The mud-covered face shattered, crackling into fragments that fell in places and revealed bits of skin beneath. A giggle erupted from the creature’s mouth.
It’s a girl, Sage thought, hearing the lyrical tones that bubbled forth. Only a little girl.
But she knew well enough that even little girls could be deadly. She’d been used as a weapon to seek out her sister’s enemies since she’d hit her twelfth year. She’d killed by the time she was thirteen.
Being young meant only that they were smaller. Not harmless.
Xander stirred. He’d had a restless night. She knew because her sleep had been sporadic, and she’d wakened again and again to his fits of malaise.
“They’re not Astonian,” he managed, trying to sit before the coughing fit seized him.
The coughing had started last night too. It was new, that symptom, and didn’t seem to fit with the fevers.
She had no idea what that meant.
“Where’s your leader?” he asked in Englaise. No matter their class of birth, if they were Ludanian, they should understand him.
The girl kept her spear pointed at Sage’s cheek, and Sage didn’t try to swat it away, despite the fact that she could. There were twenty other spears at the ready, and she worried about how many of these children she’d have to kill before one of them managed to get to Xander.
If only he were strong enough to defend himself.
Beside her he hacked again, and she squeezed her eyes shut as she waited for the paroxysm to pass.
“Please,” she intoned as gently as she could. “Let me make him some tea. I promise not to try anything. I just want to . . . to make him better.”
The response was the sharpened point of the stick jabbing her already bleeding wound.
She raised her hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. No tea.” She shot a questioning glance to Xander again when she saw him still struggling to sit upright.
Not one of the filthy children bothered to raise their harpoons at him. They recognized a wounded animal when they saw one. Xander was no threat to them.
“Your leader?” he repeated, this time managing not to cough.
From the back of the gathering there was a commotion. Sage watched as bodies parted and someone slipped between them. Whoever he was—and it was definitely a he, all caked in mud—was at least a head taller than any of the rest of them. He was lean and tall and older than the others, and he was coming right toward the front of the small gathering.
When he stopped, the girl took a deferential step backward. It was like watching those in the presence of her sister—the queen of Astonia. Like he was a king among his disciples.
A king? Sage wanted to laugh at the notion of a king in a position of power, but with Xander beside her, the situation seemed less than humorous.
“What do you want from us?” she demanded. “We weren’t causing any trouble.”
The boy’s unsettling gaze fell on her, making her feel at once apprehensive. He didn’t carry a spear, Sage was quick to note, but he had a weapon. His arms rested effortlessly on an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. It was nothing like the makeshift spikes of his disciples, not homemade or easily broken in two.
It was sleek and polished and shiny and new. And he carried it with an ease that conveyed he was accustomed to such weaponry. That he knew his way around a gun of this caliber.
Imagining him with a crown on his head was not so farfetched.
“You’re on our land,” he told her. “You’re trespassers, both of you.” He barely looked at Xander, his concentration solely directed at Sage. His head tipped down as he studied her from beneath his low brow.
He’s trying to intimidate us, she supposed as she considered his posturing. The gun, the black stare, the way he lowered his voice.
“We . . . didn’t mean to. We were just trying to find someone,” she started, but beside her, Xander’s rheumy cough interrupted her. “Please,” she tried again, reaching out to Xander. “Let me make him some tea.”
The boy turned his attention to Xander then as well. He took a step closer, and then a step to the side, his head cocked as he considered the ailing man still struggling to remain upright in front of him. The boy’s black eyes roamed to the rounded butt of newly replaced bandages that covered the place on Xander’s left arm, just above his wrist, where his hand should have been.
“The thing is . . .” The boy’s voice wasn’t as low now when he spoke, and his stance had relaxed. As if he’d forgotten he was trying to intimidate them. “I know you.”
Sage couldn’t imagine when their paths had ever crossed. Not a boy like this. One who covered himself in mud and carried gleaming new guns like this, and who led a pack of children through the forests like a horde of wild beasts. “You do?” she asked dubiously.
His unnerving eyes snapped back to her. “Not you,” he responded, and then turned back to look at Xander as he dropped to a crouch in front of him and did his best to wipe away the crusty layer of mud from his own nose and cheeks and forehead. “Don’t you remember me, Xander? I’m Caspar. Eden is my sister.”
XV
“Well, well, well. Look who we have here. If it isn’t the errant queen of Ludania.” Elena spoke to me as if we weren’t at odds at all, as if we weren’t at war and she weren’t holding me captive.
She spoke to me as if she were chastising a naughty child who’d misbehaved on her watch. “I hear we’re having something of a disagreement over what to do. And here I thought things were going to be . . . so simple between you and me,” she intoned.