Chapter 12

Slipping in and out of the barracks without anyone seeing me was going to be interesting. Everyone was still in the kitchens, the sound of their voices floating up and down with the conversation. I had to move fast. It wouldn’t be long before they flowed from their eating, up to their individual rooms.

I went to my own room first, and grabbed my few pieces of human clothing. Jeans, t-shirts and running shoes, and stuffed them into a bag, along with two small daggers. The tricky part was what came next.

Creeping along the hallway, I paused in front of Granite’s room. I knocked once, a single soft rap. No answer. Swallowing hard, I slipped into his room, grateful there was a single candle burning on his desk. The flame flickered as I stirred the air with my movement, sending shadows to dance all around me.

I opened the bottom drawer of his desk and grabbed the first stack of green money humans used for trade. I thumbed through it. One hundred was printed on each of the pieces of thin paper and I counted out forty. I could only hope that would be enough for Fern, but not enough to tip Granite off that some was missing.

Next to the money lay the papers I’d asked him about.

“In for a penny, in for a pound¸” I whispered to myself and pulled the first sheet out.

Report for King Basileus

Eastern front

Dying trees

The disease seems to be spreading quickly, and from all accounts, was deliberately loosed and encouraged to thrive. The humans we work with are doing their best to help stem the flow of lung burrowers, or Cryptococcus as they call it, but there is no slowing of the spread. There seems to be a magical push to the maggots, wind is constantly blowing. Will be sending a delegate to the closest Eyrie and our Sylph cousins to ask for help.

Truthfully,

Ranger Fir

I tucked the paper back into the drawer, my hand shaking. Lung burrowers being pushed along by the wind. No wonder Granite had been upset. The last time they’d come through, we’d easily lost over half our family. I paused, my brain sticking on a single fact. But my family had been killed by lung burrowers, which I knew was false now. What if there had been no disease at all? What if something else had killed our people, but it had been hidden beneath the pretext of the lung burrowers? My heart clenched and I knew that it was a distinct possibility.

The questions had no answers, and the longer I stood in Granite’s room, the better chance I had of being caught.

Cracking the door open, I peered down the hallway and breathed a sigh of relief. No one waited for me. I had to fight the inclination to run, and even so my steps were hurried.

“Hey, where you been?”

I spun to see Mal coming up behind. He gave me a grin and his hands glimmered green. I stiffened until he twisted his hand and presented me with a rose. “Thought you might like this.”

I blinked several times, staring at him, noticing that in the light, the whites of his eyes had a funny pink tinge. Maybe he was sick. “What’s gotten into you?”

He shrugged and gave me what I could only describe as a shy grin.

“Are you hitting on me?”

The grin widened. “And if I was? Would you do anything about it? I heard you and Coal split, thought I could fill in for him.”

A laugh burst out of me. “Not if you were the last elemental on this planet, Mal. Seriously, go bug Blossom, she’s been mooning after you for weeks.”

He frowned and I took the moment to turn my back on him and hurry out of the barracks. What the hell had gotten into him? Seemed his interview with the queen had given him some confidence. And how had he known Coal and I were no longer an item? It wasn’t like I went about announcing my life status. Coal must have been bitching then, if Mal knew, then everyone would.

Dumbass Coal and his gossip mongering.

I wove my way through the forest, looping back several times to make sure I wasn’t being followed. Just in case. I found Fern closer to the western edge than I’d expected. She was panting for breath, her heavy skirts weighing her down.

“Fern.”

She jumped and spun around, her hand to her heaving chest. “Larkspur, you scared me.”

I moved up beside her and pulled my bag from my back. “Come on, you need to change.” Getting her out of her clothes was time consuming. Corsets and stays were not an easy form of clothing to deal with. The jeans and shirt I’d brought were too big on her, the arms and legs at a length good for me. I rolled the cuffs of the pants up and then used a strip of leather to act as a belt. Fern looked down at her clothes with dubious eyes.

“Are you sure this is necessary?”

“Yes, you have to fit in for a little while.”

She blinked. “Fit in? I thought you were going to help me hide.”

With a sigh, I stuffed her dress behind a log and she let out a squeak, her hand reaching for it. I batted her fingers away. “Fern, you can’t stay here. We have to get you out of the forest if we’re going to keep you and”—I waved at her belly—“safe.”

“I understand, but where are we going?”

I took her arm and didn’t answer her. Probably best not to until the final moment. From what I recalled of Fern, she could be totally unreasonable, breaking into fits of tears and a massive tantrum at the drop of the hat. I wanted to believe she’d grown out of that particular habit, but I doubted it.

We walked in silence until we reached our destination.

A human highway that wove between the coastline and us bordered the western edge. It was to the place Granite had taken me that we were headed. I stopped, and stared out at the scene in front of us. Cars and trucks zipped along the strange, flat, black ground dotted with white and yellow paint.