The Fire Sisters (Brilliant Darkness 3) (7 page)

After what seems like an eternity, their hushed voices merge in the direction of the campsite.

“It must be safe,” Peree says after a minute. “Let’s go back.”

I stand, and he takes my arm to lead me forward. When we shove through the last of the trees to reach the fire, I stand stiffly beside it. I sense the light, I feel the warmth, I hear the whispered comments of the others about me, but I can’t reach my freezing hands out toward the fire. I can’t huddle into Peree’s arms. I can’t cry out.

Peree catches my hand. “Sit down.”

My legs instantly fold up, and I take a seat. Wait…
commands.
I can move when someone
tells
me to. The Sister took away my… my ability to make decisions, to control my body? But how? Nausea seizes me, and my body shakes. Peree wraps a blanket around me and stays close by my side.

“She’s so pale,” Bear says. “What’s wrong with her? Is she hurt? In shock?”

“I don’t know,” Peree says. “She doesn’t seem injured, but she hasn’t said anything else. She just shakes. I keep having to tell her what to do.”

“Check her neck.” Kai’s voice is grim. “Is there a wound there?”

Peree turns my head gently to one side and the other. He touches my neck. The stabbing pain is only a dull ache now.

“Right here,” Peree says. “What is it?”

“She’s been stung,” Kai says.

“By
what
?” Cuda asks.

“The Sisters.”

“What are you talking about?” Peree asks.

“The Sister who Gathered me pricked my neck with a knife and said I was stung. After that, I could only do what she told me to do. They must have done the same to Fennel.”

Stung
. My throat tightens; my eyes grow wet. I can’t wipe away the tear that dribbles down my cheek.

“Will she be all right? Why didn’t you tell us they could do this before?” Peree’s voice gets louder.

“It will wear off. At least, it did for me,” Kai says. “And I tried to explain. I said not to let them get close, that they could control you. It’s not my fault she didn’t listen.”

That’s completely unfair!

“How long did it take to wear off, Kaiya?” Amarina asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Hours? Days? Weeks?” Peree asks.

“I don’t remember!” Kai’s voice rises, too. “The Sister… she… she kept stinging me to keep me quiet.”

“Are we sure that’s what happened to Fenn?” Bear says. “Wait, maybe she can tell us herself. Fenn, tell us if the Sister stung you.”

I still can’t speak.

“I couldn’t talk either,” Kai says.

Peree releases a long breath. I can feel him trying to get control of himself. “Did anyone see anything out there?”

“Nothing,” Moray says. “The boys and me searched as much of that forest as we could in the dark. There’s no sign of them.”

“We should put out the fire and move.” Conda sounds nervous. “We’re sitting ducks here.”

“Don’t be stupid, Con,” Cuda says. “If they’d wanted to get rid of us, they would have already. Why bother giving us a warning if their plan was to kill us all now?”

“Why
didn’t
they kill us all now?” Bear asks.

No one seems to know.

“Perhaps only one Sister attacked Mirii,” Amarina says. “Maybe the group knew we were following them, and they left one behind to frighten us away.”

I want to tell Amarina I think she’s right. The words form in my brain, but I can’t produce them.

“I’m going back out to look again,” Conda says. “Maybe we missed something. If there’s only one Sister out there, we can find her. Capture her to trade for the children.”

Moray scoffs. “She delivered her message. She’s long gone.”

“Your brother is probably right,” Derain says. “We should stay together, follow the Sisters’ trail at first light,” Derain says. “In the meantime, one of us should sit watch.”

“I will,” Cuda says. “Might as well.” He gets up and strolls away from campsite, but his footsteps don’t go far, I notice.

“What about Fenn?” Peree asks.

“Hopefully, she will recover by morning,” Derain says.

“And if she doesn’t?”

No one answers.

“Lie down and rest, Fenn,” Peree says. “Try not to worry.”

I lie down, because he told me to. I can’t help the worrying part. He smooths my hair back from my face and arranges the blanket over me, tucking in the ends. Tears fill my eyes again. I can’t bear lying here like a statue, unable to speak or act. Talk about feeling useless and helpless. How long will I be like this? Will I be myself again?

