And then, to his horror, the Yuts took aim and Finnikin went falling out of the sky.
Trevanion prayed that the crew of the Myrinhall would grab the boy. Pull him out of the water and tend to him. But there was no movement toward where Finnikin lay facedown in the river, an arrow jutting from his side. The girl lurched forward, and Trevanion grabbed her, his hand stifling her scream as she struggled against him. When she finally broke free, Trevanion could hear her softly weeping, the sound more pitiful because she had seemed unbreakable.
“We wait until they leave,” Sir Topher whispered as the Myrinhall inched further upstream, blocking their view of the Yuts but not of Finnikin’s body.
“No,” the girl said. “Now. They worship the sun god here. They’ll take Finnikin the first opportunity they have.”
Trevanion hit the water instantly, pounding it with his body, punishing it for placing a barrier between him and his son. The Myrinhall had just sailed past where Finnikin lay, and with any luck the vessel would block the Yuts’ view of both their bodies. He knew he had little time. The moment the Yuts worked out where they were hidden, they would cross the river and come for them all.
When he reached his son, Trevanion turned the boy’s body over and heard him splutter and gasp for air. There was no time for relief. No time to lessen the weight on Finnikin’s body by removing his quiver and daggers. Trevanion dragged him back to the bank. Sir Topher, the girl, and the thief pulled them into the long reeds. Rather than take the chance to move farther into the jungle, they stayed crouched in the ankle-deep water, shivering as the sun disappeared behind the clouds. Trevanion placed his fist against Finnikin’s mouth to hold back the boy’s grunts of agony. The arrow had struck him in the side, just above the hip. It had to come out soon, but inflicting more pain on his son was unthinkable. He knew what type of barb was lodged in Finnikin’s body; he had seen them scattered on the deck of the cog. Broad iron arrowheads meant for hunting animals. Difficult to extract.
The air rang with strange voices from both sides of the river. Bloodcurdling wails. Some seemed like taunts. As if the Yuts were playing cat and mouse with them. Not even in his ten years of captivity had Trevanion felt so trapped. He despised his own helplessness in not being able to move his party to safety and away from this muddy, insect-infested circle of swamp.
The thief looked away from Finnikin’s shuddering body, his hands covering his ears to block out the taunts around them. “Don’t you know magic?” he asked Evanjalin accusingly.
But Trevanion knew that their only hope was to wait.
“Do you think they’ve given up?” Sir Topher asked.
The voices had stopped, but the silence that followed was more alarming than Trevanion could have imagined. He shook his head and pointed to a copse of trees in the distance. The scraps of metal the Yut natives wore around their wrists and ankles flashed and winked in the sunlight.
“They want us to know we are surrounded,” he said quietly, pointing to another group to the left and then another across the river.
“I can speak to them in Yut, Sir Topher,” Finnikin murmured feverishly. “Tell them . . . we come in peace . . . acknowledge their right to Yutlind Sud . . .”
Sir Topher hushed him. “You’ll tire yourself out, Finnikin.”
Trevanion watched his son’s labored breathing. Finnikin sat half-upright, supported by Sir Topher. Crouching had become too painful, so they now sat in the shallow water, at the mercy of mosquitoes and water rats that bit with vicious frequency.
“These people are not speaking common Yut,” Evanjalin said. She was staring at the arrow in Finnikin’s side. Her eyes met Trevanion’s, and he placed his hand against the stem.
“When they visited Lumatere in the past,” Finnikin gasped, refusing to surrender to the pain, “for an audience with the king . . . you said . . . you said he promised to recognize . . .”
“But these were not the people who visited us, Finnikin,” Sir Topher said. “These men are spirit warriors. They speak the old language of the first inhabitants.”
“They belong to one of the tribes that guard the entrance into the kingdom from the south,” Evanjalin acknowledged. Her face was chalk-white and strained. “They have done so since the time of the gods. Their customs and language are different, but they consider themselves kin to Yutlind Sud and mortal enemies of those in the north. They have lost many of their tribe to the merchant ships that enter the river and capture their people, selling them as slaves up north in Sorel.”
“What do . . . they want from us?” Finnikin croaked.
Trevanion stared at her, shaking his head in case she dared reveal the answer to the question. What they wanted was his boy, with hair the color of the sun as it set.
“Do you trust me?” she whispered.
Finnikin’s eyes rolled back. Trevanion had no idea whether it was from the pain of the arrow or the nausea from the filthy water he had swallowed. The girl placed her arms around Finnikin as her eyes issued a silent order to Trevanion.
“Talk to me,” Finnikin slurred. “Don’t let me sleep, Evanjalin.”
“Perhaps I should tell you a story. So you can record it in the Book of Lumatere when you recover from your theatrics.”
He chuckled, and Trevanion chose that moment to wrench the arrow out of his son’s body.
