All girls were marked at puberty.
I’d simply managed to hide my Chosen status for years when most were unable to. The Sworn hadn’t tried to hunt me down again—perhaps they’d forgotten?
“Perhaps there is an opportunity,” Sage agreed. “If you can get the girls to go with you.”
“They’ll go,” I said. “They’re frightened. They’re horrified by their fate.”
“Not all of them,” Sage said, and paused. She looked at the fire for a long moment. Finally, she stirred. “If this is what you want to do, I think you should try.”
Dog gave a soft woof from where she lay on my cloak. I bent over her and stroked her ears. She blinked groggily at me.
“She’ll wake up slowly,” Sage said of Dog. “What do you say, Red Rider? Will you rescue Chosen girls for the Order of the Crimson?”
“I will,” I said.
“And I’m going along with you,” Sage added.
“What?”
“I said I had to keep an eye on you for a bit, didn’t I? But more than that, you can’t rescue Chosen girls on your own. You’ll need a lookout. Someone to trade night watches with you; someone to scout for information on where the girls might be. Someone who already has their ear to the rumor mill in every town for miles. And I just so happen to be looking for a do-gooder cause to make me feel better about myself.” Sage held out her hand. “What do you say, Red? Partners?”
I looked at her offered palm. I felt the paper in my pocket like a burning coal. I thought of Kassian and his tormented gaze when he’d kissed me.
Sage might be able to tell me who the Crimson Heart was. And she was right—I needed help rescuing the Chosen girls.
“Partners,” I said, and took her hand.
SIX MONTHS LATER
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CHOSEN GIRLS were huddled together in the barn’s hayloft like doves. I counted three of them, pale as milk in the moonlight, the whites of their eyes showing in the darkness as they gazed at me in silence. Two of them looked old enough to be married off in the capital, but the third one was so young that her Chosen mark had barely healed. She was maybe twelve years old, and she stuck like a burr to the side of one of the other girls. Their matching dark hair and heart-shaped faces made me think they might be sisters. Cousins, at least.
What a tragedy for their family, I thought, to have lost all of them to the mark of the Chosen.
I stepped into the shaft of moonlight that streamed through the open window behind them and beckoned for their attention.
“It’s Red Riding H—” one started to say. The youngest one, with the widest eyes.
I put a finger to my lips and shook my head curtly, and one of the other girls put a hand over her mouth.
Not now, I mouthed at them.
Silently, I curled my fingers in a gesture that meant they were to follow me.
The girls rose, unsteady as newborn colts at first, the burlap sacks containing their things dangling from their fists as they approached the ladder from the hayloft. No doubt they’d been waiting for hours, and their legs were asleep. The girl who was tallest went first, descending the ladder slowly and carefully. The youngest girl came last of all.
At the bottom of the ladder, they huddled together and exchanged glances, and one girl’s lips moved as she whispered something. Her eyebrows drew together. A question.
I seized her wrist and shook my head.
They must remain silent for this part of the journey. It was nonnegotiable. They would have been given instructions about that, but sometimes the girls forgot in their excitement or fear.
I tapped my finger against my lips again, my eyes boring into hers.
These girls were young, and young people were sometimes careless, but they couldn’t afford to be careless. Our lives depended on their cooperation.
We never could be certain who was listening when we were still among the barns and houses, or even the roads and fields. Eyes and ears were everywhere, especially now. It was best to be silent until we’d gotten away from the village and deep into the forest where we could hear threats before they came upon us. The forest told me things that the village didn’t. In the last few months, Sage had taught me to read the sounds and silences as easily as text in a book. I’d studied and learned the languages of the animals, the trees, the wind. If the Sworn were nearby in the forest, I’d know.
Villages were not so easily deciphered. People chattered and clamored despite the danger outside. They danced even when death was at their doorstep.
I put the weight of my warning in my stare, and the girl pressed her lips together and nodded in response. She understood me, and she didn’t try to speak again, not even when I drew a white mask from the pouch at my waist and left it under the straw for their mothers and fathers to find.
After I’d placed the mask, I crept from the barn into the open air with the girls following me closely.
My footsteps made no noise, another skill I’d perfected over the past few months. The girls’ feet scuffed lightly against the gravel of the yard, but it was a whisper-soft sound that could be any barnyard animal. No one would raise the alarm at the sound of it.
They wore dark cloaks and clothing, just as they’d been instructed to do. My cloak looked dark in the shadows of the barnyard, except for the flutters of red that occasionally showed in snatches of moonlight. It was crimson colored, an odd choice for one sneaking through darkness on a perilous errand, but I could feel the power of the cloak prickling across my skin, rendering me slightly less visible, slightly less worthy of notice. It was not an invisibility cloak, but it made me fade more easily into the background even when humans were looking.
The Sworn could barely take notice of me when I was hooded and covered in the red side of the cloak. Something about its magic dulled their senses and distracted their minds.
The girls followed as I crept across the barnyard and over a fence into the pasture beyond. The cows were asleep, their ears flicking occasionally at the sound of the girls’ footsteps through the field, and their spotted backs glinted in the moonlight. One of the girls paused to press her face against the neck of one of the cows, and then she fell in line again. That single, furtive goodbye wrenched at my heart, but I said nothing. I kept moving.
That was perhaps the most important part of the journey after silence. To keep moving, no matter what.
We reached the end of the pasture, and climbed the fence again in silence, and stopped. We’d come to the edge of the forest, where the trees and vines formed a thick green-black wall at the edge of civilization.
Here, the girls hesitated. I looked over my shoulder and saw the fear flash across their faces.
Judging by their expressions, I guessed they’d probably never set foot in the wilderness. Some villages didn’t allow their children to play among the Thorn Trees as mine had. Some villages forbid their citizens to step a single foot into the forest, lest they inadvertently bring home some dark magic. Some villages dealt with bandit raids, or treecrawler attacks. Some villages lived on the knife’s edge of civilization and magical wilderness, and found they lost fewer children when they kept them in sight and away from the beckoning danger of the green woods.
The bushes rustled, and Sage emerged wrapped in her cloak and painted in shadows. The girls drew back, uncertain and trembling.