THE BIG POND
“Momma . . .” Melry’s whisper, muffled through her gag, was imbued with all the pain of seeing her mother beaten and taken away. She sobbed as the caravan disappeared from sight.
Torq laughed. “It all came together pretty well. The only thing I would have liked better was for your mother to witness my men doing what they wish with you, but the Varosians wanted her as soon as possible and we ran out of time.”
Melry’s fingers twitched. She wanted to gouge his eyes out with her thumbs so that the appearance of empty eye sockets created by his tattooed face wasn’t just an illusion.
He laughed again. “You are a fierce one. You’d kill me with a look if you could.”
I will kill you and get my mother back, she thought at him, twisting her hands in their bonds before her, but his attention was turned elsewhere as he dug into his belt pouch and removed the orb, the travel device. He rolled it around on the palm of his hand in an attitude of contemplation.
It all seemed so hopeless, her mother sold into slavery in a far-off land, Torq planning to destroy the Green Riders, and she to be—no, she couldn’t even think of it, the horror they would subject her to. The worst part was knowing how her mother would feel, how she would grieve. Melry was terrified for her mother and herself. She didn’t know what to do. As much as she wanted to roll into a ball and sob, she knew it would do little to help.
Torq tossed the orb into the air. It glinted in the moonlight. He caught it neatly. No, she thought, she must not give in to despair. Her mother needed her. But what could she do? Up went the orb, and down it came. Torq was enjoying his game, no doubt gloating over his victory. Karigan, she thought, wouldn’t give up, though the Karigan she’d seen during their imprisonment was much changed, and not just in appearance. There was a darkness about her, and a hesitation. Melry didn’t know all that had gone on with her in the north, but Fergal had told her the little he knew, and some of it had been pretty bad. Her nightmares that had awakened them all were another clue. Still, the Karigan Melry knew wouldn’t give up.
The orb arced into the air, but before it could descend, she lowered her head and charged. She rammed into Torq’s gut. It knocked the air out of him and he doubled over. The orb bounced to the ground and rolled away. Torq’s men were so surprised, they were slow to react when she ran. They attempted to intercept her, but she dodged around them and dashed across wet ground in a beeline for the pond. They yelled and pounded after her.
Her feet sank into mud, but she drove ahead and threw herself through a stand of cattails. When Torq shouted orders at his men, she did not glance behind her, but splashed through water that soaked her skirt and weighed her down. She pushed on up to her thighs. When she was in up to her waist, she held her breath and dove into the inky water among the pickerel weed and lily pads. She frog kicked to propel herself along trying to use her bound hands best as she could.
She was blind in the night dark of the pond, but swam ahead with certainty that whatever lay behind meant only torment and death. Soon the water grew deeper and cooler. When her lungs felt like they must burst, she surfaced for a breath and saw before her the silhouette of a beaver lodge. A crossbow bolt skimmed along the pond’s surface beside her. A quick glance behind revealed two figures wading knee-deep looking this way and that.
“But I can’t swim,” one of the men said.
She sank into the water again and swam for the lodge, kicking furiously, but a shocking pain stabbed her leg and she screamed bubbles. She thrashed and swallowed water and rose once again for another desperate breath.
“You’re just wasting bolts,” one of the men complained.
“Thought I saw something.”
She glanced ahead and the lodge was close now, and she submerged. Each kick sent agony through her leg. The resistance of the water pulled on the shaft of the bolt causing the head to dig into muscle. Then she almost gouged her eye on a sharp stick. Instead it dug into her cheek, but it was nothing for she had reached the beaver lodge. Despite hungering for air, she sank deeper. In natural history class, Master Fisk taught, among other things, about beavers and how their mud and stick homes had underwater entrances. This helped them evade predators and allowed them to enter their lodges when the ponds were iced over in winter. Master Fisk had actually crawled into lodges himself to see what they were like.
The need for air crushed her chest, but she probed beneath the lodge for the opening with her bound hands. When she found it, she pulled herself through it, hoping there wouldn’t be angry beavers awaiting her inside. When her head broke the surface, she gasped the air, then worked on squeezing through the entrance into the cramped space that was a beaver’s home. No beavers greeted her, and only the faint scent of animal musk and castor, mixed with that of decayed wood and mud, remained. Perhaps this lodge was abandoned.
Immediately she pulled the gag from her mouth, then probed her wounded calf. She had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. At some point, the shaft of the bolt had broken off leaving the head embedded in her leg. There was not much she could do about it but maybe staunch the blood. But even that was not easy to do in the cramped space. She wrapped her leg with the gag. Then she heard voices.
