The Shattered Mountain (fire and thorns) Page 3

  The sun is low at their backs, sweat is stinging Mara’s ruined scalp, and a few of the children are beginning to stumble from exhaustion when they walk right into a campsite.

  The children rush forward, recognizing a few friends. Four more survivors—three children and one badly injured adult. Two horses. A pack full of supplies. A cheery fire sending smoke tendrils into the sky.

  Mara sizes it up quickly, but as everyone hugs and cries and laughs with delight, she hangs back, her relief at seeing others turning to despair. Because she made a mistake, one that could have gotten them killed. She should have scouted ahead. What if this had been an Invierno camp?

  No more mistakes. She strides over to the campfire and kicks dirt and gravel onto it. When the flames are low enough, she stomps it out.

  “What are you doing?” asks a young boy, his face furious.

  She whirls on him. “Have you lost your mind? Do you want to bring the Inviernos down on us? You might as well send them a letter. ‘Here we are! Survivors for you to come kill!’ I can’t believe you all were so stupid.” Her face reddens as the words leave her mouth.

  Joy dissipates from the camp like a drop of water poured on scorched earth. Some stare guiltily at her. Others glare.

  With a resigned voice, Reynaldo says, “Mara’s right. No fires. Not until it’s safe.”

  Mara knows she should say something encouraging. Something optimistic. But she doesn’t know what. She has never been good with people. A bit withdrawn, Julio tells her. Due to a lifetime of hiding her bruises and scars—the ones on her body and on her soul.

  She looks to the one adult in the group for support. He sits slumped over by the now-dead fire, clutching his side. He raises his head briefly, and she finally recognizes him—it’s Marón, owner of the Cranky Camel and the richest man in the village. His skin is corpse-white, his eyes glazed. The two horses belong to him. With a start, she realizes that he didn’t lead the children here. He is too far gone. They rescued him.

  And suddenly Mara knows what to say.

  “You are all very brave for making it this far, and I’m proud of you.”

  7

  THERE are not enough blankets to stave off the cold night. Mara and Reynaldo organize the children into groups and tell them to huddle close for sleep. “We’ll have a fire when we get to the cave,” Mara promises them.

  Mara lies down, with Carella’s daughter and the tiny coughing girl tucked into the crook of her curved body. And when bright morning sun batters her eyelids awake, she is surprised to find that she slept long and hard.

  But Marón, the tavern owner, died during the night. Mara enlists Adán’s help to drag his stiffening body into the brush and cover it with deadfall—quickly, before all the children wake. When they do, she tells them the truth. One little girl collapses to the ground, crying. His daughter.

  As they break camp and prepare for the day’s journey, she overhears them talking about loved ones. So many friends and family members that they left behind. Some are known to be dead. But most were simply separated sometime during the chaos of the attack. Most, they hope, might still be alive.

  But Mara saw too many bodies, blackened and oozing, for there to be many survivors. And suddenly she wonders if she should have let the children see Marón’s body. Maybe a large, single dose of pain now is better than the slow, burning pain of withering hope. Maybe seeing death up close is an important part of saying good-bye.

  Right before they set off, Mara takes stock of their provisions. In addition to the supplies in Pá’s bag, Reynaldo and two others thought to grab jerky and water skins. The pack on Marón’s horse holds cooking utensils, a bag of dates, two blankets, a knife, a spongy onion, and a round of bread. It’s so much better than nothing, but they’ll need to find food fast. The nearest village is a week’s journey, but Mara isn’t sure it’s the safe choice. It might suffer the same fate as her own village. Maybe when they get close, she and Reynaldo can scout ahead.

  But first, the cave—and Julio. Please be all right, Julio. Please be safe. She has purposely not allowed herself to consider the way the rain of arrows started again just as suddenly as it stopped. As if the distraction Julio provided had vanished like smoke.

  They hike all day to reach the cave. The climb is steep, and the little ones tire quickly. She and Julio reached it in half that time, on that precious, precious day months ago.

