Kared's Children - Chapter 9

Looping his waterskin across his back, he moved toward the brook and filled it. Aleda was waiting calmly next to a tree, the fire extinguished. She watched him blankly as he approached. He barely could see her face in the predawn light.

"What else can I carry?"

She had tied a sheathed dagger to her leg. "Carry nothing." Two backpacks, a bow, a quiver, and a waterskin lay on the ground beside her.

"I’m not asking as a favor to you. Without a weapon, I feel barren. I’ll carry the packs." One was large; it had ties on its back for the smaller one. He crouched beside them both and tied the two together. Then he pushed his waterskin to his side, stood, and hefted the packs onto one shoulder while smoothly slipping his other arm through the opposite loop.

She had slid the bow around her shoulders and the quiver and waterskin onto her back. "Are we ready?"

He settled the pack. "Sure."

Without a word, she marched down the hill toward the north. He adjusted the pack one more time and followed.

. . .

The hills to the south of the city were green and verdant. Trees grew thickly, and wildflowers filled the meadows where the trees weren’t. The underbrush was light.

Damon found their going easy. Aleda seemed to have a knack for selecting the most direct route that required the least effort. She kept ahead of him, and he hadn’t been able to catch up to her yet, or he would have asked her how long she had been hiking these hills. She moved swiftly, and he couldn’t quite figure out how. She didn’t take large steps and she didn’t seem to take that many more than he did, but she perpetually stayed ahead of him, and he found himself almost jogging to keep up.

She paused halfway up the rise of one hill and waited. When, quite a few moments later, he caught up with her, she pointed to his right. "Look."

He looked. High and far, across the hills and the sea beyond, the sky in glorious color reflected against the water as the sun rose. Yellow and orange burst from the horizon downward and upward to red and the purple of the sky above and the shimmering surface of the sea.

"It’s beautiful," he said.

"Sunrise is one of the gifts nature gives us."

"A gift I could use is longer legs. I don’t know how you walk so fast."

She only watched the sunrise. "If you live without appreciating the miracles that occur all around you, you’ll have wasted your life."

He was about to answer, but the wonder he saw in her face made him wait. Finally, he couldn’t help himself. "You like nature better than you like people."

"Don’t be an idiot." She watched the sky a moment or two longer, then set off down the hillside. "Are you coming?" she called.

Damon glanced at the sky one last time and then followed. Already she was far ahead.

. . .

As they hiked across the hills, which led them ever lower, the forest through which they were passing thinned, and the slopes began to resemble the yellow, dry, dusty humps that Damon recognized as the foothills beyond Backwatch: the fields where the wildflowers surrendered to dusty meadows of sage or sand and rock. To their right sloped upward the ridge that Damon recognized and which partially had blocked his view of the Eastern Sea from the back wall of Rowan. Ahead of him, Damon expected to see at any moment the towers of the city, but they never pillared into view. Each rise they crossed brought the same expectation. Each rolling hill seemed more and more familiar.