Conquest

  “And how long are you planning to keep making us take these miraculous steps?” asked Ani.

  “Just for another couple of hours. There’s a ruined bothy by a loch with a supply dump nearby. We’ll let you rest up there properly before the final push.”

  Ani frowned at Syl. “What’s a bothy?”

  “A cottage,” said Fremd. “You really don’t get out much, do you? You’ve been in Scotland most of your life, and you still don’t know what a bothy is.”

  “I never had to know what a stupid bothy was,” said Ani.

  She paused to watch AK tear a strip of fabric from his T-shirt and tie it around his forehead before he squatted down and artfully smeared mud across his face.

  “What is that idiot doing?” she said. “Hey, idiot, what are you doing?”

  “Don’t call me idiot, idiot,” said AK.

  “Great comeback,” said Ani.

  AK grunted.

  “Camouflage,” he said, and he stamped his muddy boots meaningfully on the ground and squinted at the horizon.

  Syl bent over the water and began muddying her own features. When she turned to face Ani, she’d daubed a rough L for Loser on her own forehead in mud, and they started to laugh. It was the first time Syl had laughed in what seemed like weeks. For a moment she forgot the pursuit, and how much she missed her father, and Althea. She even forgot Ritchie impaled on his bayonet, and the drowned man in the stream, and the gift, or curse, that had caused their deaths. Her laughter took on an edge of hysteria, but she kept laughing because she was afraid that if she stopped she might start crying instead. Eventually she got herself under control. She wiped her eyes. There were tears, but they were of mirth, for now.

  “You know, it wasn’t that funny,” said Ani.

  And Syl started laughing again.

  Fremd shook his head in puzzlement, and set off again. Behind him, the laughter faded, and the little group recommenced their slow, painful trudge.

  Syl slowed to take a few minutes to talk quietly with Steven, who was walking carefully for fear of taking a tumble and bursting his stitches. He confirmed that he had not said anything of what had happened—not even to Paul—in part because he wasn’t sure what had happened himself.

  “How did you do it?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Syl. “I got angry and I just willed it. I was afraid too. I think that was part of it. I couldn’t control it. I was so frightened, and so furious. It was like a storm inside me.”

  “Have you done it before?”

  “No, not like that. I don’t think I even realized I was doing it in the past. Looking back, I can see how I might have made people do something because I wanted them to, but it was subtle. I talked them around, mostly, but I’m starting to think that if they resisted, I might have given them a little push. You understand why nobody must know, don’t you? They’d think I was a freak. They’d do tests. They might lock me up.”

  “No,” said Steven. “They’d use you, like a weapon.”

  The truth of it made Syl stop in her tracks. He was right.

  She saw Paul and Ani staring back at her when they noticed she was not following. She stomped her right foot on the ground and stretched her thigh, like someone fighting a cramp, then waved to let them know that she was okay.

  “So it’s our secret?” she said to Steven.

  “Yes, it’s our secret. It would be even if you hadn’t used it to save my life.”

  “Thank you,” said Syl.

  “It’s nothing,” said Steven, and Syl wished that were true.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  F

  or the next hour Syl walked beside Paul and told him stories of places that she’d never been but wished to see, describing things she’d only ever read of in books or glimpsed on screens or in virtual-reality constructs, and some even that she might simply have dreamed: the curlicue insects of Illyr, like musical notes moving through the air; great lakes that shone not blue, but gold and yellow, while the sky above constantly swirled with ferocious clouds tinged with blue and red as storms raged high in the atmosphere even while all was calm and humid on the ground. She told him of towering plants that grew to the sky and sucked rain from clouds, and of the strange creatures that spent their entire lives atop these highest flora, winged and scaled with bright red skin as tough as canvas to protect them from the storms, their bodies only descending at last to the ground upon their deaths. She told him of the moons that fought over the waves, and the lazy arc of the planet’s bright star—Illyr’s sun—that gave a sense of near-endless days and deep, dark nights. She told him of the luminous creatures that followed the night so that they were always in the dark, and camouflaged day creatures that stayed always in the sun, their bodies so perfectly adapted to their environment that they were visible only as a blurring against the clouds, a ripple in the fabric of the sky.

  In return, he answered her questions about his life. He talked of his decision to join the Resistance. He spoke of a sister who had lived for just a few hours after her birth, and whose presence he sometimes felt near him, as though her ghost had remained with them and continued to grow, reluctant to be separated from her brothers. And he told her of his mother, who, on the death of her husband, had somehow found it within her to love her boys twice as much to make up for his absence.

  “She sounds marvelous,” said Syl.

  “Well, she drives me mad sometimes, but then I do the same with her. Anyway, you know mums.”

  “No,” said Syl. “I don’t. But I’ve got Althea.”

  “Oh Syl, I’m sorry. That was thoughtless. But tell me more about Althea.”