  It’s exactly the way she remembered, with a sun-soaked ledge outside the crooked opening. The air is drenched with a clean, sharp scent from the juniper surrounding the ledge, keeping the cave invisible from below. What she doesn’t see is any sign of life. No campfire. No footprints. No Julio.

  She helps the tiny, coughing girl onto the ledge, then Mara abandons the children to rush inside the cave. “Julio?” she calls, and her voice echoes back with emptiness. “Julio?” she repeats, as if calling louder will summon him.

  Someone comes to stand beside her. “He’s not here, is he?” Adán says.

  “He will come,” Mara says, though her gut twists. She takes a deep breath. “All right, everyone. Let’s get settled. Reynaldo, if you build that fire, I’ll make a soup tonight.”

  The cavern already boasts a fire pit in its center. It’s a narrow but long chamber, with a ceiling high enough that only she and Reynaldo must hunch over. She knows from experience that cracks in the ceiling provide an outlet for smoke. There is plenty of room for all nine of them during the day, but a shortage of level floor space will make sleeping a challenge. There might be space for everyone if she, Adán, and Reynaldo sleep outside on the ledge, rotating watches.

  Mara throws together a thin soup of jerky with onions and garlic. As they take turns spooning it from her cooking pot, she sizes up the group. She is the oldest, at seventeen. Reynaldo is fifteen, Adán fourteen. Everyone else is younger, down to the tiny girl, who can’t be more than four. Mara is glad to note that her coughing has subsided, and it no longer turns up blood. Maybe something will go right for them after all.

  She doesn’t know all their names. Her village isn’t that large, but skirmishes with the Inviernos have caused a lot of migration among the hill folk, and when the animagus burned her village, it was half full of strangers.

  She could ask their names. She should ask their names. But she’s suddenly overcome with the sense that she might learn who they are only to see them die.

  Later. She’ll ask later. She wants to be silent and alone with her thoughts a little bit longer.

  Looking into their ash-covered faces, their eyes filled with both hope and terror, Mara marvels at how two such opposite-seeming emotions can exist inside her. She wants to save them. But bitterness grinds away at her heart too. These are the children of the people who turned blind eyes to her pain. They bought her pastries and her wool quick enough, but never in her life did anyone ask, “Mara, how are you really?” Until Julio.

  Once Julio arrives, she won’t have to be in charge anymore. He’ll be the oldest of their group, at nineteen. He’s confident and outgoing, well liked by everyone. He’ll know how to deal with the children. Julio likes taking care of people. He’ll relish the responsibility.

  Mara is about to go out to the ledge to take the first watch, but the tiny girl toddles over. Mara sits as still as a statue as the girl climbs into her lap. She grabs a fistful of Mara’s shirt and snuggles in tight. Then Carella’s daughter sidles up, lays her head on Mara’s thigh, and falls fast asleep.

  After a moment, Mara’s shoulders relax. She wraps one arm around the tiny girl and lets her other hand rest on Carella’s daughter’s silky head.

  8

  THE next morning, Julio still has not come. Adán stands on the ledge, gazing down the mountain. He is a lot like his brother—the same long limbs, the same straight black hair bleached red at the temples. His hands are as big as paddles, hinting that he might be even taller than Julio someday.

  Mara steps up beside him, squinting against the morning sun.

 
“He’s coming, right, Mara?” Adán says.

  “He’s coming.”

  “And then what are we going to do?”

  She shrugs. “Julio will know. He’ll probably lead us to the nearest village. Some of these children might have family there.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” says a voice at her back, and she turns.

  Reynaldo’s curly hair is sleep mussed, and his wide-spaced eyes blink against the sun. Mara has always thought him young looking for his age, with his round cheeks and open gaze. But there is something old and weary about him now. Perhaps they’ve all aged years in the last day.

  “What do you mean?” Mara probes.

  “Our village isn’t the only thing that burned.”

  As he stares out into the empty expanse of sky, something in his face prompts Mara to say, “Your farmstead. Is that why you were in the village yesterday?”

