“Just sit down, will you? You were up all night, right? I’ll get the wood.” He waved to the log again, then disappeared into the shadows between the trees.
Realizing he had called her over because he’d been thinking of her needs, Lilah blushed and sat down. Now she wished she hadn’t been difficult. A part of her wanted to help, regardless of his request, but with the sun down, her fascination with the fossil problem waned, and weariness caught up with her. She eyed the ground, thinking of lying down with her back to the log and her face to the fire, but her stomach growled, so she pulled over her bag and rummaged for one of the packaged meals they had brought.
Therrik continued to bring wood until full darkness covered the mountain. He must have planned to keep the signal fire going all night.
“Did you find sign of your men?” she asked as he added wood to the stack.
“They hared off in three different directions. I’ll have to wait until morning to track them.” He cast a sour look toward the forest, then settled on the log next to her.
“Salted chicken, diced and canned?” she asked, reading the label off the tin before handing it to him.
“Sounds appetizing, doesn’t it?” He accepted the can and used his utility knife to open it.
“I had mine already and can attest to the excellence of the cuisine.”
“I bet.”
“Here are some beans too, if you want them. I didn’t finish them.”
He accepted the open can silently. Apparently, thank-you wasn’t a word, or a term, that he used, either.
She didn’t know what to say after that. A part of her wanted to lean against his shoulder and close her eyes, but that seemed overly familiar when she had known him for less than two days. She eyed the spot on the ground again, though to claim it now would mean sleeping with her head under his legs. That also seemed familiar. And it could be dangerous if those beans had the typical effect.
“What?” Therrik set the can of beans on a rock by the flames to warm it.
“Hm?”
“You’re grinning.”
“No reason.” She grinned wider.
“Just delighted by my company, eh?”
“Clearly.”
“Kaika and Bosmont should be back within the hour,” Therrik said, nodding toward the trail. “It shouldn’t take them that long to gather supplies.”
Lilah nodded, though she hadn’t been worried about being alone with Therrik. Was that odd? That she trusted him after less than two days? Even if she hadn’t started to get the sense that he was honorable under the gruffness, she would have expected an army officer to act ethically. After all, the soldiers in the Time Trek stories often wrestled with questions of morality when they traveled into the past, and they tried to do the right thing. She smiled, wondering if Therrik had read any of the books and what he would think of her comparing him to Commander Asylon.
“Have you always been a soldier?” Lilah asked. “Since you were old enough to sign up?”
He hesitated, stirring the beans before answering. “Almost.”
“Was it something you dreamed of as a boy?”
“Not really. I didn’t think I’d make it into adulthood.”
She frowned at him. “What does that mean?”
He stirred the beans some more.
“Sorry, I’m prying. I was just trying to think of something to talk about.”
“Aren’t you tired? You could go to sleep.”
“I didn’t want you to be lonely.”
He snorted. “I’m alone a lot. I’m used to it.”
She almost said that was as sad as a boy not thinking he would make it to adulthood, but managed to stop the words from tumbling out. He didn’t seem like someone who would want or appreciate pity. Besides, around here, teasing seemed the more acceptable response to a person sharing his feelings.
“It could have to do with the yelling,” Lilah suggested, offering a smile.
“Oh? I thought it was my pummeling people.” He removed the can from the fire and took a bite.
“The pummeling probably doesn’t help. Though I am relieved that you beat back the man who attacked me. We’ve been so busy that I forgot to say thank you. Thank you.”
“You would have handled him if I hadn’t gotten there in time.”
Lilah wasn’t so sure, but she accepted what probably passed for a compliment from him. At the least, he believed she had some competence, though she wasn’t sure what she had done to earn that opinion from him. She had been falling over backward as she shot the man she’d killed. Maybe if she hadn’t been, she could have chosen a less vital target. Had he deserved death for trying to escape? She wasn’t sure, but she couldn’t believe the conditions in those mines were appealing. If she were in the prisoners’ place, she might risk her life trying to escape too.
“My father was an asshole,” Therrik said, his gaze toward the fire.
She blinked and looked at him. She wasn’t sure what that was apropos of, but she made an encouraging noise. Thus far, he hadn’t shared anything about himself, and she found herself curious about him. What had caused him to end up in this remote post? From the comments she’d overheard, she got the impression it was doled out as a punishment assignment, as rough on the soldiers as it was on the miners.
“To me, to my little brothers, to my mother,” Therrik went on. “I planned to kill him as soon as I was old enough to be able to overpower him. He wasn’t that big of a man, but he was wiry and strong.” He flexed his arm and smiled—the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Runs in the family. I knew they’d arrest me when I succeeded, give me a death sentence, but I figured it would be worth it, so he’d leave my mother and brothers alone.”
“He hit you?” Lilah guessed.
“All of us. He was always mad. Mean. Cruel. He gambled a lot, lost a lot, got beat up by underworld thugs a lot, since he didn’t always have the money to pay when he lost. He couldn’t get back at them, so he took it out on us. When I was little, I thought it was my fault, that I was a disappointment. By the time I was nine or ten, I figured out the truth, and I just started to hate him then. That’s when I developed my plan and went to bed dreaming about enacting it every night.”
