“Did you?” the woman asks.
“I know where she is. I wanted to talk with you before doing anything else.”
Knowing that there’s no one better at tracking a person in the Barrens than the man in front of her, the woman nods her head. “Can you describe her to me?”
“She’s young—shorter than you with a medium build. Legs fit enough to outpace most of our kind. Her hair hangs well over her shoulders, but the blue is now gone. She looks like one of us.”
The curious young Traveler I encountered once before, the woman thinks to herself. The wild sap must have freed her mind from the restraints of the Delta. But despite her strength and speed, she doesn’t know how to survive in the Barrens. A fate worse than she could ever imagine might await her.
Remembering how close she once came to suffering that same type of horror, the woman looks up at the clouds. If not for the man standing in front of her, in the best of scenarios, she would have been killed. She didn’t want to consider the other possibilities.
She was still young when it happened, her body still developing. Curves had found their way into her chest and hips, but she wasn’t fully mature yet. It was only a few hundred morrows after her Ovì’s death, long before she met the Watcher who became the Mür of her child.
As she often did after she learned to travel, she sped one morrow through the wasteland to the west. When she reached the hills where the dirt speckled with red, she found a high crest. Far enough from the edge of the Schorachnia’s domain that they wouldn’t harm her, but close enough that she could hear the music rising from the Eternal Canyon, she sat alone in thought.
She stared at the vines falling over the Canyon’s edge in the distance, mesmerized by the rich color of their flowers. She imagined a world filled with vibrant hues, not the drab black and grays of the Barrens. A world where she didn’t need to be ready to defend her existence with every breath she took.
While the music caressed her ears, she let herself feel peace. She laid her spear by her side, leaned back to the dirt, and rested the back of her head on her folded hands. As she gazed at the barrier to the Infinite Expanse, the serenade of colors waving across the faraway sky, her eyes began to droop. Her mind drifted into a tranquil state and she soon fell asleep.
She never heard the footsteps climbing up the hill behind her. By the time she opened her eyes, two male Murkovin were already standing over her. She tried to jump to her feet, but one of the men grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her back to the ground. While he pinned her to the dirt, the other brute gripped her arms in his rough, calloused hands. After he bound her wrists with rope, the first man crawled on top of her body.
Squirming on the ground, she tried to buck him off. The man who had tied her wrists together fired a fist to her face. The man on top of her forcefully clenched a handful of her hair in one hand while groping at the waist of her pants with the other.
“You belong to us now!” he hissed. “You’ll do our bidding, or we’ll beat you until you do.”
Without the slightest sound betraying its arrival, the tip of a spear ripped into the back of the beast’s head. As the Murkovin’s body collapsed on top of her, his blood splattered on her face. A foot swung over her. With a sharp crack, it crushed the nose of the creature holding her wrists. The same weapon that had killed the first of the brutes then split open the skull of the second.
She looked up at a tall, weathered man standing over her. His face was square and strong, and his hair cut short enough that it stuck straight up from the top of his head. Across one of his cheeks, a thick scar ran from the corner of his mouth to his ear. Rigid muscles bulged from his shoulders and arms. She trembled from the gruesome thought that he’d killed the other two so that he could take their place.
The man leaned down and grabbed the hair of the dead creature on top of her body. After hurling the beast away from her, he knelt by her side. To her surprise, he freed her wrists from the rope, helped her sit upright, and then stood up again.
“Never sleep in the open,” he chastised in a low, gravelly voice.
Without saying another word, the tall Murkovin turned away. Fresh blood still dripped from the tip of his spear as he stepped down the hill. The girl rose to her feet and wiped the blood off her face.
“I’m grateful for your help,” she called out.
He stopped and turned to her. “Be more careful in the future. You should know better than that.”
“Why did you come to my aid?” she asked.
He aimed his eyes at the corpses by her feet. “Like you, I’ve had people I care about killed by men like them.”
“How do you know what’s happened to me in the past?”
He returned his attention to her. “My cavern is a few hundred miles west of yours. I often travel through your area. I’ve seen you from a distance many times over thousands of morrows. I saw that you buried your Ovì and hung two bodies from a tree. It wasn’t hard to figure out what must have occurred. If I’d been nearby when it happened, I would have helped.”
“I’ve never seen you,” she comments.
“That’s why I’m so tall,” he says. “No one sees me unless I want to be seen.”
She instantly realized that