  And she did, spilling feelings she’d never shared before about her formative years, about the hole she felt inside that never went away and how Althea had filled at least part of it, speaking words to a near stranger that she had never shared with a friend. Paul had heard that there was an Illyri from the castle who was friendly with Trask—and perhaps more than that—but he had not known her name until now, and he thought how strange it was that even in this he had somehow been connected to Syl without knowing it. As Syl grew forlorn at her separation from those in the castle who loved her, Paul cheered her with upbeat tales of his life and his extended, oddball family, of cousins and aunts and uncles so bizarre that she thought he must surely have invented them, until she came to the conclusion that nobody could invent a family so strange.

  Then he had more questions about where she came from, about her homeworld, so she told him of marvelous fabled cities: of Olos with its castles of ice; of the magical Arayyis that spilled elegantly into the sea; and of splendid, spired Tannis, the birthplace of her mother, the most glorious city of them all.

  At last they came to a small loch in the heart of the woods, its waters still and cold, reflecting the mountains in shades of icy blue and green, and Syl sighed with pleasure, smiling at Paul and saying, “But of course, this is beautiful too.”

  He took her hand and squeezed it, smiling too, and she felt his touch tingling all the way up her arm and catching like a sigh in her throat. She squeezed back, and he lifted her fingers to his mouth and pressed his lips to the back of her hand. Just then Fremd started to bark instructions and, blushing, they both let go before anyone could see them.

  Fremd announced that they would rest here. As AK pointed out, there was also the possibility of catching some fish for supper.

  “With your bare hands, no doubt,” said Ani.

  Her dislike of AK, unreasonable and instinctive, had not decreased during their walk, and she seemed to take pleasure in baiting him. AK gave her a funny look before he wandered off to “survey the terrain,” only to return a little later with four plump silver fish on a hand-hewn wooden spear. Ani spluttered with surprise when he handed her his prize.

  “You’ve got to be joking,” she said. “What am I meant to do with
these?”

  “Cook ’em,” he said. “Or stick ’em where the sun don’t shine.”

  “Cooking them might be better,” said Steven.

  “And tastier,” said Syl.

  Paul was sitting on a boulder keeping watch while Fremd went to the bothy for whatever supplies he needed. Syl had thought about joining Paul, but then decided to give him a little time alone.

  “I’ll help you,” Alice told Ani. “I know what to do.”

  “Right,” said Ani, staring doubtfully into the glassy-eyed faces of the dead fish. Alice dug about in her small backpack, pulled out a penknife, and gave it to Ani, who gamely set to work gutting the fish on a flat stone, wrinkling her nose with distaste as she followed the little girl’s instructions.

  “Do you think,” she said, “that we dare to make a fire, or is it to be sushi for dinner?”

  “Neither,” said Fremd, as he stepped from the woods.

  From his pack he produced a pair of small gas camping stoves, and a battered metal plate.

  “These should do the trick.”

  He also had two tins of baked beans, a small pot, some bars of chocolate, a jar of instant coffee, sachets of creamer, and paper cups.

  It was to be a feast.

  •••

  They shared the fish as it cooked, stuffing the hot food into their mouths with their fingers. Ani offered the first morsels to AK, and he pronounced it to be very good indeed, and a thaw in their relationship began. When they’d eaten the last of the beans, Fremd rinsed out the pan and filled it with water to boil, spooned the coffee into the cups, and shared out the chocolate. Syl had lost all track of time. There was still light in the sky. That was all she knew for certain.

  “I have a sudden desire for toasted marshmallows,” said Paul.

  “I’d settle for soap,” said Steven, sniffing theatrically at his armpits.

  “As if by magic,” said Fremd, and from his pocket he produced two thick bars of yellow soap. Steven grabbed them.

  “And on that note, I’m declaring it bath time,” he said.

  He got to his feet, and with a whoop hurtled down the slope toward the water.

  “C’mon!” he shouted, tearing off his clothes until he was down to his boxers. “Last one in is a chicken.”

  Paul and AK took off after him, Alice at their heels, but the Illyri girls hung back. Syl pulled a face. “A chicken? Why is the last one in a chicken?”

  Ani shrugged, frowning.

  “I don’t understand either.”

  But now Paul was shouting to them from the bottom of the slope as he too stripped down to tartan boxer shorts. His body was pale and lean, his stomach taut, his limbs held together by obvious sinews and tight knots of still-bruised flesh, and Syl felt a tingling in her thighs and an odd weightlessness in her chest.

  “Syl?” Ani said. “Earth to Syl.”

  “Sorry,” said Syl. “I was just . . .”

  Ani waited, one eyebrow arched like a bird taking flight. “Yes? You were just what, exactly?”

  “Never mind,” said Syl.

  She took her friend’s hand, and together they loped down the slope to bathe in the icy water. It was freezing—so cold that Syl thought she would only be able to stand it for a few seconds—but she was desperate to clean herself. She moved away from the others, who were playing piggy-in-the-middle with a bar of wet soap, Steven and Paul squeezing the bar in their hands to propel it over Ani’s head. Syl was in no mood to play. Instead she scrubbed and scrubbed with the second bar of soap, as though she could wipe away not just the filth and the mud but the memory of the blood she had spilled. When she could stand the cold no longer, she ran shivering from the water. She came to their camp and saw that Fremd had built a fire in the lee of a boulder, shielding it on the exposed sides with raised banks of earth.