Finnikin bit so hard into Evanjalin’s flesh that he tasted her blood on his lips. And for a while the flames of fever chased him into dreams and memories. Where he saw the stake. Wood piled around its base. Set alight. And he was nine years old again, watching with horror the executions of the Forest Dwellers. Children of Sagrami. Around him people were sobbing. They had already taken his father, but he needed to be here for Beatriss. So that he, the son of her beloved, would be the last thing she saw. But Seranonna was there instead, her hands drenched with blood, flames crawling up her body as she cursed. And then he was in the tree. The one he had sat in with Balthazar and Lucian and made plans to trap the silver wolf. The tree of his childhood. That day, hidden in its branches, he pulled out his dagger. He aimed as his father had taught him.
And caught Seranonna in the heart.
Trevanion watched the tremors wrack Finnikin’s body as he slept. It was dark now, but he still felt the presence of the Yuts. Voices rang through the night sky sporadically, and he could hear the girl muttering as if in prayer.
“Sir Topher,” he said quietly. “Take them.”
Sir Topher leaned forward. “Is he . . .” He could not bring himself to finish the question.
“Take them,” Trevanion repeated. “Continue on the east bank and head toward the grasslands. Hopefully, they will not follow, for you have nothing they want. You know where to find my men. Tell Perri that his captain has passed on the greatest honor a guard of Lumatere can be given.”
“Trevanion —”
“Tell him the girl will lead you to our king and our people.” Trevanion looked at Evanjalin but could not read her expression. “If my boy dies, I die protecting him.”
There was silence for a long moment.
“It’s not right,” Sir Topher said. “That it happens in this order. That a man should outlive his —” Sir Topher’s breath caught in his throat. “Don’t let them take him alive. Promise me that.”
“Why do the men of Lumatere always speak of dying for the kingdom and for each other?” Evanjalin asked, irritated.
In the dim light of the moon, Trevanion could see her face. Her body had taken a battering on the boat, and she looked weak from fatigue. Yet there was still a glint in her eyes. She tried to rise, but he pulled her back down. “Where are you going?”
“I cannot promise that I will make sense to them, but I know enough of their language to get by.”
“You have nothing to offer them,” he said. “They will kill you the moment you step out in the open.”
She shrugged free of him. “Never underestimate the value of knowing another’s language. It can be far more powerful t
han swords and arrows, Captain. I’ve listened to them long enough to understand a little. Among them is their leader and his son. One has been on this side of the river, one on the other. And do you know what the father has promised the son? The honor of lighting the pyre to sacrifice Finnikin.”
“There is nothing you can do,” Sir Topher said. “You will only put your life in danger.”
She looked at him sadly. “Sir Topher, do you honestly believe we are not all marked for death anyway? We entered their land illegally on a cog that has taken away their people in the past. But I may know how to convince them to trust us.”
“How?”
“When the slave traders steal the young in Yutlind Sud, they sell them to the mines of Sorel.” Her eyes met Trevanion’s. “I knew a slave girl there who told me stories of her people.”
Trevanion held her stare. He had heard about what happened to the children forced to work in the mines, tales so gut-wrenching that even the most hardened prisoners would shudder at hearing them. If Evanjalin had been in the mines, it would explain why she knew the terrain of Sorel so well, although he suspected that she was not telling them the full truth.
“When I heard their voices over our heads, it was clear to me, Captain. The chieftain is a father. There was such love and pride in his voice when he called out to his son.”
“I didn’t hear that love in the voices taunting us, Evanjalin,” Trevanion said harshly.
“Because you don’t understand the nuances of their language. We hear the grunts and the guttural sounds, and we believe them to be something worse than hate,” she said.
Finnikin stirred beside them. Trevanion watched as his son reached out and gripped the girl’s hand, trying to stop her from leaving. The girl gently untangled her hand and crawled away, but Finnikin grabbed the cloth of her shirt, pulling her back against him.
“Take me with you,” Finnikin whispered, his breathing shallow. “We can do this together.”
“Your wound is infected. You should rest rather than fight it.” She turned to Trevanion. “What a stubborn nature the mixing of blood from our rock and our river produces, Captain.” It was almost an accusation.
She managed to pull free of Finnikin, but this time Trevanion gripped her. “You risk his life by holding me back, Captain!” She said. “I know how to rid him of the poisons in his blood, but only if you let me convince them to allow us to remove him from this swamp.” She looked to Sir Topher, her eyes pleading. “You are the king’s First Man, Sir Topher. Order your captain to let me go.”
Sir Topher looked torn. He knew that sending her out to the clearing meant she could be dead from hundreds of arrows before she spoke her first word.
“Let her go, Trevanion,” he said at last.
His words were met with silence.
“Promise them that Lumatere will acknowledge the south’s rightful claim to the throne of Yutlind Sud, but not of Yutlind Nord,” Sir Topher said quietly. “It may help. Our king made no secret of the fact that he believed the claim on Yutlind Sud was illegal, and in time he would have made this view public. It may not be enough to keep them from attacking, but it’s something.”
Trevanion stood and pulled Evanjalin to her feet, holding her close to his side. “You don’t step away me from me,” he ordered. “Is that clear?”
“Captain, you don’t understand. I know their language —”
Trevanion cut her off.