“That’s... Couldn’t your mother get any help? Go to the authorities?”
“She tried. They wouldn’t do anything. He was still Lord Therrik, even if having a title didn’t mean much anymore. Nobody who wasn’t of noble blood was going to cross him, nobody except the mobsters. All they care about is if you owe them money. They’re not intimidated by anyone.” Therrik shrugged. “When I was twelve, I made a serious attempt to kill him. Looking back, if I’d waited another year, I might have succeeded. I grew a lot at thirteen. Too late then.”
“What happened?” Lilah asked, her weariness driven away as she imagined the scenario.
“He’d just beaten my mother so hard that she couldn’t get up. My carefully calculated plans disappeared. I just had this black rage swallow me. I barely remember grabbing a kitchen knife and jumping at him. If I could have kept to my plan to take him from behind, maybe it would have worked out. As it was, I did some decent damage for a scrawny kid. Must have cut him ten places and nearly took out his eye before he got the knife away from me and threw me against the wall. Nearly knocked me out. Think he would have killed me, but my mother crawled over and covered me with her body. He stabbed her instead. He had better aim than I did.”
“Gods, Therrik.” She gripped his arm, not knowing what else to say or do.
“He ran, the coward. Left me holding her. She died in my arms. I didn’t know what to do after that. Walked my brothers the ten miles to the capital and looked up an aunt I’d only met a couple of times in my life. My mother’s sister. I thought she might take us in, but she didn’t have any money. Ended up putting us in an orphanage. My brothers were younger and less... angry than I was. More confused. They did all right. I never did. Ended up on the streets, running with some older kids. Learned to stea
l, to survive. Later on, I learned to kill. Those in rival gangs, scum for the most part. Same as me.” His mouth twisted with wry acknowledgment.
“Then some innocent man got caught in the crossfire, and the police cared enough to hunt us down. I think the two boys I was with probably ended up here.” He jerked a thumb toward the mountain. “I hadn’t been responsible for the shooting, not that time. Just an accomplice, as they called it. Anyway, I said who I was, and someone recognized the family name. At first, they didn’t believe me—guess my father had finally gotten himself killed by some mobster the year before, so the estate was unclaimed, and they thought I was trying to lie my way into nobility. But my story checked out, and then the aunt remembered me and said I was who I claimed. I swear I wasn’t trying to get out of anything, but the judge overseeing my case was from a noble family, and when he heard my story, he offered me jail for twenty years or the army for ten. I’m not sure he quite realized I was only sixteen at the time. I’d grown a lot by then. Did a couple of years in the regular army, took to it, and ended up getting sent to the academy to become an officer.”
For the first time since he had started speaking, he looked at her. He shrugged and spread his palm. “So the very long answer to your other question is no, I’d never considered the army until I was given the choice between it and jail.”
“It seems like it was the right choice.”
Therrik nodded. “At least I get to channel some of my aggression into killing the nation’s enemies. I used to be able to do that, anyway. When I got sent out on missions and encountered imperial soldiers. Lately, I’ve been stuck teaching young fools or commanding the rejects of the army.” His thumb jerk toward the mountain was more frustrated this time, though he soon clasped his hand in his lap, as if to quell his irritation. More calmly, he said, “You teach, I assume. How do you deal with it?”
“I’m actually not very good at it, and I also get frustrated with young fools.”
His eyes widened. Had he expected her to get poetic about the joys of teaching?
“Especially the ones that don’t want to be there,” Lilah added. “They take the class because it satisfies some degree requirement and they think it’s easier than other options. Because how can studying old bones be difficult? Or require math?”
“You sound bitter.” He actually smiled, like he enjoyed hearing about it.
“It’s the research I love. The teaching is required, fortunately fewer classes now than I used to have to endure. But I got into this to be in the lab or out in the field making discoveries. Do you know that I have over forty-seven articles published in well-respected academic journals? In the last five years, I’ve filled in several branches of the phylogenic tree for mammals, linking extinct species with modern animals. When I was in school, I thought I’d be the first Zirk—first person in my family to bring a degree of fame to our name. Granted, it would have been in small and erudite circles, but still. We aren’t noble, not even close, and most of the men in the family are drunks. It would have meant something.” She tossed a stick into the fire. “Ridge beat me to fame by spinning upside down in the air and shooting things. It’s petty, and I know it, to begrudge someone else his success, but I can’t help but be exasperated sometimes at what society decides is worth admiring. Do you know that I regularly have students, male and female, come up and ask me to get his autograph? We don’t even live in the same city.”
Therrik’s smile stretched wide. It was almost alarming, since it was so out of place on his usually dour face. “You don’t like him.”
“What? No, that’s not true. I mean, I don’t not like him.” Lilah rubbed her face. Did that even make sense? Why was she complaining about this after that horrific story Therrik had told her? As if her academic aspirations mattered that much in the grand scheme of life. “Honestly, I don’t know him well enough to like him or dislike him as a person,” she said, feeling his gaze still upon her, and that he truly seemed pleased, or perhaps amused. “I’ve just been slightly irked with him from afar over the years.”