  He nods. “They killed everyone. All the livestock. Burned our . . . I ran to the village to warn everyone. But I was too late. And I’ve seen smoke on the horizon.”

  Gently, Mara says, “You helped me save these children. You weren’t too late for that.”

  He swallows hard and nods, but he says nothing.

  Mara crosses her arms and hugs her shoulders tight. She wishes Marón had lived. He was a smart businessman, and his tavern was a cornerstone of their community. He would have known what to do. “So you think the nearest village suffered the same fate?”

  “All of them, Mara. All of them within two weeks’ journey. It’s war, now. Full out.”

  Adán whirls on him, tears in his eyes. “We have to go somewhere!”

  “We don’t have enough supplies to stay here forever,” Mara agrees. “We hardly have enough to get us through the next two days.”

  Reynaldo says, “Maybe we could hunt—”

  “Game is scarce,” Mara interrupts. “The fires will have driven most of it away.”

  Reynaldo looks down, scuffs the toe of his leather boots against the rock ledge. “I know of a place, but . . .”

  Mara and Adán regard him expectantly. “But . . . ?” Mara prompts.

  “It’s a secret. I’m not supposed to tell.”

  Mara inhales sharply. “The rebel camp. You know where it is.” Julio was always so sure it existed, that the rumors were true. A safe, hidden place, somewhere west of here in the scrub desert, where an oasis provides good grazing and even some farming.

  Reynaldo says, “My cousins Humberto and Cosmé went there last year. I visited once. They invited me to join, but my Pá needs . . . needed me.”

  The tiny hope sparking in Mara’s heart is all the more precious for how fragile and weak it is. “Would they take us in, do you think? Could you show us the way?”

  “I can. But it’s on the other side of the Shattermount, where the hills start to become true desert. A week away. We should leave right now. Before our food runs out.”

  “No!” Adán says.

  Mara nods at the boy. “We’ll wait for Julio.”

  Reynaldo sighs. “What if he doesn’t come?”

  “We’ll wait,” she repeats.

  “But, Mara . . .”

  “Two days. Give us two days.”

  Reynaldo nods once, sharply. “Two days.”

  9

  TWO days later, the children are restless and hungry, the shallow, hastily dug latrine is full, and there is no sign of Julio. There is no sign of anyone else, either. Reynaldo and Adán scouted back toward the village to no avail. Mara searched the area around the cave but found only flood-tumbled boulders and dried brush. Though she says soothing words to the children, she has come to believe they are all who remain.

  Overlooked, because they were the smallest and most helpless.

  Mara goes through the motions of heating up leftover soup, breaking camp, and packing—all without speaking. She will do what she can to get the children to safety, because it is a purpose, something to focus her thoughts on. But after? She doesn’t know what comes after.

  One little boy tugs on her shirt and asks, “Are we leaving today, Mara?” She can only nod wordlessly. She is an overfilled water skin, her sides stretched too thin from the pressure, and if she opens her mouth everything will come bursting out—grief, rage, despair.

  They made their food stretch longer than they anticipated. Adán bagged two jerboas the previous day with his sling, and Mara made a stew of the tiny rodents. She made sure no one was looking when she slipped the hearts, livers, and even the wobbly stomachs into her pot. She made the children wash down their stew with a brisk juniper tea, and everyone went to sleep with full bellies.

  Now she worries about water. The trickle running down the Shattermount’s giant fault will be dry in a day or so. They need another storm. But a storm on the Shattermount almost invariably means a flood.

  “Which way?” Reynaldo asks as they gather on the ledge before setting off. “Do we stick to the ridge or climb down through the ravine?”

  The mountain is not lush like its brothers farther east. It is a lone monolith, too near the desert. “We would be exposed on the ridge,” Mara says. “Visible to any Inviernos still in the area.” And the Inviernos are practiced archers—far more skilled than she is. They come from a place where wood is plentiful, and their beautiful bows are sturdy and tall, meant for long-range. “They wouldn’t even have to get close to take us apart.”

  “If it rains . . .”

