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She looked back at Jennsen and smiled her sweet love. “I’ll always be in your heart, baby. Always. Love you, always.”
“Oh Mama, you know I love you. Always.”
Her mother smiled as she watched her daughter. Jennsen’s fingers caressed her mother’s beautiful face. For a fleeting eternity her mother watched her.
Until Jennsen realized that her mother was no longer seeing anything in this world.
Jennsen fell against her mother, dissolving in tears and terror. Choking in sobs. Everything had ended. The crazy senseless world had ended.
Her arms stretched out toward her mother as she was pulled away.
“Jennsen.” His mouth was close to her ear. “We have to do what she wanted.”
“No! Please oh please no,” she wailed.
He gently pulled. “Jennsen, do as she asked. We must.”
Jennsen pounded her fists against the blood-slicked floor. “No!” The world had ended. “Oh please no. No, it can’t be.”
“Jenn, we have to go.”
“You go,” she sobbed. “I don’t care. I give up.”
“No, Jenn, you don’t. You can’t.”
His arm around her middle lifted her, set her on her wobbly legs. Numb, Jennsen couldn’t move. Nothing was real. Everything was a dream. The world was crumbling to ash.
Holding her by her upper arms, he shook her. “Jennsen, we have to get out of here.”
She turned her head and looked at her mother on the floor. “We have to do something. Please. We have to do something.”
“Yes, we do. We have to leave before more men show up.”
His face was dripping. She wondered if it was rain. As if she were watching herself from some great disconnected distance, her own thoughts seemed crazy to her.
“Jennsen, listen to me.” Her mother had said that. It was important. “Listen to me. We have to get out of here. Your mother was right. We have to go.”
He turned to the pack beside the lamp on the table at the side of the room. Jennsen slumped to the floor. Her knees hit with a thump. She was empty of everything but the hot coals of agony from which she could not pull away. Why did everything have to be so wrong?
Jennsen crawled toward her sleeping mother. She couldn’t die. She couldn’t. Jennsen loved her too much for her to die.
“Jennsen! Grieve later! We have to get out of here!”
Out the open door, the rain poured down.
“I won’t leave her!”
“Your mother made a sacrifice for you—so you would have a life. Don’t throw away her final act of courage.”
He was stuffing whatever he could find in a pack. “You have to do as she said. She loves you and wants you to live. She told you to run. I swore I’d help you. We have to leave before they catch us here.”
She stared at the door. It had been closed. She remembered crashing into it. Now it stood open. Maybe the latch broke…
A huge shadow materialized out of the rain, melting through the doorway into the house.
The brawny man’s eyes fixed on her. Feral fright surged through her. He moved toward her. Faster and faster.
Jennsen saw the knife with the ornate “R” sticking from the side of a dead man’s neck. The knife her mother told her to take. It wasn’t far. Her mother had lost her arm—her life—to kill him.
The man, seemingly oblivious of Sebastian, dove for Jennsen. She dove for the knife. Her fingers, greasy with blood, seized the handle. The worked metal gave good grip. Art, with purpose. Deadly art. With teeth gritted, she yanked the blade free and rolled.
Before the man reached her, Sebastian growled with the effort of burying his axe in the back of the man’s head. The soldier crashed to the floor beside her, his meaty arm falling across her middle.
Jennsen, crying out, wriggled out from under the arm as blood grew in a dark pool beneath his head. Sebastian pulled her up.
“Get whatever you want to take,” he ordered.
She moved through the room, walking in a dream. The world had gone mad. Perhaps it was she who had finally gone mad.
The voice in her head whispered to her, in its strange language. She found herself listening, almost comforted by it.
Tu vash misht. Tu vask misht. Grushdeva du kalt misht.
“We have to go,” Sebastian said. “Get what you want to take.”
She couldn’t think. She didn’t know what to do. She blocked the voice and told herself to do as her mother said to do.
She went to the cupboard and rapidly began picking out things that they always took when they traveled—things always at the ready. Traveling clothes were kept in her pack, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. She threw herbs, spices, and dried food in on top of them. She pulled other clothes, a brush, a small mirror, from a simple chest of woven branches.
Her hand paused when she started grabbing her mother’s clothes for her. She stopped, fingers trembling, focusing on her mother’s orders. She couldn’t think, so she moved like a trained animal, doing as she had been taught. They’d had to run before.
