Then, Dog burst out, her tail wagging and her body quivering with excitement. She bounded to the Chosen girls and licked their hands.
The girls smiled. The youngest one hugged Dog tightly.
I spoke for the first time.
“This is Sage, and that’s Dog,” I said. “And I am—”
“You’re Red Riding Hood!” the youngest cried.
It was the name that I’d begun to be called all through the villages. Red Riding Hood, because of my cloak and hood, and because of a children’s story my grandmother used to tell me, that I supposed other grandmothers had also told their children. A story about a little girl in a red hood who carried a picnic lunch to her grandmother’s house through a forest.
A little girl pursued by a big, bad, seductive wolf.
I thought of Kassian, and blinked as pain punched me in the chest.
“We’ve heard so many stories about you,” the youngest was saying while Dog enthusiastically licked her cheeks.
“Will we see any treecrawlers?” one of the older girls asked, looking pale.
“You’ll be safe with us,” I assured the girls. “This is my twenty-fifth rescue. Over sixty Chosen girls have been escorted to safety by us. We haven’t lost a girl yet. Stay close and follow our directions, and you will be safe no matter what’s in the forest.”
The girls nodded, their chins trembling.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Walk fast and stick close together. Look where you’re stepping and avoid anything that might crunch under your feet if you can.”
The girls joined hands and plunged behind me into the tangled green of the forest with Dog keeping pace beside them like a patient sheepherder with a group of lambs. Sage brought up the rear, concealing our tracks as we went and taking care to fix any broken branches or snagged cloth that the Chosen girls might leave behind.
We passed like ghosts through the maze of trees, leaving no trace of ourselves behind.
The forest grew thick here. Branches scraped at our faces and dragged at our clothes like grasping fingers as we broke through the barrier between civilization and wilderness. One of the girls squeaked as a twig caught her cloak, and she wrenched it free anxiously and clung tighter to the others.
I pressed forward without pause, leading them past the thicket and into the deeper gloom. There, the trees grew spaced apart, not crowded together in eager search of sunlight and space. There was order deeper within the forest. Room to move, to think. Here, moss grew thick as a carpet beneath our feet, and the trees rose like columns holding up a roof of dark leaves. I heard the girls exhale behind me—whether in relief or wonder, I wasn’t sure. Both would be appropriate.
The wilderness had a startling beauty on nights like this one. Moonlight lanced through the branches in luminous shafts of glowing light, and all around us, shadows rippled and breathed like living things. The air was quiet and soft as velvet against our skin, but still, it was alive with flutters of owls’ wings and the squeak of bats overhead if one knew how to listen for them.
A sudden crashing sound came from our left. Dog barked once, sharply. Sage pushed the girls to the ground as I turned with a whirl of my cloak and grabbed the sharpened stick from my belt that I used to kill treecrawlers.
“Stay down,” I commanded the Chosen girls.
With a glance at Sage, I stepped into the darkness, moving toward the sound.
But in another few seconds, I relaxed and lowered the stick as a deer loped away in the shadows.
I returned to the others and shook my head to let them know we were safe. I helped the girls to their feet, and we continued through the thick darkness of the wood.
~
After a few hours, Sage called for a rest. The girls sank onto a fallen log, and I passed them bread and water from my pack while Dog plopped down on the girls’ feet and wagged her tail, hoping for scraps. Sage disappeared into the forest to look for a spring or creek where we could refill the canteens, and I drew back my hood and pulled off the white mask I wore, the same white mask that the Chosen girls wore in the capital. I liked to wear it when I went into villages to steal away the Chosen girls. The mask concealed my identity in case I was seen, and it reinforced the idea that I was an unknown, ghostly person of legend.
It also itched like hell, and I was glad to take it off.
The girls relaxed at the sight of my face as if they’d been a little uncertain as to my humanity before, and the sight of my cheeks and mouth reassured them.
I rubbed the skin on the bridge of my nose with the back of my hand where a blister was forming. The girls watched every movement I made, their faces bright with curiosity. I knew they must be brimming with questions.
I’d taken the white mask for my own a few weeks after I’d begun rescuing Chosen girls. Choosing a symbol had been Sage’s idea, actually, and I’d immediately relished the idea of the white mask as my calling card. As a Chosen girl, I’d been forced to wear the mask to mark me as one of the prisoners who existed to perpetuate the werewolf race. Now, I left the masks behind to let the Sworn know that I was stealing away their broodmares. The symbolism of it gave me a fierce sense of satisfaction. I liked to imagine Mother Shade’s fury if she could see me whenever I felt too tired to continue.
I was no one’s prisoner now.
“We can speak now if we need to,” I said, “but we need to keep moving. We have miles to go before we can rest. We’ll travel at night and sleep during the day at first, until we get far enough that no one will be searching for you anymore.”
“What about treecrawlers?” one of the girls asked, her voice shaky at the edges. She scratched Dog behind the ears as she spoke. “What do we do if we see one?”
I tapped my belt, where the sharpened stick swung on a braided leather tie. “Dog will warn us if she smells any, and I’ve fought them before. Later, I’ll teach you all how to fight them too. But it shouldn’t come to that. We’re far from their usual roaming grounds. I don’t think we’ll encounter any.”
“I saw a treecrawler once,” the youngest girl whispered. “It crawled right up to the house before my pa stabbed it through the chest with a shovel. It was an old man, missing half his face, with vines growing through his eye sockets—”
“Let’s dwell on hopeful thoughts,” I interrupted. “We’ve got a long way to go until we’re safe. Best not to spook yourselves with scary tales in the meantime.”
This wasn’t a camping trip. We weren’t telling ghost stories for our amusement around a friendly fire. They needed to keep their wits sharpened and their courage belted on, and needless fear dulled the mind and heightened the senses in a way that made careful, measured discernment difficult.
Sage returned with two freshly filled and dripping canteens of river water. I let the girls rest another few moments before giving the signal for us to continue.
To the girls’ credit, they didn’t grumble when they started walking again, although I could see that the youngest one was limping a little. After a mile, I drew her aside and asked her to take off her shoe so I could examine her foot.
“I hurt my ankle a few weeks ago working in my father’s field,” she explained in a low voice while I probed the joint with my fingers. “I stepped in a gopher hole and twisted it. I thought it was healed up, but all this walking…” She shrugged.