33: Dead Girl Walking

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Tyk looks about for somewhere to hide, even though it’s far too late, but before she can do anything, he’s close enough for her to hear his very familiar wing hum. “Kesan!” she calls out in relief, and beside her, Smon relaxes.

Kesan drops onto Tyk’s horns, then her back, then starts inspecting her all over. “You’re alive! You’re okay! Oh dear, you’re pretty banged up.”

“Just scuffs and scratches,” she says, while he gets to work cleaning the river dirt off her and carefully applying thick, sticky saliva to every little mark and scratch in her carapace. “I’m fine, Dad. That’s going to take forever.”

“If it’s going to take forever, then that’s just proof that you’re not fine. Oh, look at this up your side – ”

“It’s just a shallow scratch. Nothing is cracked.”

“Well it’ll become cracked if you keep taking scratches in the same place and won’t let me heal them. Smon,” he adds, looking up, “I’m very glad to see that you’re okay as well.” He says this with significantly less excitement.

Smon nods, and digs straight into the mainroot of the matter. “I’m a serious complication. You can’t take me safely back across the boat.”

“I’m not sure what the political situation is at the Green Hills Hive at the moment, but opinions are very mixed, and even if they’re not the majority a determined enough – ”

“It’s fine. I don’t need to cross back. I’m going to go on to the Starspire.”

“Alone?!”

“No,” Tyk says firmly. “With me.”

“What? Absolutely not!” He flies up to Smon’s eye level. “You can’t ask her to – ”

“I didn’t. I’d be happy for her to go back with you, but I don’t think it’s my choice to make. I can promise that if she comes with me, I can and I will protect her.”

“She’s a child.” He drops back down to Tyk. “You’re a child!”

“Smon says she needs to go to the Starspire, and there’s no safe way to get her back across the river anyway. And I’m not letting her go alone.”

“San and I will come, then.”

“Neither of you are good at travel. You barely tolerated the journey to Green Hills. And Mum is one of the most powerful diggers for the hive. And the more people come, the more important it’ll be to bring actual supplies, the harder it’ll be to forage out here with more mouths to feed. You want to try to get another caravan across? Besides, nobody else can come, because you need to tell them that we’re dead.”

“There is absolutely no way I’d lie about that to your mother.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to. But the Green Hills Hive have to believe that we’re dead. If they know that Smon’s alive, they’ll send people to kill her. And if they know that I’m alive, they’ll know Smon’s alive, because why else wouldn’t you bring me back? If you tell them that we’re dead, they’ll believe you, because they wouldn’t consider that you’d let me make this kind of journey, because the Green Hills Hive doesn’t know what you and the rest of Redstone River know.” Tyk has one strut that she’s been dragging around her whole life, just one, and now she pushes it into place. “You knew, from the moment I hatched, that this was my destiny.”

“When you were an adult,” Kesan says. “You were supposed to grow up and become a trader, or emigrate to a hive really far away, or… or become a border scout; we might need border scouts in the future, to patrol the edges or set up outposts on the trade routes or something. Not this; not so far away, and not so soon.”

“And yet, here we are. If this is the destiny that I am marked for, then fighting it doesn’t help either of us. You’re going to drag me home against the gaze of the stars? I know what I have to do, Dad. I know that I have to do this.”

Kesan lands on the ground in front of her and drops his wings completely flat. “I don’t like this.”

“I know.”

He hovers back up to Smon. “You will look after her. Promise.”

“Yes. I’ll protect her with my life.”

He hovers back down to Tyk. “And you will look after yourself.”

“Don’t I always?”

“Not nearly as much as I’d like. Your mother will clip my wings for this.”

“Tell her you tried to drag me back by the horns and I wouldn’t let you. What can she expect you to do, send the Green Hills Hive after us and get us killed?”

“We will be waiting for news of you on the wingsong,” he says, landing on her back to hum for Ketyk one last time. “The stars will look after you. I’ll take war to the sky itself if they don’t.”

“We’ll be fine,” Tyk assures him. “You’ll hear from us when we reach Glittergem.”

“You’d better.” And with a final goodbye, and a final touch to her horns, Kesan takes to the sky to go and report his daughter’s death.

Tyk watches him go, reflecting silently that he’d made her promise to look after herself, but he hadn’t made her promise to come home.

They watch him until he disappears. It takes a while. He takes his time flying away.

“Mum is going to be so, so mad that she didn’t get to say goodbye,” Tyk says. “Not to mention Dahm and Kedahm.”

“They can yell at you when you see them next,” Smon says.

“Y-yeah. Anyway. What’s the travel plan?”

“I was going to tow the farm up the length of the river as far as is feasible, then find something to build a cart for it. Do you have a better one?”

“That’s probably the fastest way to travel, but there’s a pretty good chance that the Green Hills Hive won’t take Kesan’s word on nothing and will send out scouts to look for you just in case. So we should get away from the river as soon as possible.”

