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Tick stopped in the dense ferns near the boulders surrounding the guards’ camp. A small pack of Ferals ravaged the place, attacking the soldiers with spears and axes, but it wasn’t the number of them that gave me pause. Two Ferals sat on horseback, removed from the fight.
I’d never seen a Feral on horseback, let alone removed from the group, watching the others fight as the woman and girl were, as if they were merely observing.
The guards were heavily armed, but they’d been caught unawares, their movements frantic and disjointed, unlike the Ferals.
I frowned, watching through Tick’s eyes with a strange sense of awe. While some Ferals were injured or dead, the others weren’t crazed and desperate, like wild animals ravaging a meal. Instead, they worked together like a wolf pack as they cornered a guard, allowing one Feral man to lunge forward, striking the fatal blow.
I felt Lyra and Callon’s nearness but could only hear the gurgling cries and savage snarls around the bend. “Wait,” I rasped, pulling Dusty to a stop in a thicket of trees. I wasn’t ready to make us known. “They’re coordinating,” I explained, barely registering my own voice.
“The envoy?”Callon asked telepathically.
I shook my head, watching the woman on horseback. Her clothes were tattered, as most Ferals’ were, and her black hair was long and unkempt. There was nothing significantly different about her other than the fact she kept herself separate, unwilling to join the fight.
Only when she nudged her horse toward the ravaged camp did I realize the fighting was over and the Ferals had won.
Disconnecting from Tick’s mind, I motioned for Callon and Lyra to follow me.
“You’re sure about this?”Callon asked silently.
“I’m sure we need those uniforms before the Ferals take them, or we’re screwed. That’s our way into the city.”
I glanced at Lyra. She gripped the hilts of her knives sheathed beside her gun, her eyes wide and waiting for whatever came next. Everyone hated the Ferals. They were unpredictable and acted out of desperation most of the time. Now that they seemed to be organizing, I didn’t know what to expect. Still, whether it was an inexplicable feeling of guilt about the lot they’d been dealt in life or my hatred of slaughter, having seen too much of it over the years, it didn’t feel right to ambush them and draw blood. They’d killed our enemy, after all.
I looked at Callon, afraid to speak aloud in case the Ferals would hear us.“Maybe I should go alone,”I said silently again.“They outnumber us—”
“No. We all go,”Callon insisted.
“We have no fight with them,”I told him, glancing over my shoulder.“They are killing our enemy. Not us.”
“Yet.”Callon’s jaw ticked.“They aren’t killing usyet.”
My eyes hardened on him.“We don’t hurt them unless we have to. And if they don’t take the uniforms, there’s no reason to disturb them.”
We stared one another down, but Callon finally dipped his chin with a sigh. I nodded for him to fill Lyra in, and I connected with Tick again, watching the Ferals through her eyes.
The woman on the horse peered around, assessing the carnage before dismounting in the center of it. She grunted at the young girl, still sitting on her horse on the outskirts. Since the girl didn’t move, I assumed she was told to stay put.
The Feral woman passed the beds that hadn’t been rolled and the smoking fire that had gone out in the night. Outwardly, there was nothing to mark her as a leader, save for her horse and her posture, a bit more assured than the others.
The longer I watched her, the more convinced I was that she knew the members of the envoy would be asleep, that their stumbling upon the guards wasn’t luck at all but planned.
More grunts were exchanged as the surviving Ferals riffled through the envoy’s saddle packs. They tasted their food and smelled their garb, picking through anything that smelled or looked appealing to them and disregarding the rest.
The leader walked over to the cart loaded with soil from the desert and lifted the blanket covering it. She eyed the crates of rainbow rocks, then aggressively searched through the glass vials of different colored soils. She made inaudible sounds and waved her arms around, and even if I didn’t know what she was saying exactly, it seemed she wanted them to take everything.
I hadn’t realized I’d dismounted Dusty and was walking closer until I blinked, seeing the Feral through my own eyes beyond the trees. Instantly, the woman’s blue eyes were latched onto me.
There was a gurgle to my left, followed by a scathing scream, and before I knew what I was doing, I raised my bow and shot an arrow through the neck of an injured guard who had grabbed a handful of a Feral woman’s hair. He let go, and she gasped and scrambled away as he fell back with a final breath.
Chest heaving and bow still raised, I looked at the Feral leader. Her chest was heaving, too, her eyes wide and assessing me. Easing my stance, I lifted my hands, bow unaimed, and hoped she understood I was not there to harm them.
The longer the woman stared at me, her blue eyes boring into mine, the more I believed she did.
I stared back at her, thinking about a day in the ruins outside of Corvo City years ago, when another Feral woman had Beast in a cage, prepared to skewer him for her evening meal. I’d been able to communicate with that woman like I could with animals. It was different and difficult, straining my mind in a way that had debilitated me for hours after. But I’d done it.
The leader’s head twitched, her eyes darting behind me as Lyra and Callon stepped into view. “Hey,” I said calmly. “We won’t hurt you.” I raised my hands and bow higher. I wasn’t ready to completely divest myself of my weapon yet.
Though the woman snarled and her lip curled with distrust, she didn’t attack us, nor did her people.