  “We’ll climb out at the first sign.”

  Reynaldo nods agreement.

  They give Adán a head start. Like his older brother, he has spent days in the wilderness, and of all of them is most suited to scouting ahead in stealth. After Mara warns the rest of the group to silence, they set off after him.

  They will travel down the fault line, then circle the base of the mountain until they reach the desert side. From there, Reynaldo will guide them through the warren of buttes and fissures that make up the scrub desert to the secret rebel camp. It’s a good plan, the best one they have. But Mara plods along by rote, putting one foot in front of the other in numb silence.

  She and Reynaldo carry the tiny girl in shifts, and they’re about to do a handoff so Mara can navigate a boulder in their path when she hears something.

  The cracking of a branch. The rustle of leaves. Coming from behind.

  Mara shoves the tiny girl at Reynaldo, swings her bow around her shoulder, reaches back, and draws an arrow from her quiver.

  The scuff of a boot. Definitely not a deer or a fox.

  Mara notches her arrow. “Get behind me,” she whispers, fast and low. “Now!” The children scurry to obey.

  She glares at the path they just traveled, trying to parse a face or figure among the dead windfalls and scattered boulders. A manzanita bush waves violently. Mara draws her bow until the fletching rests against her cheek.

  A face materializes. Streaked with sweat and blood. Wild-eyed.

  “Julio!” She may have screamed it. Mara drops her bow and sprints forward, reaching him just as he topples forward into her arms.

  His sudden weight almost drives her to her knees, but she holds firm. His back is sticky and wet, his skin fevered. She drags him to level ground, then gently lays him down, instinctively stretching him out on his stomach.

  Sure enough, the broken shaft of an arrow protrudes from his lower back. He gasps, his cheek grinding into the dirt, as she peels back his shirt to expose the wound.

  The skin around it is swollen and oozing. The arrowhead is not deep, but it might be lodged in a rib. At least it missed his vital organs. They could have treated it easily two days ago. But infection has set in, and now streaks of sickly black zigzag across his skin.

  “Oh, Julio.”

  “Mara,” he whispers. “You shouldn’t have waited for me.”

  If he is clearheaded enough to have made it to their cave, read the signs of recent occupation, and tracked them here, then there is hope for him yet.

  Hope. Such a
dangerous thing.

  She traces his cheek with a forefinger. “I need to get this arrow out,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “I’ll have to scrape out the infection. It will hurt.”

  “I know.”

  The children crowd around. They stare at his oozing wound with a mix of delight and revulsion. “That’s gross,” says one boy, peering closer.

  “I have duerma leaf in my satchel,” Mara says. “I can at least make sure you sleep before and after.”

  Julio murmurs something that she takes to be assent. She bends over and plants a quick kiss on his hot forehead, then leaps to her feet. “Reynaldo, go find Adán. I’ll get a fire going to heat up my knife.”

  “But the fire . . . the smoke . . .”

  “We have to get that arrow out.”

  Reynaldo frowns, then disappears down the ravine.

  She floats through her preparations, a grin occasionally turning up the corners of her lips. Julio is alive. Alive, alive, alive. She steals glances at him as she rims a fire pit, gathers firewood, kindles a tiny spark into a bright flame.

  Mara heats up the last of their water. She uses a cupful to make a tea of the duerma leaf, which Julio sips slowly from his awkward position on his stomach. She will need the remainder for cleaning the wound.

  She doesn’t want to let the arrowhead fester inside Julio’s body a moment more, but she needs Adán and Reynaldo to hold him down while she works. So she sits by the fire, one hand trailing in Julio’s matted hair, the other holding her blade over the flames.

  “My brother?” Julio mutters. “Is he . . .”

  “Adán is safe. He’s scouting ahead. I sent someone to fetch him.”

  Julio wilts against the ground, as if his body is finally able to let go an excess of air. “Thank you, Mara,” he breathes. “God, that’s a relief. And your pá? Did you find him?”

  Mara can’t meet his eyes. “I found him.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”