“Kesan seemed to believe that they’d take his word for it and that reporting us dead would keep us both safe.”

“That’s because he’s emotionally involved. He thinks that letting me go with you is an absurd sacrifice that they’d never believe he made. But we can’t rely on that. If they think this is an invasion, they’re going to be extra cautious. He doesn’t have proof of your death, so they’ll look for it themselves.” Tyk doesn’t mention the two Green Hills Hive women that Smon has killed. “We should be safe, I think, once we’re on the other side of the boat crossing – after a day or so travel upriver from there it’s simply not economical for them to try to follow us. But with them between us and our destination, it could be a problem, unless we leave the river and go around. It’ll be a lot slower, but I don’t think the two of us are likely to move very fast anyway.”

“There are other ways to avoid scouts,” Smon says. “What if we travel at night and rest somewhere hidden during the day? The men can’t see very well in low light, can they? So they won’t be scouting at night. My farm is waterproof; I’ll sink it in the river during the day until we need to head away from it.”

“Can you see at night?”

“Well enough to travel, yes. And if I need light for small, quick things…” Smon lights up the fire stone on her wrist, points the light at the ground and does something that makes it very dim. “It’s much better not to use it, just in case it attracts attention, but…”

“But they won’t have scouts out at night, so there wouldn’t be anyone to see it anyway. Yeah… yeah, that should work fine. We should be able to slip past the boat in… what, a few days? Kesan proves that we’re still within flight range of the boat; we can’t have washed that far downriver.”

“Then we should sink the farm and hide for the day now,” Smon says. “If we’re close, they could send another scout at any time.”

“Yes, good plan.”

Smon checks the waterproof seals and sinks the farm, and the pair do their best to erase their footprints on the riverbank and look for somewhere to rest where they can’t be seen from the sky. It’s not easy; the ground is fairly flat, and the high grasses do more to hide them from each other than from anyone above, but they manage to find a slight dip where the grasses on either side grow in at an angle and conceal them both lying down. It’ll do; even if other scouts do come, it’s unlikely that they’ll search any particular area particularly thoroughly, and they’ll be looking for the unavoidable drag marks of pulling the farm out and away from the river. There is simply no way to move the farm through this dense grassland without leaving a clear trail even if they did have a cart, and no way for Smon to survive without it, so as long as the scouts don’t consider the possibility that she can sink and raise the farm in the water at will, they should be fine. And even if they do figure that out, they can’t see it in the red water, and there is so, so much riverbank to search.

So Tyk feels pretty safe as she nestles down in the grass to wait out the rest of the day.

And immediately falls asleep. It’s been a short day, but an exhausting one.

She wakes in the dark, to the sound of something moving around her with a strange, heavy gait. Smon, loping about on her two big legs. The sun’s gone down, and Smon is cutting small handfuls of grass here and there; biomass, Tyk realises, for the farm, trying to fill it up without harvesting enough in any one area to make her activity clear to scouts. Tyk doesn’t know how familiar the Green Hills Hive is with this part of the riverbank – maybe they send scouts down here regularly for some reason, maybe they don’t – but a large incongruous patch of cut grass would be as good as a cart trail so far as evidence of their survival goes.

Tyk gets up and shakes the dust and grass seeds from her body. It’s still quite early in the night, there’s no need to rush Smon to get moving before she’s seen to her farm, but Tyk has her own business to tend to – namely, foraging food of her own. There’s no caravan to rely on out here; she’ll need to find what she needs in the dark, or starve. And she doesn’t need as much food as Smon’s big, hungry farm, but she sure needs to be mre selective about it. A girl can’t survive on straw.

Tyk’s foraged by starlight before, but the raw, uncultivated land on this side of the river doesn’t have the richest pickings. There are rules for foraging, rules about how many rushes from each honeyrush bush to prune to allow the rest enough sunlight and air circulation to regrow, about how far to spread the seeds from the flowers you pick, about how deep to bury the quarter of the river yams you leave behind and how to fertilise them so that they’ll grow back quick and tender for the next forager. Rules that the overbred, under-hunted crabs in the area don’t follow, leaving tough, struggling plants in tiny patches that Tyk is afraid to tend for fear of leaving evidence of their presence. The crabs themselves are a food source, but all asleep in their burrows, so Tyk digs for her meal in the river mud, careful to search only in the water and leave no trace of her digging on the abovewater banks where a scout might see.

It’s only after she’s buried to the shoulders in mud and covered in the red dirt of the river that she remembers that the last time she was clean, her father had cleaned her, and that that might never happen again, and is buried under a cave-in of sudden grief and loss that she dare not surface still carrying in case Smon sees and asks her about it. She keeps digging underwater until she has a hold of her emotions again, and by then, Smon’s finished tending her farm and Tyk has gathered a truly decadent meal of crabs. She eats while Smon fiddles with the straps on her farm until she’s created a tow line for it.

And then, with Smon pulling the tow line from the shore and Tyk steering the farm in water, they begin their journey upriver.

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