“What am I going to do?” she whispered, covering her face with her hands.
“Join us,” I said quietly. “That’s what you’ll do. It’s the best place for you.”
“And what? Watch my sister punished in my place?” Was she crying behind those hands? I wasn’t good at knowing what to say to help with crying.
“You can’t do anything else,” I reminded her. I was trying to put myself in her place. Trying to imagine wanting this life and then having it snatched away by the goals of other people – goals I didn’t even share. I could see her perspective, but she needed to be practical, too. “You’re here with us and you’re already branded a traitor, so you might as well join us all the way. You’ve seen what’s happening. You’ve seen all the injustices. You’ve seen that snake the crown prince manifested. You’ve heard the things he said to us. Why not join us and find a different path?”
“You’re wrong,” she whispered.
I involuntarily drew backward. Wrong? Was she crazy? She’d seen what I saw! How could she think the Winged Empire was still something to follow or engage in? Didn’t she see that my hands were shaking just from the memories?
“I do have options,” she continued. “I could just find the nearest Claw and turn you in.”
I swallowed. I hadn’t expected that.
She pulled her hands from her tear-streaked face so suddenly that I worried for her.
“Sign,” she gasped, “I need a sign.”
“O ... kay,” I said. She was in worse shape than me, despite the pain I was in from the beating last night. My eye throbbed and my belly hurt so much that I wasn’t sure I could stand up straight. But I couldn’t’ think about me right now. I needed to slow down and help Zayana. “Where do you learn about these signs? There sure are a lot.”
“My nurse taught me,” she said with a look that suggested I’d asked her how she’d learned to dress herself. “Just like all children on the mainland are taught.”
“Well, you seem to believe it more than the others I’ve met.”
“I have faith.” She said that with a trembling lip like her faith was on the edge right now. She was studying the wood around us, looking for her sign.
“Maybe you could send Flame to go and look after your sister,” I suggested. After all, I had sent my bee. It brought me a lot of comfort.
She rolled her eyes. “He’d fade in a mile. A useless plan.”
“How do you know?” I pressed. After all, my bees did not fade in a mile. Even now, I was picking up little flashes from them. Ixtap, nursing a gash he’d gotten in the fight. His snake wrapped around it as if trying to caress it better. Someone – Juste, maybe? – huddled in a dark corner sobbing. Wow. He must have liked me even more than he let on with all that marrying business. I’d broken his heart. Or maybe he was even more unhinged than I had feared. I swallowed at the memory of my last minutes with him. If he ever got his hands on me, he would tear me to pieces.
You’ll be fast and smart and that won’t happen, Aella. I stroked the bracelet Osprey had given me, more grateful than ever for a way to know where he was. But then I shook my head. Every time I thought of him I saw mental images of him descending on us and ripping us to pieces with Os’s talons. That was not helpful. Think of something else. Anything else.
“A knothole with a saw cut running through it!” Zayana gasped, pointing at what she’d seen.
“I guess that would be common in any construction project.” I looked around at the rough job done on the walls.
Her eyes narrowed.
“But even so,” I said, trying to salve her hurt feelings, “you still saw it while you were looking for a sign.”
She relaxed, running a hand through her long dark hair. Even now, it was smooth as a sheet.
“It means broken ties,” she said, her face twisting like she was going to cry again.
I held my tongue. Maybe she would just decide to join us if I let her interpret her signs. After all, ‘broken ties’ had to mean her ties to the Winged Empire.
She gasped.
I waited but eventually, my curiosity got the better of me. “What is it?”
“Two ants caught in a spider’s web.”
“What does that mean?” And how in the world could you go through life seeing signs in absolutely everything? You’d never get anything done!
“Absolute loyalty. The binding of your heart to another’s.”
Well, that sounded promising. She could break her ties to the Winged Empire and be a loyal revolutionary. I smiled and very cautiously, she joined me.
“Thank you for sending Flame to rescue me from that awful place.” It was easy to sound genuine. “I wouldn’t have escaped without him.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t rescue you. He was just supposed to look for you.”
“Well, then I’m doubly blessed,” I pressed, but she looked uncomfortable at my gratitude.
I was saved from this quagmire of shifting emotions by Wing Ivo opening the trap door above us and motioning for us to climb. I grabbed the ladder first and pulled myself up, forcing myself to ignore the stabbing pains through my belly where the Claws had kicked me. One day, I’d pay Juste back, blow for blow. I’d take his precious kingdom out from under him and free my people. And I’d escape the clutches of Osprey to do it.
I felt a stab of guilt at that. Because though he would hunt us down and utterly destroy us, he didn’t want to. It was hard to fully blame a man for doing a thing he didn’t want to do to save the lives of other people. He was probably in more pain than I was after all the times he stabbed himself to try to distract Juste from me. And from that stab to his chest. I shivered at the memory of doing that to him and was grateful when Ivo’s weather-worn hand grabbed mine and helped me up into the room above. I needed the distraction. I could hardly bear to think of Osprey right now.
“My friends will lend us horses,” Wing Ivo whispered as I looked around the small room. Tables were laid out with buckets and large barrows. The place smelled strongly of fish – both fresh and rotting. I fought against gagging. Ivo gave me a pleased smile and I returned it. “And they’ll provide us with supplies, since we are caught without them. Our hunter will expect us to flee into the Forbidding. It would make the most sense, since our skills are strongest in the wilderness, but we will not make this easy for him. We’ll flee into civilization, rather than out of it.”
My heart sank at the thought. “Won’t there be more ways for us to be caught with so many Wings and Claws along the way?”
“We’ll just have to be more careful than ever,” Wing Ivo said, helping Zayana up the last rung of the ladder into the fisherman’s wharf house. “Whatever you do, keep your voices down and your faces out of sight.”
“I’m sick of constantly running from something,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I want to run to something.”
“One thing at a time, girl!” Ivo’s voice was a growl as he crept to the door and looked through the slats.
“This general – the one with the two ravens. I want to find him,” I insisted. If I was going to keep from going crazy with worry, I needed a goal.