“Half the reason I want a promotion is so he won’t outrank me,” Therrik said. “Pilots make me crazy, and he’s the worst. They’re so damned lippy, and they get away with it because the king and everyone else is convinced the fate of the nation rests on them and their flying buckets.”
Lilah snorted. She could see through the unspoken words that Therrik would prefer it if the fate of the nation depended on him and his muscles.
“But I might be crazy for wanting to get promoted,” he went on, his expression sobering. “I’ve barely been able to stand colonel. Too much organizational busy work, teaching, babysitting, keeping track of wayward soldiers.” He flicked a disgusted finger toward the trees where his men had disappeared. “I miss going on missions. Shooting people is much easier than turning them into model soldiers.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re a bit of a ghoul, Therrik?”
“Many people. Mostly women. And I think you can call me Vann now.”
“Ah. Good.” Lilah leaned against his shoulder.
He grew still, and she thought he might wrap an arm around her. It would not have been unwelcome. But he kept his arms down. At least he didn’t move away from her, so she could use his shoulder as a pillow. Too tired to decide if it would be an imposition or not, she closed her eyes, thinking she might fall asleep there.
A loud snap came from the cliff, and she jerked upright, her butt almost slipping off the log.
Therrik—Vann—steadied her, resting his hand on her thigh. The fire still burned high, and light and shadows danced on the granite cliff. If some rock had shifted, Lilah couldn’t see it, but the noise had been ominous. A cliff shouldn’t be susceptible to a rockslide, and yet, all the moss-covered boulders littering the area suggested one had happened long ago. She still couldn’t imagine the scenario that Kaika had described, someone with magic melting igneous rock and re-forming it into granite, complete with fossils inside. There would have been evidence if that had happened within the last few weeks or even within the last few decades. Surely, such heat would have destroyed vegetation and trees in the area.
An eerie moaning sound came from the forest. Or was that a howl? It didn’t sound natural, whatever it was.
“That’s just the wind, right?” Lilah asked, trying to sound nonchalant, though the noise was creepy.
“I don’t know. Something scared my men off last night. I spotted a few prints from what seem to have been large wolves when I was looking for tracks, but wolves shouldn’t have scared grown men with rifles.”
“I’ll hope it’s just wolves. I would rather deal with animals than anything otherworldly.” Lilah felt foolish speaking of such things as if they were real, but she didn’t know enough about how magic worked to guess at what could and could not be done with it. She looked toward the skull leering out at them from the cliff.
“As would I. At least for now. The others will be back soon, and Kaika should have my sword. It loves slaying the otherworldly.”
The idea of a sword having a sentience and loving anything was disturbing, but if there was some strange evil out here, Lilah approved of having a weapon to use against it.
The howls faded, and the only snaps came from the wood in the fire. As the strangeness of the moment passed, she grew aware of Vann’s hand on her thigh. In the chill of the night, the warmth of it felt good through her trousers. She wondered if he had plans to move it at all. Should she encourage that? He had seemed on the verge of kissing her back in his room, but he hadn’t taken advantage of the fact that they were alone around a campfire now. She hadn’t minded his touch even before he’d shared his past, and now she wanted to wrap an arm around him and comfort him, even if he hadn’t sounded like he needed it after all this time. That must have been thirty years ago for him.
Lilah’s mother was still alive and working as a humanities teacher who proofread her papers before she sent them off to her peers to evaluate. She had lost he
r dad in the same accident that had taken her husband from her, but she barely missed him. He had never struck any of the kids, but he’d been drunk more often than he’d been sober, and even after his death, she had never been able to forgive him for being the one who had been driving that ridiculously modified steam wagon—or talking Taryn into going for a ride in it with him.
Vann had been peering into the darkness, toward the direction where those howls had originated, but she must have made some noise, because he looked back to her now, then down at his hand. He released her quickly, as if he hadn’t realized it was there and was chagrined to find it so. A twinge of disappointment ran through her.
“I’m going to walk around the perimeter.” Vann grabbed his rifle and stood up. “You should get some rest. Once Bosmont arrives with that rock splitter, sleep won’t be easy to come by.”
Lilah watched his broad back as he headed into the gloom, wondering what had changed since they had stood so close in his room, admiring his weapons. Had she offended him? Surely, he wouldn’t have shared his story with her if he was mad at her. But maybe he hadn’t meant to share so much and now felt uncomfortable about what he’d revealed. She could understand that, especially from someone for whom sharing was probably a rare thing. Still, as she pulled her jacket close about her and lay down between the log and the fire, she kept running the conversation over in her mind and wondering if she had said something wrong.
Chapter 6
The eerie howls continued to drift up from the forest, sounding slightly like something from a wolf’s throat but too sonorous to have come from any native creature. Vann had spent enough time in survival training courses and out hunting in the wilderness to be familiar with what stalked these mountains. If he were a kid wandering through a cemetery at night on a dare, he would be thinking that some restless spirit was haunting him, but he had never seen anything in his life to suggest that such things happened anywhere other than in people’s imaginations. The gods knew he’d killed enough men that their souls would be haunting him every day if they could.