead’s direction. “What do you say, Ris? I’ll pick them off one by one. You and Naeron can handle the stragglers. We’ll finish in time for Kaibren to make dinner.” She helpfully pointed to each: the potential dragonriders, Ris and Naeron; the aging poet, Kaibren.
Ris muttered something under her breath that sounded a lot like, “Please stop helping.”
Anahrod threw the bag back to Ris. “Sounds like you don’t need me.”
Ris laughed, tossed back her hair. “Oh, storms and ashes—” She swung back around. “If this is your idea of haggling, I must say it’s working. One hundred scales, then?”
“How about the truth,” Anahrod countered. “What you’re doing down here? Because I’m having a hard time believing a couple of dragonriders need my help.”
Ris started to say something—a protest, a lie, something.
“Don’t pretend you’re not dragonriders. Overbite knows what a dragon smells like, and you lot stink of it.”
Ris raised both eyebrows. “Is that so?” Anahrod knew she’d revealed too much when she saw the sparkle in the woman’s eyes. “Just the one dragonrider. Me.”
Anahrod turned her gaze to Naeron. “You’re not a dragonrider? You don’t look like a priest.”
“No,” Naeron agreed. “Sorcerer.”
Anahrod snorted. She wanted to call the man a dirty liar, but truthfully, he really didn’t seem like a Skylander at all. She was having a difficult time imagining what motivation he could have for admitting to heresy. “Where are you from?”
“East,” he answered. He started to add a comment, paused, looked frustrated, then spoke to Ris in a rolling, fast stream of words Anahrod didn’t understand.
“He’s from the eastern plains,” Ris explained. “One of the Ilhomi.”
Anahrod tried to place the name, succeeded, and felt sick. “Didn’t the dragons wipe out the Ilhomi?”
“No,” Naeron corrected, narrow-eyed. “They tried .”
“Wait,” the boy protested. “What do you mean, the dragons ‘wiped out the Ilhomi’? You can’t mean the dragons from Yagra’hai.”
“We’ll talk about that later.” Ris dismissed the concern, focused on Anahrod. “But you see? We’re not exactly first in line to attend church services. If you’re concerned about draconic attention, don’t be. We prefer to avoid draconic attention ourselves.”
“You’re a dragonrider, ” Anahrod pointed out.
“Oh, she’s a smart one, isn’t she?” the younger woman said.
“I don’t mean my dragon,” Ris said. “ My dragon is the most amazing and wonderful dragon to have ever existed. It’s the rest of them that are all—” She made a face like she’d just eaten rotting fruit.
“Good to know,” Anahrod commented, although she was inclined to believe all dragons fell into the “blegh” category. “Why can’t your amazing and wonderful dragon come get you?”
Ris stared at the woman before gesturing at the jungle canopy. “He might not breathe fire, but he’s still a dragon . He would destroy a huge section of the jungle reaching me. If he misjudged it, we could easily end up as accidental victims. Do you want that? I don’t want that.”
“That just leaves one question.”
“Yes?” Ris smiled.
“Why are you here?”
The Skylanders (or Skylanders by association, in Naeron’s case) gave each other looks ranging from uneasy to annoyed. Anahrod recognized the attitude: they either weren’t going to tell her or were about to lie.
“It’s my fault.” Gwydinion stepped closer to Anahrod. “My father’s in some trouble. Quite a lot of trouble. It’s not his fault, though! He didn’t do anything wrong!” His eyes were shining.
Anahrod gave the boy a moment to collect himself.
“Ris is a friend,” Gwydinion explained after rubbing his eyes. “So, I asked her to help my father. What he needs is only found down here in the Deep. I just didn’t expect it to all be so…” He made a vague gesture to the whole jungle.
“Yeah, funny how that works.” Anahrod studied the boy. Weirdly, he seemed to be telling the truth—or he was a fantastic liar.
That a fifteen-year-old kid had asked a dragonrider for a favor and had not only received it but had used that favor to travel into the Deep was ridiculous . So much so that Anahrod couldn’t imagine anyone expecting such a story to be believed.
Perhaps Gwydinion was telling the truth. He had left out a lot of details, after all. Liars usually provided too much information, thinking it made their story more believable.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
He brightened noticeably. “Yeah. I think we did. Now we just need to escape alive.” The boy didn’t seem worried about it being an issue.