“All I need to understand is the unwritten law of warriors,” he said firmly. “And women and children are never sent to do our work without our protection.” He pointed to the trees, emphatically. “That’s the language I share with them.”
As Evanjalin and Trevanion walked into the clearing, Finnikin heard her shout out a word, loud and clear. In their filthy hiding place, he tried to sit up, watching her flinch as if she expected an arrow to come flying toward her at any moment. His father’s eyes were like a hawk’s as they searched the trees around them.
After a brief pause she stood facing east. Each time Trevanion tried to protect her body, she stepped around him, and when finally he gave up and stood by her side, she began to speak.
Sometimes her lone voice in the jungle suggested she was retelling a story, a history that seemed to have no end. Other times there was vehemence in her tone, husky in its broken delivery of an epistle to those who had guarded the entrance of this land for so long. But she continued speaking through the night until Finnikin heard her voice slur from fatigue and watched her body slump against Trevanion’s.
Evanjalin was hardly recognizable in the morning light. Mud caked her shirt, and her face was swollen from the mosquitoes that had feasted on her during the long hours squatting in the river. She had scratched some of the bites to their bloody core, and even her scalp looked raw from the ordeal. Then Finnikin saw her body stiffen, her eyes on the figures that began to appear through the trees. They were like ghosts: their eyes pale and their faces and torsos so white that at first he thought they were painted. They came from every direction of the jungle. Too many to count.
The chieftain stared at Evanjalin, his face expressionless. The two men who stood before her were indeed father and son, yet unlike Finnikin and Trevanion, they were almost replicas of each other. When the chieftain gripped Evanjalin’s arm, Trevanion made a move forward but she gently held him back. And then the chieftain spoke, the words blunt and almost hostile, but Finnikin knew enough about the rhythms of language to understand that she was not in danger.
The chieftain barked out an instruction, and Finnikin watched as two of the warriors walked toward their hiding place in the reeds. They pushed past Froi and Sir Topher and grabbed Finnikin’s face. While one of the warriors forced open his mouth, the other brought a flask to his lips. He drank the water in great gulps, almost choking with relief, his head rolling back. And then the warriors picked him up and carried him away.
“Evanjalin?” he heard Sir Topher ask in alarm.
Suddenly Finnikin was in his father’s arms. Trevanion placed him gently on the ground. Evanjalin’s face appeared above him, and then the chieftain’s.
“They mean you no harm,” she said quietly.
One of the warriors handed her the flask of water. The chieftain continued to watch them all, though his gaze kept returning to Trevanion and Finnikin.
“The slave girl told me the southern Yuts have always been criticized by the northerners for their weakness,” Evanjalin said. “You see, the northerners would kidnap the warriors’ sons and keep them as hostages, and instead of defending the kingdom and fighting for the crown, the southerners always went searching for their sons. Some see it as a weakness to give up the security of your kingdom and throne for the sake of your child. I told them the story of the captain of the King’s Guard who confessed to treason and was imprisoned in the mines of Sorel to save his son, who ten years later freed him.”
“You said a word over and over again. ‘Majorontai’.” Finnikin gasped as she cooled his brow with some of the water.
“The slave girl,” she responded quietly.
“She belonged to them?” Trevanion said.
“No. Perhaps another tribe,” Evanjalin replied. “But she was from these parts and was stolen by the merchant ships and taken to Sorel by the traders.”
The chieftain spoke, and Evanjalin nodded. “They want us to follow them and get some rest,” she said.
“Can we trust him?” Trevanion asked.
“If they wanted to kill us, they would have done so by now.”
“What did you tell them, Evanjalin?” Finnikin asked.
“I told them the truth,” she said quietly, turning to Sir Topher. “Make sure we honor Lumatere’s recognition of autonomy in the south, sir.”
“But who’s in charge in the south?” Sir Topher asked.
“I have a feeling we will find out soon,” she said.
Finnikin fought hard to keep his eyes open. The face of a young spirit warrior appeared above him, besid
e Evanjalin. The warrior spoke and handed her another flask, and she nodded before turning her eyes away from Finnikin’s.
“Hold him down. Don’t let him go,” he heard her say quietly.
He couldn’t keep count of how many hands held him down as Evanjalin poured a thick substance into his mouth. It gurgled as his body thrashed and convulsed, wanting to reject it. Then one of the warriors reached over and pressed his fingers hard into the wound at his side until finally he slipped into unconsciousness.
When he woke, it was dark. Finnikin knew he was no longer lying in the clearing. He could hear the sounds of the nocturnal world combined with the spirits of the past as they screeched and moaned and possessed the night. They were not the familiar noises of the woods of the north. This was old country. Finnikin felt the icy breath of its ancestors on his face.
“Evanjalin,” he whispered, his lips dry. He heard a rustle, and then she held a flask of water to his mouth.
“Are you in pain?” she asked.
“More nauseous than anything,” he murmured. “How long have I slept?”
“All day and half of this night. Sir Topher and Froi are sleeping.”
“My father?”
“Pacing.”
“And the spirit warriors?”
“Watching you. This is their settlement. Their women and children are upriver.”