The Girl from Everywhere (The Girl from Everywhere #1)(84)

“No, Dad. I’m not leaving you.”

The captain turned his haggard face to me and smiled like a sunrise.

“So, Captain?” Kashmir scanned the street beyond the grounds and the wide lawn ahead. The shadows were sharp as knives under the spotlight of the moon. “Where did he go?”

“I lost him,” Slate said. “But he dropped the gold.” The captain jerked his chin toward the center of the lawn; there, stark in the light of the moon, perhaps two ships’ lengths away from where we stood, was the bottomless bag.

I sucked air through my teeth. Where was Mr. Hart hiding? In the shadow of the low stone wall? Under the dark crowd of hedges across the way? Or perhaps in the deep coves behind the limestone columns of the side of the cathedral? I searched, but I saw no one. “It’s a trap,” I said, my blood pounding in my ears—or was that the sound of pursuers, closing in? “He’s waiting for us to go for the bag so he can pick us off.”

“Yeah, well,” the captain said. “If we wait here, someone else will shoot us!”

“Let’s all go back to the ship, Dad.” I plucked at his sleeve. “Please.”

“And leave the map?”

Kashmir turned sharply at a sound I had not heard. “Captain—”

“Hart has the map, Dad, and I don’t think he’s bringing it back!”

“They want the gold,” he said stubbornly. “They’ll make him give up the map to get it.”

“Not if he kills you first!”

“We’ll send one of the soldiers—”

“We have to move, Captain,” Kashmir said urgently.

Slate rounded on him. “Not without the bag!”

Kashmir hesitated only a second before he sped out from the shadow of the tree.

I grabbed at his sleeve but missed; I called after him, but he paid me no mind as he ran across the moonlit grass, ducking, dodging, zigzagging back and forth. He rolled past the bag and came up with it in his hands as the report of a rifle crashed in my ear.

I screamed—something stung my cheek—and one of the clay soldiers beside me exploded into potsherds. But Kashmir was already coming back, and he threw the bag to Slate and barreled into me, pushing me to the other side of the tree and shielding my body with his, pressed close. He had run hard, but I was the one panting. He cupped my face in his hand, his thumb brushing my cheek gently. “Shh. It’s all right.”

Slate grabbed the bag and crouched beside us, his eyes darting about like fish. “Where did that come from?” He pointed his gun this way and that.

Without taking his eyes off mine, Kashmir nodded upward, toward one of the looted houses across the street—just visible through the trees that lined the grounds. “Top floor. Third window.”

The glass had been smashed, and the shutter hung at a crazy angle, wreathed in a pall of gun smoke. I pulled away from Kash and squinted, but all I could see was a deeper shadow, and the long barrel of a rifle glinting in the moonlight. “Is it Hart?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Either way . . .” The captain fired three shots off toward the house—they went wide, but the barrel withdrew behind the shutter. “Let’s go.”

He set off at a run, and Kash followed, pulling me along beside him, keeping the tree and his body between me and the shooter. The soldiers formed up behind us, offering additional protection.

We marched north then, and east, out of the city at a quick pace. The soldier’s feet, rising and falling in rhythm with the drum the general beat, and the sonorous tone of the conch shell were the only sounds in the nearby streets—although far off behind us, the night air jangled with the racket of raised voices, shouted orders, someone wailing. And ahead, the murmur of fear, the soft click of locks, the clatter of shutters closing.

Blake was well out of it, although I could only imagine the row that would ensue when Mr. Hart got home. Although perhaps neither Blake nor his father would speak a word of it. Blake had known of his father’s involvement for a while now. Perhaps they would keep pretending.

Soon we left the city behind and entered the dark roads of the valley. We passed the beautiful estates of the wealthy, which gave way, higher up, to the little grass houses, their cook fires still smoking. We only saw one rider, already facedown on the ground, his horse stamping nearby and whickering gently. The light we carried was the only light on earth, although above us, the brightness of the moon shamed the stars.

We left the road and found the winding path where Blake had shown me his idea of paradise. The smell of ancient loam rose up beneath our tramping feet. It was darker under the trees, and sinister; the path more treacherous, with fallen trees trying to trip us, vines winding around our ankles, and branches ripping at our sleeves. Once, something rustled in the undergrowth, and my heart jumped in my chest, but it was only a rat eating guavas.

As the path narrowed, the warriors began to crush the undergrowth, and I called a halt in the clearing where the village had once stood. “We should leave them here,” I said. “They’ll leave a trail a mile wide if we bring them to the cave. Put out their torches.” Kashmir sprang to, taking the torch from the general and extinguishing it. Eerily, the other warriors followed suit, all at once, and stood in silence, their red eyes glowing in the night like scattered coals from a dying fire.