Anahrod examined the group. Weird, puzzling, and dangerous. What the girl with the knives was failing to consider was that the moment Sicaryon decided they were an actual threat, he’d send his sorcerers. This wasn’t like the Skylands, where everyone who could cast a spell either ended up a dragonrider, a priest, or dead. Sorcery wasn’t something practiced under every tree in the Deep, but close enough.
No, the real problem was that these people were cocky. That was an attitude for which the Deep had little tolerance.
Anahrod mentally sighed. She just knew she was going to regret this. Not least of all because she would have to send Overbite off in the opposite direction. That meant she’d lose her. Even if the Scarsea captured Overbite instead of killing her, it’s not like Sicaryon would just give the titan drake back. Better to leave Overbite with Sicaryon than the alternative, though, which was the titan drake slowly dying of a poisoned wound until some other predator finally took advantage of her misfortune.
Anahrod pointed to each person. “So, you’re Ris… Naeron… Gwydinion. You must be Kaibren.” The older man inclined his head politely in her direction. That left one person without a name to match their face. “And you are?” She asked the hotheaded young woman with the knives.
“Yeah, like I’m going to tell you—”
“The lovely woman with the terrible personality is Claw,” Ris volunteered.
“Claw?” Anahrod scoffed. “Let me guess: she picked that name out all by herself.”
“Fuck off. What’s your name then, troll?” Claw growled.
“Jhyanglae,” Anahrod answered, which had the advantage of betraying who among them spoke Sumulye. Kaibren accepted her answer without comment, while Naeron’s eyes darted to her in shock. Ris covered her mouth to stop herself from laughing. Claw didn’t understand, but she was sensitive enough to the mood to realize that Anahrod had just made a joke at her expense.
Claw snarled and jerked her hand away. “What did she just say?”
“It was less of a name than an instruction,” Ris said.
“Oh yeah? Let’s see how funny you think it is when—”
Kaibren put a hand on the woman’s arm. “Only the fool cuts his own rope while he’s still scaling the cliff.”
Claw quieted. As she nodded to the older man, a distant, rhythmic sound echoed. Drumbeats.
“Music?” Gwydinion cocked his head.
“No,” Naeron murmured. “Message.”
“Oh joy,” Claw muttered. “Do the damn trolls use drums to signal each other or something? Oh, they do, don’t they?”
It wasn’t a good sign. The Scarsea didn’t need to catch up to them if they could signal ahead. She had no idea how far Sicaryon’s reach extended these days. She suspected a very long way, indeed. Anahrod had no confidence in these people to outpace their pursuers, and if Ris was telling the truth, they had no clue how to approach any of the locals.
“Where exactly do you need to go?” Anahrod asked Ris, squinting.
“The highlands,” she answered immediately. “Somewhere open enough for my dragon to land.”
That was easy enough. Bonus: they’d have to travel away from Scarsea lands. That part fit in with Anahrod’s plans nicely.
“Fine.” Anahrod held out her hand to Ris. “Give me the pouch. You’ve bought yourself a guide.”
As Anahrod finished tying donated clothing to Overbite’s harness, she found Gwydinion standing next to Overbite’s head, gently petting her nose.
What made Anahrod stop and stare was the fact that Overbite allowed this without protest. No growls, no snarls, no sign that Overbite was anything but pleased by the boy’s attention.
“She likes you,” Anahrod said.
“She’s sunlight.” Gwydinion’s eyes were bright and too shiny. “I wish… I wish there was a different way.”
Me too, Anahrod thought.
She scratched the edge of Overbite’s jaw.
[I need you to do something for me, pretty girl,] Anahrod told her. [Just a little thing, and then you can sleep.]
Gwydinion took a step backward as Overbite moved her head, but he didn’t flinch. The titan drake tilted toward Anahrod, who showed her what she needed. Anahrod overrode the enormous beast’s protests and persuaded her to play nice to the next group of humans she saw. To lower her head and whine sweetly because these would be friends of Anahrod’s.
It was almost true. She’d considered Sicaryon a friend, once. More than a friend. Now, Overbite’s best chance for survival lay in the titan drake making her best impression of a tame vel hound begging for scraps.
[Go,] Anahrod ordered. [Don’t stop until they find you. Don’t go to them. Let them chase you. Then make friends.]
Overbite gave her one last nose shove and then limped off into the forest.
She exhaled slowly and ignored how dry and tight her throat felt. She turned to the Skylanders and gestured in the opposite direction.
“Let’s go. Follow my lead. Don’t lag behind. We need to be as far from here as possible before the Scarsea reach this position.”