Water begins to boil busily on the fire.

“Do you want a cup of tea?” Peree asks.

“Are you paying attention, Lofty? She can’t answer you,” Moray says.

Peree curses. “This is ridiculous! I don’t want to
order
her to drink a cup of tea or to sleep. I don’t want to order her to do anything!”

My chest aches with the distress in his voice.

“That’s where we’re different,” Moray says. “I’d enjoy it while it lasted.”

Bear makes a disgusted noise. “You’re such an ass.”

“If that’s how you feel about it, brother,” Conda says, “why are you even going after Frost?”

“I want my baby back,” Moray says. “Frost has him. Simple as that.”

“So after she delivers the baby, you’re done with her?” There’s a hopeful note in Conda’s voice.

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On if I see something I like better in Koolkuna.”

From the darkness, Cuda laughs. Everyone else quiets, probably trying to discourage Moray from speaking again. It works. After a while, I hear him snoring.

Not me. I lie beside the fire for hours, unable to sleep. Peree tosses and turns next to me, not seeming to sleep either.

As light filters through the forest once again, a fiery poker of panic stabs me. I still can’t move. The others are going to leave Peree and me behind. He’ll have to take me home to Nerang. What will happen to the children and Frost? And me?

The others stand and move about the campsite.

“Any change?” Bear asks.

“Not that I can tell.” Peree sounds worn out.

“I’m going to check the snares,” Kai says.

“I’ll go with you,” Bear says. “No one should go anywhere alone from now on.”

The fire crackles and spits as someone builds it up again, probably to cook the goose Peree shot last night. He touches my shoulder.

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

As he stands and walks away, my fingers twitch toward him under the blanket.

They moved. My fingers
moved
! I try to shift my whole hand. I can’t, but still, this has to be a good sign. I keep at it, 
silently 
straining with the effort.

Eventually, Peree tells me to sit up and eat. I obey him, but at the same time, I’m wiggling my toes inside my shoes. My teeth grind together. 
Kai and Bear return with a rabbit.

“Pack up,” Amarina says.

Everyone moves at once. Someone pours water on the fire. It hisses—the death throes of a flaming serpent. I stay seated, just as I was, but my hand flexes again. Did anyone see?

I’m getting better!
I shout inside my head.
Don’t leave us!

I strain to speak. Concentrating on forcing the air out of my lungs, I… cough.

Yes!

I cough again, loud and sharp.

“Fenn?” Peree drops to the ground in front of me. “Are you doing that on purpose? Can you answer me?”

“Cough once if you can,” Bear says.

I do.

Peree hugs me to him before kissing all over my face. “Are you okay? What can I do to help?”

“She can’t answer that with a
cough
,” Moray says. “Are you hurt, little Fenn? Cough if you are.”

I stay silent.

“Do you want to go back to Koolkuna?” Peree asks.

Silence again.

“You want to keep going?”

I cough hard.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Peree says. “Maybe I should take you back and have Nerang check you.”

It takes every ounce of my focus, but I manage to whisper, “No.”

I want to go on, now more than ever. If the Fire Sisters use this terrible power to control the children, what else are they doing to them?

“When you’re able, Mirii, tell us what happened last night,” Amarina says. “Can you walk now?”

I force out a yes. Within a few minutes, I’m able to string together a short sentence. Relief melts through me when I can finally reach out for Peree’s hand. He keeps me close beside him as we leave the campsite behind.

When I have enough control of my voice, I tell my story. I didn’t have time to notice much about the Sister, other than that scent, the knife prick, and her accent. It was different from my own or the
anuna’s.
Her words were snipped off at the ends.

Finally, I wonder, 
“How does a knife prick give the Sisters control over people?”

No one speaks. If Kai knows, she doesn’t say.

We continue to follow the Restless, in the same direction as the current. It sounds as if it’s growing more intense. Clouds chase away the early morning sunlight, while the forest crowds us closer and closer to the edge of the river. Birds flit around us from trees to water. Their wings snap overhead as they fly, likely hunting the humming insects and mournful frogs that I hear along the bank.

