Page 47 of Birthright

Manus held out his arm for me to balance myself. “Under your feet.”

I yelped despite myself. There were too many shadows in those cracks and crevices. “I could have lived without that information,” I said, trying to get my nerves under control.

Manus shrugged. “You asked.”

I told him about the layout as we moved down the mountain. Try as I might, I couldn’t help thinking about the Slaugh under my feet. I knew it was hours until dark, but I really didn’t want something to jump out and grab me.

Manus must have seen it on my face. “You’ve been walking on them for hours and now you’re worried about it?”

“I’d have been worried about it before if I knew. Besides, it keeps me from worrying about that little desert in front of us. I feel something alive in there. I’m guessing it’s the Tutzlwarms. How much do you know about them?”

“About the same as you,” he said, his expression flat, but I could see the tension in the taut muscles of his neck. “I’d sure like you to still have that saber.” We moved down the rocks, the steepness giving way to gentler hills.

We stood at the edge of the sand. It wasn’t exactly black, but it wasn’t the golden sand I’d seen in Arizona on family vacations as a child either. Small boulders protruded here and there. Inwardly, I wished we could leapfrog from one rock to the other to avoid walking on it. It might look like harmless sand, but it was another trap, and danger lurked just beneath the surface. It crawled over me like ants…I mean Tutzlwarms. I knew anything with that name was going to be trouble.

“Burning daylight, little lady,” Manus said in his best John Wayne voice, which was woefully bad in the best situations. Now, it wasn’t funny at all. But the fact he was trying to make me laugh helped ease the growing tension we both felt.

Reaching out my hand to his face, I said, “I needed that.”

He covered my hand with his. “We’re not halfway through this yet, Keena. Are you okay?”

I really didn’t know. I could see the shacks, small in the distance, and wondered if Abbey or my father was in one of them. It hurt to think so. Out here exposed to the heat and the winds. I really hoped they were in the castle, but that thought wasn’t any better. My stomach tightened at the burning from under my mark, surprising me—it was the strongest my energy had been since arriving. My altered powers were churning, wanting to fight the offishness of Thule. “No choice. They’re here somewhere, Manus. I have to be okay so they can be.”

He kissed my palm before I pulled it away from his face. “You know there’s a very real chance that both Coyle and Abbey…” He trailed off. He didn’t want to speak the words aloud and I didn’t want to hear them.

“I know. If that’s so…I’m sorry to have dragged you out here, Manus.”

“My honor.” He smiled and took a step onto the sand, his foot only sinking about an inch into the granular, sooty-looking substance. I followed. In the grand tradition of sand, it was hard to walk through, or trot, as we were doing. Neither one of us wanted to spend any more time than necessary on the island desert. I had walked in deserts before, and plenty of beaches, but never with the fear that the sand itself might swallow me whole. My heart was pounding and sweat ran down my face and neck. The leather tank top was stuck to me and my palms were sweaty. The sand was blowing around, sticking to my skin and stinging my eyes.

I managed to get close to a large boulder and some smaller rocks around the midway point. I jumped atop the smaller pile as if it were second base. Manus followed. He was panting from the exertion of running in the sand. We took drinks from a canteen and he stuffed it into the pack on my back before hopping off the safety of the base.

Before his feet hit the ground, I was hit in the side and knocked off, landing hard on my shoulder. My head spun from the force of the blow and with the added weight of the pack, I couldn’t right myself fast enough.

As I struggled to my knees, another gut-wrenching blow came from the other side. I gagged and fell as fire spread through my torso, ribs giving way under the pressure of the hit. Doing my best to roll, I landed in a crouching position, my toes and one hand on the ground, while the other hand held pressure on my screaming ribs.

It made it easy to see Manus struggling with a giant lizard-snake thing.

The mammoth light gray beast, with dark splotches that matched the sand, jerked hard to remove itself from Manus’s blade. Fitting its name, it had the general shape of a worm but the belly of a snake, the legs of a lizard, and a head that looked like a snapping turtle. Manus brought his saber down in the middle of the thing’s skull. The blow was hard enough that I heard the blade scrape as it hit bone.

I didn’t have time to see what effect the blow had on the Tutzlwarm or Manus because of the movement of sand in front of me. I drew a blade from my side just as another Tutzlwarm emerged from the sand as easily as a fish would jump from water. I rolled out of its way this time, barely, and plunged the dagger into its soft underbelly, splitting it open as it dove past. The unearthly wailing sound it made as it flopped around with its insides spilling onto the ground hurt my ears.

Hunched down, trying to hold my ribs and ears at the same time, I saw Manus still struggling. “The underbelly!”

He drew one of his daggers and made an uppercut movement, slicing the Tutzlwarm’s throat from underneath. It died gargling on blood that disappeared into the sand. It was absorbed by the dry earth almost immediately.

The sand directly under me began to soften and move. I tried to stand but sank faster than I could move my weight forward.

Sand swallowed me from feet to knees. It happened so quickly, I couldn’t move against it. When I struggled, it softened more and sucked me farther. Manus reached out but the sand was moving all around me, not letting him get close enough to pull me out.

“The iron! In your pack!” Manus got himself up on the pile of rocks as I struggled to pull the pack off. I swung the pack around and my ribs screamed in pain, making me release my hold and send the bag flying into the shifting sand. It was sinking. I leaned forward, fighting the pain. I missed the shoulder strap.

“Cauldrons!” Angry and on the verge of panic, I bent even farther, the dirty sand now up to my thighs, and somehow managed to stretch far enough to grab the bottom of the strap before it disappeared in the churning granules.

I tossed Manus one end of a heavy chain and he pulled. I stopped sinking, but the suction created by the sand that was now at my hips wouldn’t release me. He wrapped the chain around a large boulder for leverage and pulled again. “It’s no use,” I shouted. I wasn’t budging and the iron chain was digging into my forearm. The force pulling me down was winning.

Another of the worms launched out of the sand, flying at my face. I couldn’t get out of the way. I heard Manus cursing and the clattering of the chain as he wound the remaining length of his end around the rock. I leaned forward as far as I dared without putting my upper body on the sand and shoved the dagger upward at the bottom of the worm, only nicking it as it dove back into the sand behind me. The movement shifted the sands again, pulling me down past my hips.

I closed my eyes and concentrated hard. Thrust, I thought. Thrust! I felt the power surging in my abdomen and it burned as much as my battered ribs. I pushed it outward, screaming with the pain of the magic leaving my body, sending power into the sand as I cast.