I tore a length from my dress and wrapped her ankle tightly. “How’s that feel?” I asked.
The girl tested the ankle by putting her full weight on it. “Better,” she whispered after a thoughtful pause. “Many thanks. I-I’m sorry. You’ve ruined your dress.”
“We can’t have you going lame at the start of our journey,” I replied. “Come, let’s keep going. We want to get out of this stretch of woods before sunup.”
We rejoined the others. The earth here was sandy, and dry gullies and riverbeds crisscrossed among the trees. Exposed roots stretched like grasping fingers from where the earth had been worn away by rain and time, and in the moonlight, they looked as ominous as snakes.
I knew this area well, though, and I was beginning to relax when Dog’s ears pricked forward and she gave a low growl.
We halted. The girls crowded together, all of them with their hands over their mouths and their eyes wide. Sage tapped my shoulder.
She jerked her head to our left, and I listened.
Somewhere nearby came the distinct sound of footsteps.
CHAPTER SIX
I TURNED TOWARD the sound as Sage pulled the girls into one of the dry gullies and tucked them beneath an outcropping of roots. After a hand signal from me, Dog darted after them, leaving me alone.
When the others were hidden, I scrambled up the side of the embankment and flattened myself against one of the trees to listen. The moonlight had disappeared behind a bank of clouds, and the forest was black. My pulse thundered in my ears and beat at my throat and wrists.
The footsteps came again, faint but discernible. I held my breath. They sounded deliberate, but not furtive. A hunter, perhaps? Someone returning home from a journey to another village? Although rare, some humans braved the forests to follow old paths and trade black market goods and information.
Sage and the girls were silent in the gully beneath me, waiting.
I leaped silently to the shadow of another tree. Rough bark scratched my hands, but I barely registered the sting. I was listening with every fiber to the throbbing silence all around.
Faintly, in the distance, I heard a man’s voice mumbling a drinking song as if singing absently and under his breath.
Gradually, the sound faded away.
I waited another hundred heartbeats, but I didn’t hear the singing again.
Finally, when we were sure it was safe, Sage and I led the girls on.
~
Once we were deeper in the forest with no more sound of travelers or other threats, we relaxed a little, and Sage walked beside me. There was scant chance of being followed now if we hadn’t been pursued this far. The singing stranger had been a fluke. We were past the first round of danger, and we could breathe easily for a little while. Dog frolicked in the underbrush, sniffing everything, her tail wagging.
“What are your names?” I asked the girls as we walked.
The Chosen girls introduced themselves—Daisy and Amaryllis were sisters, as I’d suspected, and the other, youngest girl, a second cousin of theirs, was named Bree.
“What’s your name?” Bree asked me.
“Don’t be silly,” Amaryllis scolded her. “She’s Red Riding Hood. You know that. Even babies know that.”
“Yes, but—her real name.”
“She can’t give us her real name,” Amaryllis continued with a shake of her head at her cousin’s lack of understanding. “She won’t want to be traced, or her family punished by the Sworn for what she does. She’s got to keep it a secret.”
“Oh,” Bree said in a small voice. She glanced at me for confirmation, and I nodded.
“Sage isn’t my real name either,” Sage announced cheerfully. “But I’m so dang wise, I thought it was fitting.”
This coaxed a few reluctant smiles from the Chosen girls. They turned to discussing what they might call themselves if they were to pick code names, and that occupied their minds while we walked for a long while.
I was quiet. Amaryllis’s words had burrowed deep into my thoughts.
She won’t want her family punished by the Sworn for what she does.
I thought of my grandmother, Delphine, all alone in her house back in the village where I’d grown up. Was she safe? Had she heard tales of the girl called Red Riding Hood who bravely walked the forest to rescue doomed young women? Did she suspect it could be me?
I wished I could tell her so she could be proud of what I’d become. I wished I could see her again. Hug her tight and whisper everything in her ear. I missed the smell of cookies that always seemed to permeate the air of her house, and the cunning quilts she made with scraps of fabric she collected from other villagers. I missed the book of poetry she’d read so many times that the spine was falling to pieces, and falling asleep to the sound of her reciting the words of one of her memorized poems aloud in the stillness of the house. I missed her crepe-skinned but strong hands that gripped mine tight when she greeted me in the mornings. I missed the way she pretended to be grouchy on her birthday, and how she rolled her eyes when I sang to her and made her blow out her candles.
How I missed her.
And, on the heels of that thought—how I missed Kassian.
I hadn’t seen him since the night in the barn. I looked at the paper every day, but it was always blank except where I’d hastily scrawled my instructions to him on the same night he’d given it to me. The words were smudged into illegible smears now, after so many days and weeks and months of folding and unfolding the paper and looking for words.
A sharp pain stabbed at my throat whenever I thought of that empty paper. He’d given it to me, but he did not write.
Had he forgotten about me? Had his feelings waned, while I was still a captive to my love for him?
Or was he dead?
The last thought was worst of all, and I always flinched away from the possibility as soon as I thought it. I couldn’t stomach imagining him dead. Not when we’d parted the way we had. Not with everything left unsaid, unfinished. Not when my love for him was still a wound across my heart.
My chest ached. I walked faster, and the girls scrambled to keep up.
“We’ve heard of Red Riding Hood,” Daisy whispered, her eyes alight with awe. “Everyone has. It’s all the girls talk about in the school yard.”
“And what do they say about her?” Sage asked, grinning at my obvious discomfort.
“Oh, there are dozens of different stories. Some say Red Riding Hood is the ghost of a Chosen girl who died escaping the Sworn who came to take her,” Daisy said.
My mind flashed to a memory—a girl screaming as she wrestled free from the Sworn and ran to the edge of a steep drop. The flutter of her dress as she jumped. The red of her blood on the rocks below.
I shuddered.
Amaryllis chimed in, “Some say Red Riding Hood is the sister of a Chosen girl, and she rescues others to avenge her lost sibling.” Her nose wrinkled. “The boys like to scare the little ones by saying Red Riding Hood is a treecrawler in a red cloak, and that when Chosen girls wait for her, they’re dragged off to their deaths by her thorny hands.”
“I haven’t heard anything as interesting as these stories,” Sage said. “They’re fantastic, especially that one about the treecrawler.”
“I’ve only ever heard how Red Riding Hood rescues the Chosen girls from the horrors of the capital and takes them to freedom and safety beyond the forests,” Bree said, with a touch of wounded loyalty. “Nothing about ghosts or treecrawler monsters.”