Chapter 16 In Which I Tell Jordan the Truth #3
His response was immediate. Yes.
Wordlessly, I showed the exchange to Sahir. He grunted. Gaheris and Lene stood up.
“Should I take my phone?” I asked.
“The Court is the only area with cell service,” Sahir said. “But do as you will.”
I’d just lied to Jeff, then. I would not be available.
I sent a text to my mom. Busy few days—won’t be able to call. Then I texted Thea and said, Insane work assignment, don’t expect replies for a bit, texted Jordan I’m going on the quest, and locked my phone.
I kissed Doctor Kitten on the top of the head, and Nele stretched out on the bed next to him. With one backward glance to see the two of them already snuggled up like absolute traitors, I followed Sahir, Gaheris, and Lene out of the room.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find four packs leaning against the wall in the hallway, but I was briefly horrified by the way they lay out in the open as streams of faeries passed us in both directions.
Everybody would see that we were leaving.
Any spies on the inside could inform various bands of kidnapping soldiers that the human was about to embark on some kind of quest. Did Sahir have no sense of self-preservation?
Sahir gestured toward a pack, so I shouldered it, since there was nothing else to do at this point. Gaheris and Lene took up the other two, and together we left the mountain.
We walked for most of the morning.
I hadn’t been exercising much.
At all. I hadn’t been exercising at all.
My calves burned before we’d even reached the forest at the far end of the clearing.
By the time we hit the shadows of the first trees, I had an ache in my left buttock and a stitch in my side.
The day was cold, but I sweated through my shirt beneath the pack.
My fingertips turned blue, and I wished I had gloves.
There were constant trills of bird call, so frequent I found it jarring at first. Over time, the noise faded into a background melody entwined with the rustling of tree branches and crunch of leaves underfoot.
No one spoke. I thought about all the times I’d wished I could go on a quest, like my favorite characters. I thought about how fervently my favorite authors had derided questing, and how I’d always thought they were being buzzkills.
They were not being buzzkills. Walking all day in a state of anticipation rapidly becomes boring.
Sahir seemed uninclined to talk. Behind me, Gaheris and Lene walked side by side, their low voices blending into the sounds of the nature around us.
I tripped over a tree branch, and Sahir caught me by the arm, his fingers digging into my flesh. “Walk better,” he instructed, a man born to be a teacher.
I opened my mouth to retort and got a faceful of dirt. I tried to breathe but couldn’t.
There was a weight on the pack on top of me. I flailed my arms.
“Stop moving,” Sahir hissed. The weight lessened, and I tilted my head to the side, gasping. His hot breath ghosted across my cheek. The curtain of his hair filled my line of sight and the sharp cinnamon smell of his shampoo filled my nostrils.
He used one hand to pull his hair away so I could see that he’d flung himself nearly on top of me and then levered himself onto all fours, crouched over my backpack.
Lene wriggled up next to me, flat on her stomach with dead leaves caught in her whiskers. “Get to cover.”
“Where is cover? Cover from what?” I whispered. I went to lift my head, and Sahir’s hand clamped down on the base of my skull.
“It’s Kamare,” Lene said, digging the claws of her left hand into the earth. The flex of her lightly furred fingers left long furrows in the ground.
“What?” There was a branch beneath my neck, jabbing into my carotid artery.
“The faerie who tried to poison you,” Lene clarified.
“The lunch lady?” I asked blankly.
Sahir’s sigh ruffled my hair and the leaves beneath us.
I abstained from further clarifying questions, my heart pounding against the leaves below me. Slow minutes ticked past, and my left calf started cramping.
Finally, Sahir’s fingers loosened. I propped myself up on my elbows—inadvertently whacking Sahir in the stomach with my pack. He exhaled in a low and displeased huff. The warmth behind me disappeared, and I rolled over to see that he’d stood up.
When I glanced past him I saw that Gaheris’s hair was extinguished; he’d huddled into the trunk of a nearby tree, eyes shut and skin shockingly well camouflaged.
“I didn’t notice anything,” I whispered.
Sahir rolled his eyes. “Of course you did not notice anything,” he said. “There were twelve faeries. They moved with the wind and stopped when it died. They appeared to have one tracker, but from the sound of his breathing, he is experiencing a head cold.”
“I believe that his head cold prevented him from smelling us,” Lene chimed in.
Gaheris finally stood and came toward us, trembling on stick-thin legs.