“Keep a close watch on the forest,” Derain warns. From the tense silence, everyone already is.

I’m not in the very back of the group for once; I’m in the middle. Derain asked Peree to walk at the front as point. Kai said she’d go with him, of course. The brothers positioned themselves on either side of me, and Bear and Amarina are behind.

I have a buffer of skilled hunters and fighters around me. Not because I’m too valuable to lose, but because I’m the most vulnerable. The Sister was probably waiting for a chance to get me alone to deliver her warning. Her words are the haunting refrain of a song:
turn back, go home, turn back, go home.

Following the river, we move up and down easy rises in the land, until easy becomes difficult, and difficult becomes punishing. I’m out of breath, and my leg muscles howl.

“The water sounds like it's running faster,” I comment when we stop for lunch.

“The river has narrowed,” Amarina says. “The banks are pinching in.”

“There’s some white water out there now,” Bear adds.

“We’re near where the Sister and I swam the river,” Kai says from nearby.

“We can’t swim it." I'm thinking of Peree.

“Obviously,
you
can't,” she says.

Several retorts jump to mind, but I bite them back. Kai is bitter, or jealous, or who knows what. I have to be the bigger person. If only being the bigger person were more satisfying.

“We could build a raft,” Conda says. “My brothers and I made them back home to take across the water hole and hunt.”

“You did?” I ask. “I didn’t know that.”

Moray laughs. “There’s lots of stuff you don’t know about us, sweetheart. You were too busy being all responsible, doing what you were told. You could’ve had a lot more fun if you’d hung out with us once in a while.”

“If you had Aloe for a mother, you would have done what you were told, too.”
Their
mother, Thistle, was meddling, gossipy, hateful, and she played a role in the events that led to Eland’s death. I wonder how they feel about her. “Who taught you to build rafts?”

“Our father,” Conda says, “before he—”

“Drowned in a bottle of wine,” Cuda says.

Moray laughs, but it’s strained. “Poor us. Right, boys?”

Back home, when the Three assigned Moray to watch me, he told me his father drank too much. What was their childhood like with a meddling gossip like Thistle and an alcoholic as parents? I barely remember the brothers back then, except that Bear couldn’t stand them.

Bear hasn’t sparred with them as much recently, I realize. In fact, he’s been a lot quieter since we left home. I
dly, 
I tap my walking stick on the ground. I used to have a good idea what he was thinking most of the time. Now? No idea. We haven’t had much time to talk. And, I realize, what time I
have
had I spent with Peree.

“A raft would take too long to put together,” Bear says.

“The Sisters will have some way to get the
guru
across,” Derain says.

“You said that before. What if they don’t?” Conda asks.

“I choose to have faith that we will find one,” Derain says.

“
Faith
?” Cuda says.

“Faith.” Derain’s voice is firm. “I have faith that we will be able to cross the river, just as I have faith that I will have my daughter and son back soon. Without it, how could I bear this separation?”

I wince at the longing in his voice.

We stand and move again, trudging up and down yet another hill.

“There was a fire here,” Amarina says at the bottom. We all move toward the sound of her voice. “It is fresh. They scattered the wood and covered it up, but there, you can see ash and char.”

“Nice find, Amarina.” Bear sounds impressed.

Hints of burnt wood tickle my nose—along with the sharp scent of the Sisters. “I smell them again.”

Everyone quiets.

“They aren’t here,” Bear says. “We’d see them. The forest has thinned a bit.”

“But if the Sisters made this fire, the
guru
may only be a few hours ahead,” Derain says.

We hurry on, keeping to the riverbank. The others box me in, helping me when I stumble. Before long, Bear clears his throat behind me.

“I smell it now, Fenn. You’re right; it burns my throat.”

“Anyone else?” I ask.

“Nope,” Moray says. “We’re following
your
nose, sweetheart.”

But where is it leading us? Where are the Sisters?

The ground begins to rise again—another hill. We march up, the Restless falling well below us. The hill is clogged with weeds, densely packed trees, and prickly bushes. I tuck my walking stick under one arm and hold the other hand out. Hopefully, I can at least stop myself from going headfirst into Peree, Derain, and Kai.