  “Don’t worry,” he said from nearby. “It’s not dark yet so it would be hard to see even without the rock and dirt, and it’ll do you all good to warm yourselves by it. We can cook on a gas stove, but we can’t dry ourselves with one.”

  He produced a small tube of ointment and gently tended to the blister on Syl’s foot. He was bare-chested, for he too had taken the opportunity to wash. Syl saw scars and burns on his skin. When he was finished, he turned his back to her to shrug on his shirt, and Syl glimpsed a great tattoo that stretched from his shoulders to the base of his spine. It was a bearded face made up of leaves and vines and young branches, all of them bright green. It was a face from ancient myths, the face of an old god.

  It was the Green Man.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  T

  hey warmed themselves, then dressed again and tried to sleep for a time while Fremd kept guard. Syl lay awake, watching the fire die and thinking about the great tattoo on his back. Could it be? Could an Illyri be at the heart of the Resistance? What was it that Heather had said about Fremd?

  He is at the core of the Resistance. But Fremd, it seemed, was much more than that.

  And Syl fell asleep and dreamed of old gods.

  Fremd woke them while it was dark, and they marched for the rest of the night. The rain returned just before dawn, heavier and colder than any they had yet experienced. The ground turned to swamp, and even Fremd struggled to make headway. Eventually they were forced to camp by a bank of rocks, the largest of them looming like a gray cliff face over the trees. There was a fissure at its base where Fremd lit another small fire, certain that it would be shielded from any watchers above. It was too deep in the rock face to give off much warmth to those outside, but he instructed them all to remove their shoes and socks so that the fire might dry them out. He again produced the container of ointment from his bag, and tended to those whose feet were blistered. He did so unselfconsciously, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to hold and heal the filthy, battered limbs of strangers. Only AK declined.

  “I’ll do it myself,” he said. Fremd shrugged. If he was offended, he gave no sign.

  They sipped water and nibbled on protein snacks and muesli bars, more treasures from Fremd’s store at the bothy. Ani set about diligently breaking her two bars into squares and making them into sandwiches, muesli hugging the brown gunk of the protein. Steven took her cue and molded his protein bar into the vague shape of a dog, then promptly ate it. Ani consoled Alice, who was missing her mother, until the child fell asleep, then started a silly game that entailed scrawling shapes on each other’s backs and guessing what they were, but AK ruined it by drawing a pair of crude oversize breasts on Ani’s back, which earned him a punch that deadened his leg, while Syl found herself flustered and unable to reply when Paul drew a heart on her spine.

  “I didn’t mean anything, you know, weird by it,” he whispered over her shoulder. “It just seemed like the easiest thing to draw.” She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed, but she liked the tickle of his warm breath on her ear. She shivered happily.

  “You’re cold,” he said, taking off his thick waterproof jacket and wrapping it around her shoulders.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, shoving it back into his hands. “Then you’ll be cold.”

  “How about you sit right here then, between my knees, and I’ll wrap it around us together? Then we’ll both be warm,” he said. His legs curled around her, making a chair, and he pulled his oversize parka around them both, snuggling her between his arms. Syl was too embarrassed to shuffle away, but too aware of her own weight to lean on him, too awkward to relax.

  “That’s warmer,” he said next to her ear, pulling her closer and leaning his head on her shoulder. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No. No, not at all. It’s definitely better,” she heard herself say, and she had to admit it was, even when she saw Ani watching them, grinning with wicked amusement. She was too engrossed in making Syl feel awkward to notice the look of longing that Ste
ven directed at her, but Syl caught it. She wanted to tell Ani to be careful, for Steven was clearly falling for her. Ani could hurt him if she wasn’t careful.

  But then she was aware that she too was falling for someone who could hurt her.

  “Do you like what you do?” she asked Paul.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean all this. The fighting. The Resistance.”

  She moved in his arms so that she could see his face as he answered. He looked down on her, and she thought that she had never seen such tenderness in the eyes of one to whom she was not bound by blood or the passage of years.

  “There’s nothing to like about it. But I dislike the occupation even more.”

  “Why, though? I’m not trying to be flippant or anything; I just can’t understand why it’s so abhorrent that you would rather die fighting the Illyri—I mean, us.”

  Her choice of words betrayed the strength of her growing feelings for Paul, and the confusion they were causing her—the Illyri weren’t something other than herself; they were her own people—but Paul did not pick up on it. Instead, he noticed that she had placed her emphasis on the word you; it was his safety, and his life, of which she spoke.

  “Do you hate us?” Syl continued. “I mean, you personally, like Duncan did?”

  “Sometimes,” said Paul. “But honestly, I just wish you’d go away. Just bugger off back to where you came from.”

  She looked at her feet, her face burning.

  “Right,” was all she managed in reply.

  “I don’t mean you!” He gripped her shoulder, turning her toward him. “I mean, you’re . . . It’s . . .”

  He struggled to find the right word, then settled for “You’re different.”

  “Different? Is that the best you can do?”

  “No,” he said.

  His lips touched hers now, briefly, sweetly, another stolen contact gone before the rest of them could notice. Syl smiled, her cheeks pink. Paul’s eyes were shining as he stared into her face, and he grinned broadly.