“The Queen’s soldiers distress me,” he said. “They have hungry eyes.”
I closed my own eyes. “Sahir,” I said. “How much more walking before we find Roman?”
“About three hours,” Lene said, when Sahir didn’t reply. “If we walked at our usual speed. With you?” She looked me up and down. “Seven. We will camp tonight an hour from the sacred site, so that you can present yourself well to Roman in the morning.”
With this encouragement, I brushed the dirt from my knees and gestured for her to lead the way.
By late afternoon I was crying softly, limping along several paces behind Gaheris.
The blister on my left foot was bigger, but the two on my right foot had somehow both developed between my big and second toes. This can-do attitude earned them a place of pride in my mental litany of complaints.
“Have you dreamed of our quest, Miriam?” Gaheris asked. “Guidance would be to our benefit.”
I jerked to a halt. “What?”
Sahir glanced from me to Gaheris and back to me. “Well, it is a fair question.”
Several horrible realizations clicked into place.
“Is that what ‘Lady of the True Dreams’ means? That I have prophetic dreams?”
“What did you think it meant?” Gaheris asked, looking baffled.
“I didn’t think it meant anything.”
Now Sahir looked irritated. “We have had several very involved conversations about names, Miriam. Why would the Princeling have given you a meaningless name?”
I flung my hands up so hard I almost unbalanced, the pack pulling me toward the forest floor. “Political cachet?” I guessed wildly. I regained my footing. I’d thought the Princeling had given me a title to protect me in his Court.
Lene, who had been pretending not to listen, turned around, too. “Is this a human prank?” she asked. We’d covered practical jokes, pranks, and April Fools’ Day in one of our recent human classes.
My jaw dropped. “So I do have prophetic dreams?”
At this, Sahir emitted a sigh so vociferous it disturbed some nearby birds nesting in a tree. “Miriam, obviously you have prophetic dreams,” he said, and turned his back to me definitively.
I trailed the three of them as we continued on our trek, my feet crying out and my head spinning.
“Who was that obvious to?” I asked. Then I remembered the conversation between the Princeling and his knights on that Teams call months ago—about my fractured eyes and weird zygomatic bones.
If my dreams were prophetic, why were they so much sexier than my waking life?
None of the faeries answered me, so I subsided into baffled silence. Hours passed as we walked.
Finally, at a signal I didn’t discern, the three faeries stopped in a small clearing.
They didn’t verbalize the division of labor but moved with the ease of long familiarity. Gaheris touched my arm and jerked his head in a gesture that probably meant Come with me and not Wow, the strain of these backpacks has caused me a lot of neck pain.
While Sahir and Lene raised the tent, Gaheris and I collected wood for the campfire.
This entailed me trailing him and humming in agreement whenever he picked anything up.
Gaheris was uniquely suited to this task, touching each piece of wood in turn to determine if it would burn.
We collected two armfuls—enough for dinner, but not enough to keep the fire going through the night.
When we got back to the campsite, a large A-frame cloth tent had been raised.
I found myself wondering who I would sleep next to, a little stressed out about the idea.
I was used to falling asleep in front of Sahir.
And Lene was used to falling asleep in front of me.
Gaheris and I were each vastly removed from the other’s sleeping habits, and this made me nervous.
The air had a bite to it, cleaner and sharper than autumn in New York. Gaheris and I gathered several large stones and marked out a circle in the dirt.
“This should be enough,” he said, leaning a few logs against each other in our makeshift fire pit. He left a hand on the wood, and a tongue of fire twisted down his head and neck, along his shoulder, and out over his fingertips. The wood caught, and he pulled a hand away.
“Why doesn’t your hair set anything on fire?” I blurted out, finally vocalizing a question that had bugged me for months.
He looked up from where he knelt on the ground. “Because I do not want it to,” he said, frowning at me. “Do you want it to?”
“No, of course not.” I turned away from him, toward the discarded packs. I reached for the nearer one and opened the top to find a stack of wooden bowls. I pulled it out, and then grabbed the food containers underneath.
A loaf of bread. Some more of the purple hummus-adjacent spread. Something that looked like precooked lentils.
I put my hands in the air and stretched upward. I didn’t hear Sahir come up behind me.
“That looks edible,” he said, his cheek nearly pressed to mine as he peered over my shoulder. I suppressed a shiver and arched my back. The motion nestled his chin farther into the crook of my neck, where the rough stubble on his cheek rubbed against my skin.