It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. Why did any of it have to happen?
The eagle chirped, a delicate call at odds with its size.
Jolted out of her misery, Avisha turned to look. The eagle flapped, rose awkwardly, then dove along the path, talons raised and ready to hook them.
Avisha shrieked. She grabbed Jerad and threw herself flat, Jerad squirming beneath her. The heat and roil of the eagle passed over her body.
Below, men yelled out in a panic. Then they screamed.
She lifted her head to see men scattering away from the eagle's attack. The eagle had plunged into a group coming up the path. With talon and beak it slashed and cut and tore.
Avisha pushed Jerad's head down. 'Don't look!'
Nallo cried out. 'Vish! Those are soldiers like the ones who burned the village. Run!'
Like the ones who burned the village.
Like the ones who could rape and murder a girl in the woods.
She bolted, slipping, cursing, weeping with terror, sprinting into the woods where she might hope to hide. Glancing back, she saw the batting wings, the slash of talons, the flash of gold that ringed its beak. The men's screams drove her on. She ran with trees clawing at her, until her sides heaved and she fell to her knees spitting and retching. Her chest was aflame.
Nallo leaned on a tree, gulping air, holding Zianna. 'Where's Jerad?'
Avisha lifted her head. Jerad was not with them.
The ground dropped out from under her. She fell, dizzy, tumbling, helpless. But she was kneeling in the dirt with rain drizzling over her. She hadn't fallen at all.
Nallo said, 'Did you leave him behind?'
Between one ragged breath and the next, the rain ceased falling.
Jerad wasn't with them. She had left him behind.
11
Someone had to go back and find Jerad. So Nallo didn't wait. She pried Zianna off her body as the girl whimpered and clung, shoved her into Avisha's arms, and stumbled back the way they had come.
She'd recognized what those men were the instant she had seen them. What a fool she'd been! Avisha had stood there blubbering on the path, when they should have kept going despite the eagle. That was how those outlaws had walked up from behind without her hearing.
Eiya! She must watch, observe, keep her eye on the trail they'd tramped through the woodland so she could find her way back. She must listen, to make sure she didn't stagger out like a flailing drunk onto the road, an easy target. The rain gave her cover; the vegetation was damp enough that instead of snapping it merely bent, squooshed, sucked. She marked how the canopy altered where the path cut along the slope as it moved sidelong around the hill. She slowed down, grasped the slender trunk of a pine tree, trying to quiet the surging pound of her heart in her throat and ears.
She heard no sound of men talking. She heard no sound of footfalls, nor press of branches swept aside as they searched into the woodland for the runaways. She eased forward into the cover of a stand of pipe-brush. Her ears stung as the wind picked up. Still nothing. Crouching, she tipped to hands and knees and crawled through the muck to the shelter of a bush from which she could see the path.
Six bodies sprawled on the ground, limp and torn, several still twitching. She forced herself to scan the path.
The eagle chirped.
She slunk along the line of bushes until she could see where the path pushed onward. With wings spread and head raised, the eagle waited. A bundle of clothing had fallen to the ground beneath it.
It wasn't clothing. The eagle was standing over Jerad, cruel talons fixed on either side of the boy and its gaze pinioned on the dead men it had ravaged.
She found a stout stick on the ground, tested its heft. With this pathetic weapon, she walked onto the path.
'Jerad!'
The eagle flared its wings wider. She halted. Like the eagle she, too, was panting, angry, scared, injured in her own way. When it looked at her, she returned its fierce gaze without fear.
'We're friends, not enemies,' she said, a little testily.
Its mouth gaped, showing its tongue. Was that a good sign, or a bad one? She took another step and a third, by stages moving closer until she could see that Jerad was alive. The eagle was guarding him.
'You saved us,' she said, hoping to sooth it with her voice.
It swiveled its head, measuring her.
'N-Nallo?' His voice was so soft she barely heard it. 'I'm scared, Nallo. Did you see what it did to those men? Is it going to kill me?'
'Hush!'
At her agitated tone, the eagle flared again, and Nallo said, more harshly than she intended, 'Stop that! He's just frightened! You're scaring him.'
He sobbed, so she grasped the stick more tightly and held it a little above and across her head as if that flimsy stick could ward off the eagle should it strike. She walked at a measured pace right up to the huge eagle. Under its wings and the vicious-looking beak, she knelt beside Jerad and coaxed him to his knees.
'Come on, now, Jer! If the eagle meant to kill you, it would have done it already.'
'It's going to eat m-m-me.'
Really, the boy was impossible. 'No, it isn't. Get up.'
'They play with animals, and then eat them alive.'
'Get up!'
He clung to her as she dragged him away from the eagle and off the path. 'It tore that man's head off. It stuck that man right through the chest with its claws. Did you see?'
it protected you, Jerad.'
She shoved the boy down into a heap of sodden leaves ripe with
smells released by the rains. Turning, she examined the eagle. The heavy feathered brows made its stare more intense, and naturally the hooked bill with its pointed tip looked daunting. The top of its bill was colored a bright yellow, and yellow rimmed its mouth behind the bill. Its feathers had a golden sheen, shading darker along the wings and breast, patched with white. Its legs, too, were feathered, shaped like leggings. Its talons were skin and claw, big enough to enclose her chest.
As she watched, it began to clean blood and bits of flesh from its bill with one talon. It had a fussy touch, comical until you thought of what the eagle had just done.
Where had the outlaws come from? Were there more of them?
'Jerad, hide in the woods. Take this.' She picked up, and handed to him, the pouch she had dropped in the first steps of their panicked flight.
'It's too heavy.'
'Take it into the trees. I'm coming.'
She found the washtub where Avisha had dropped it. When had that happened? The series of events blurred in her mind: the washtub tumbling down the slope and spilling its contents every which way; Avisha hauling it up again. The eagle had come, and then the outlaws, and she realized that the eagle had surely come because it had seen armed men moving up behind them. It had deliberately saved them.
It lifted its head, looking past her. She heard men tramping up the path, moving in haste. She lugged the washtub off the road, and just in time she and Jerad dropped behind a stand of pipe-brush. She left the washtub beside the boy and shimmied forward on her belly through the brush until she could look over the path. The wind was rising again, rippling in the clothing of the dead men as if the cloth had woken and meant to abandon the mutilated husks.