“Not her,” said one of the men, not too far off. “It’s a log.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Maybe you hit her after all. Or she’s drowned.”
She hoped they hadn’t taken a natural history class with someone like Master Fisk.
The voices faded as the men moved on, searching along the shore. She curled up on her side with her knees tucked to her chest in the close space. And she waited.
And waited.
Then she heard the men again. They were closer.
“Gone,” one said. “Maybe we did get her.”
“Doesn’t matter.” This time she recognized Torq’s voice. “What’s important is what the Witch thinks we’ve done to her daughter. She’ll never know the difference.”
One of the men grumbled.
“I know, I know,” Torq said. “You wanted some fun. When we get back up to the pass, choose one of the captives there, maybe that little girl you’ve had an eye on, and use her as you wish.”
Melry swallowed a sob as their voices once again faded and she heard only the croaking of frogs. She started to shiver for her clothes were wet and the intensity of her flight had worn off. The lodge, however, kept her warmer than if she were out in the open air. Finally she gave in to racking sobs for whatever fate her mother would meet in the hands of the Varosians, for the unnamed girl who would suffer in her place in the camp of the Raiders, and for her own sorry circumstances.
She wondered if Weapons cried, and doubted it. They were hard, like granite. To an outsider they might not even appear wholly human. She tried to emulate them, but found she could not. In the mud and jabbing sticks of the beaver lodge, lonely and bereft, she wept until exhaustion took her.
They were down to sixteen Riders in total. Connly had directed Fern and Oliver to accompany Fergal and Megan, and the captive Raider, west to meet up with the king’s army. There’d been a happy reunion between Fergal and his old cavalry horse, Sunny, whom the Raiders had been using for their own needs. Karigan smiled at the memory of Fergal throwing his arms around his horse’s neck.
But now she and her companions were hunting for Torq and Colonel Mapstone. Ripaeria, who was currently off somewhere making a hunt of her own for sustenance, had scared the Raider into revealing the location of where Torq was meeting with some foreigners—for what, he could not say, no matter how frightening Ripaeria made herself. With the mountains to their left shoulders, the Riders rode as the night sky turned to the gray of morning dusk. They were exhausted, but determined.
Connly, in the lead, called a halt and stood in his stirrups to peer into the distance. “Sandy,” he shouted, “up front!”
The Rider trotted his horse up beside Connly and Karigan.
“Do you see a pond ahead?” Connly asked.
Sandy, whose ability was exceptional vision, also stood in his stirrups. “Yes, Captain, a large one with beaver lodges as the Raider described.”
“See anyone?”
“No people. Just a couple deer browsing near the water’s edge.”
Both men eased back into their saddles.
“Let’s hope it’s the right pond,” Connly said. There had been a lot of wet areas they’d passed by, smaller ponds dotted with beaver lodges, but this one was supposed to be particularly large. It had no name and did not merit note on any of their maps as beaver ponds were ephemeral things, turning back into meadows when the beavers moved on. The Raiders had just called it the Big Pond.
Connly gave the word, and they trotted out in two columns, Karigan and Connly leading. By the time they reached the pond, though the valley remained shaded by the mountains, the meadow grass and leaves of aspen and birch took on an emerald-golden cast. Fish surfaced in the pond creating ever-widening rings, birds swept over the water after insects, and beavers swam along bearing branches in their mouths.
There was clear sign of human disturbance in the wet ground near the pond—hoofprints and carriage tracks pressed into the earth. Sandy once again used his special ability to examine the ground while the rest of the Riders stood back so as not to confuse the scene. He squatted and pried something out of the grass which he brought to Connly.
“Brass button,” he said. “And blood staining the ground. Not a whole lot, but some.”
Connly took the button and held it in the growing light. “From a Green Rider officer’s coat, do you suppose?”
Karigan, in turn, examined it. A piece of gold thread hung off it. She nodded, her spirits plummeting. “Looks right.”
Connly then called Peri forward. Though she wasn’t a green Greenie, she was relatively new and the extent of her ability was not known.
“Can you verify that this button was the colonel’s?” he asked her. “I can’t honestly think of who else it would belong to, and I am sure she left it for us to find.”
Peri took it from Karigan and closed her eyes in concentration. “It was the colonel’s, and she was alive when it fell to the ground,” she said without hesitation. Then she yelped and jumped backward, dropping it as if it stung her. “Pain,” she whispered.
Karigan exchanged an uneasy glance with Connly. The colonel had been alive when she was brought to this location for the meeting with the foreigners. However, when she and Connly asked Peri for more information, all she could tell them was that there had been fear and pain.