After a long while, he risked ducking behind a tree to look back. Once his inertia stopped, his lack of breath caught up to him. He gasped painfully and sagged against the tree trunk.
He had come a long way, driven by terror to unusual speed. He was just past the place where you would leave the path to find the second ruin. In about another mile was the third ruin: as far as you could walk in a day and still make it back before dark.
Beyond that were the places you could only reach with the bicycle; the spring he had stopped at with Benja, the ruins beyond it, and then the expanse of the old city itself.
Illya crumpled, if they were not behind him now, they would not catch up before he was farther away than they would ever go. The fear of pursuit had drained away, and he found that it had been the only thing keeping him upright.
After a while, he walked again. His legs shook and his vision blurred, but he still wanted to get past the third ruin.
As he went, he continued looking back over his shoulder compulsively, but a new fear started to grow. No one was following him anymore. Why would they? The sun would be at height soon. Even with the speed of his flight, he was not far ahead of the marching day. Soon, he would reach the point where a person would have to turn back to the village or be caught out at night with the Terrors.
He would not be able to turn back. He may have escaped, but he could never return. If he did, he would find himself full of arrows before he had even reached the walls.
Banishment.
The mob had called for his death, but the sentence he had given himself would be far worse. He had no people now. He was alone with no walls and no home to keep him safe. In a few hours, it would be night, and the Terrors would find him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ILLYA GAVE UP. He knew that there was no hope of surviving the night. After sitting back against a tree for a while, flooded with gruesome thoughts for the better part of an hour, he let go of all of it. There was nothing more he could do. The feeling, though horrible, was oddly freeing.
He couldn’t change any of it, not what was going on in the village and not what was going to happen to him. He had been living under the weight of guilt for so long that to be free of all responsibility made him giddy. All summer, he had held the survival of the village and the weight of being Leader on his shoulders.
The truth was out now, and there were no secrets left for anyone to find. No one expected him to save the village anymore or to bring it through the winter. No one expected anything at all of him anymore.
After a while, Illya got up. He walked through the heat, feeling it penetrate. It relaxed his muscles deep to the bone. He walked and walked, and the heat beat down. It moved past pleasant and soon he was stifled, closed in by his clothes. They were a barrier between him and the free air. He tore at them, leaving holes that did not quite accommodate the need to escape.
The leafy canopy of trees ended, and the bare spots on his arms began to scorch in the unrelenting glare. He was in a place he had never been before, having always stayed on the broad path whenever he had been this far out of the village. In a daze he wandered, eventually aware that the need to find water was becoming desperate. He walked and walked, it was mid-afternoon, and the sun beat relentlessly on his shoulders.
He heard the water before he saw it. A roar and a cool breeze directed him to turn through a gap in the boulders and trees.
The air was sweet and sharp, smelling of sage and sticky geranium. A giant waterfall crashed down a rocky cliff into a deep blue pool. It emptied into a stream, which he supposed would eventually feed the main river far below. He stripped off the remainder of his clothes and dove straight into the deep blue pool.
The cold of it was sharp and unexpected. It stole his breath and made his body ache, but he relished it. Tiny bubbles, disrupted by his plunge, rose all around him, tingling his skin. He lapped great gulps of water and felt his mind clear. When he began to shiver, he swam to the shore and pulled himself out. The ache slowly receded from his hands and feet as he sat in the friendly sun.
It was not until dusk began to settle that fear crept back in on him. The shock of the cold water had brought him back to life. Now he realized that he wanted very much to keep that life after all. If he was going to have any chance of doing that, he had to find a place where he could defend himself.
After some debate, he scaled the cliff beside the falls, hoping that the Terrors would not come to higher ground. Fog drifted over the pooling water above the falls, deceptively still before the plunge, glowing pink in the setting sun. The temperature dropped as the sunlight fled with a visible speed from the far hillsides. He heard it then. The first yip yip yee sounded, way off in the hills.
A few moments later, an answering yip yip yip rang out. Fear poured over him as if it was a bucket of icy water. He gasped, breathing too fast, and tried to recover himself before he let his mind spin out of control.
The Terrors were out there and they were coming.
Illya had never actually seen them before. He had heard them every night of his life. A few months ago, he had nearly met them, but he had no idea of what they looked like. He realized he didn’t have a first clue of what he was about to face.
Were there many kinds of beasts or just one? How big would they be? Could they climb trees? As the shadows lengthened, the woods, lovely in the afternoon, appeared sinister. He felt like the Terrors could be hiding anywhere, ready to jump out from behind a rock or tree at any moment. He had spent his life in the woods and seen them through all conditions. He knew all their seasons; snow and rain and the heat of summer. He had simply never been out in them at night.
Everyone knew that the rules changed in the dark.
In the early days of the village, people had been attacked in the night. Many had been killed before they had come together to build great fires and walls to keep out the night.
Fires.
He fixated on that. Maybe he couldn’t build walls or a giant fire, but he could build a small one. He didn’t know if it would be enough. Either way, there was no other choice. He had to try something.
Try or die, right? He thought of Benja and felt a pang through his chest.
Would the villagers release Benja now that he was gone? Or would Conna make his family pay for Illya’s crimes?
He closed his eyes. He didn’t think Conna would do that; he was almost sure.
He shivered, shaking himself out of his paralysis. There was nothing he could do about it, and if he didn’t find a way to make it through the night, there never would be.
The yipping was growing louder. He searched for a defensible place for his fire, moving quickly, gathering the driest kindling he could find as he went.
He piled his kindling in an open area beside a tall rock outcropping. The light was nearly gone, and he shook off his habitual fear, forcing himself to keep working despite the urge to run for the safety of the gates. Samuel had said once that he could be the master of many things if he had the will to do it. He wasn’t the master of anything really, but he was the only one out here who could be the master of himself. That was all there was left.
He took his knife out of his belt, thankful that he was in the habit of always wearing it. Carefully, he shaved kindling from a dry branch and made a little pile of it under a pyramid of small sticks. He struck the blade on a piece of flint stone.
His hands were shaking, and it took several attempts to make a big enough spark. Finally, his strikes sparked and caught the kindling. Illya dropped quickly onto the ground and pursed his lips to blow gently on the little coal. It flared hot, and the tiny flame shortened, gathering itself around its source. Then, in the absence at the end of his breath, it leaped up to catch the bigger sticks of the pyramid.