She scanned the room. Four dead D’Harans. One that morning. That made five. A quad plus one. Where were the other three? In the dark outside the door? In the trees? In the dark woods, waiting? Waiting to take her to Lord Rahl to be tortured to death?
With both hands, Sebastian seized her wrist. “Jennsen, what are you doing?”
She realized she was stabbing at the empty air.
She watched as he pried the knife from her fist and returned it to its sheath. He tucked it behind her belt. He scooped up her cloak, which the huge D’Haran soldier had ripped off her as she had first fallen into the nightmare.
“Hurry up, Jennsen. Grab anything else you want.”
Sebastian rifled through the dead men’s pockets, pulling out money he found, cramming it in his own pockets. He unstrapped all four knives, none as good as the one he’d tucked behind her belt, the one with the ornate letter “R” on the handle, the one from the fallen dead man, the one her mother had used.
Sebastian slipped the four knives down the side of the pack as he yelled at her again to hurry. While he took the best sword from one of the men, Jennsen went to the table. She scooped up candles and stuffed them in the pack. Sebastian attached the scabbard of the sword to his weapons belt. Jennsen collected small implements—cooking utensils, pots—pushing them in her pack. She wasn’t really aware of what she was taking. She was just picking up whatever she saw and putting it in.
Sebastian lifted her pack, took one of her wrists, and stuffed it through the strap, as if he were handling a rag doll. He put her other arm through the other strap he held out for her, then threw her cloak around her shoulders. After he pulled the hood up over her head, he stuffed her red hair in the sides.
He held her mother’s pack in one hand. He tugged twice and freed his axe from the soldier’s skull. Blood ran down the handle as he hooked the axe on his weapons belt. With the heel of his sword hand against the small of her back, he urged her onward.
“Anything else?” he asked as they moved toward the door. “Jennsen, do you want anything else from your house before we go?”
Jennsen looked over her shoulder at her mother on the floor.
“She’s gone, Jennsen. The good spirits are taking care of her, now. She’s smiling down on you, now.”
Jennsen looked up at him. “Really? You think so?”
“Yes. She’s in a better world, now. She told us to go from here. We have to do what she said.”
In a better world. Jennsen clung to that idea. Her world held only anguish.
She moved toward the door, doing as Sebastian said to do. He scanned in every direction. She simply followed, stepping over bodies, over bloody arms and legs. She was too scared to feel anymore, too heartsick to care. H
er thoughts seemed completely muddled. She had always prided herself on her clear thinking. Where had her clear thinking gone?
In the rain, he pulled her by her arm toward the path down.
“Betty,” she said, digging in her heels. “We have to get Betty.”
He gazed at the path, then toward the cave. “I don’t think we need bother with the goat, but I should get my pack, my things.”
She saw he was standing in the downpour without his cloak. He was soaked to the skin. It occurred to her that she wasn’t the only one who wasn’t thinking clearly. He was so intent on escaping that he almost left his things. That would be the death of him. She couldn’t let him die. Betty would help, but there was one other thing that she remembered. Jennsen ran back in the house.
She ignored Sebastian’s yells. Inside, she wasted no time rushing to a small wooden chest just inside the door. She looked at nothing else as she pulled out two bundled sheepskin cloaks—one hers, one her mother’s. They kept them there, rolled and tied, at the ready, in case they ever had to leave in a hurry. He watched from the doorway, impatient, but silent when he saw what she was doing. Without looking death in the eye, she rushed back out of her house for the last time.
Toegether, they ran to the cave. The fire was still crackling hot. Betty paced and trembled but was uncharacteristically silent, as if knowing something was terribly wrong.
“Dry yourself a bit, first,” she said.
“We don’t have time! We have to get out of here. The others could come at any moment.”
“You’ll freeze to death if you don’t. Then what good will running do? Dead is dead.” Her own reasoned words surprised her.
Jennsen pulled the two rolled sheepskin cloaks from under her wool cloak and started working loose the knots in the thongs. “These will help keep the rain out, but you need to get dry, first, otherwise you won’t stay warm enough.”
He was nodding as he shivered and rubbed his hands before the fire, the sense of what she said finally overcoming his urgency to be gone. She wondered how he managed to do all he had done with a fever and after having taken herbs. Fear, she guessed. Stark-raving fear. That, she understood.
Her whole body ached. Not only had she been banged around, but she saw now that her shoulder was bleeding. The cut wasn’t bad, but it throbbed. The sustained level of terror had left her drained and exhausted.
