The Glass Arrow(79)

I’m not completely unarmed. I have Brax, crouched beside me, growling and snapping his jaw.

“Stay away from him!” I shout, careful not to use his name so they won’t know he’s talked to me. “Don’t you touch him!”

They don’t look to each other. They keep staring at me, playing perfect mute Drivers.

The girl with the buckskin dress draws my gaze. Her lips are pulled down in a thin frown, and when she moves through the parting crowd, I can see she’s limping. Boards have been fastened to her ankles to keep them perfectly straight. She hunches over a crutch latched to her right forearm. The knife gleams from her right hand.

A shuffle to my right. I spin, ready to defend, but the wavy-haired boy does not move any closer. He’s still holding the loaded bow, though now it’s aimed at the ground. He’s staring hard at me as though trying to read my mind. I can see his teeth grinding in his sun-weathered jaw.

The air seems to be thinning. I am aware of every movement of those around me.

“Leave them be.”

I jerk back towards the strained sound.

Kiran’s conscious, leaning against the shale cliff behind the girl with the boards on her legs. A sob bursts up my throat when I see he’s okay, and that his face is flushed with life, not illness. His shirt is open and his wound has been redressed.

“Kiran,” I whisper. He sends me a weak smile and I nearly buckle to my knees. I don’t care how he’s better, I’m just glad he is.

The girl’s eyes twitch in response to his words. Her mouth drops open in silent question. Absently, she worries the metal shank in her hand.

“She’s one of ours, Kyna.”

Kyna, the one he spoke of in his fever dreams. I glance to the braces on her legs. I’ve a soft spot for fragile women, he once said when he’d spoken of Daphne. I wonder if he was talking about this girl. Kyna.

Whispers. The Drivers are speaking to each other. It takes a full beat to realize he’s talking about me.

“She’s got Driver blood?” Kyna asks. Her voice is like his, but higher. It takes me a moment to decipher the words.

“No, I don’t,” I say. My ma conceived me in the city; it’s why she was marked. My father was some faceless buyer. A Magnate.

“She says she’s not,” says Kyna.

Kiran must be lying. He’s probably told them this to free me.

“She doesn’t know,” he says.

“It’s the outcast!” someone calls from behind me.

The eyes of every Driver, Kyna included, whip back to beyond the fire, to where Lorcan approaches, knives braced in both hands. They do not threaten him with their weapons, but seem frightened all the same.

I flex my fingers then pull them into fists, stronger with Lorcan near, but surprised by his presence. I hadn’t even heard him sneak up.

“What is going on?” Kyna rubs a hand over her forehead. “What is he doing here? And how do you know she’s like us?”

“Her stories,” he says. “She talks about the outcast. She calls him by name.”

“I…” I shift from one foot to the other, not sure what I’m supposed to say to get us out of this. “It’s Lorcan,” I finally say.

“Who told you his name?” Kiran asks.

“My ma.”

Kiran takes a slow, pained breath. “She wouldn’t know who he was unless someone told her, and the only one the outcast ever said he told was the girl he met in the city.”

They all seem to know who he’s talking about. Grim looks are exchanged, and all of a sudden I feel like I’m on display, like I’m on the auction stage again.

Shades of doubt slide over me. If Lorcan was my father, my ma would have told me.

“Of course,” I say. “Lorcan’s my father.” I’m just playing along, but all the memories are flashing before me. Lorcan teaching me to use a bow, to set snares. His long walks with my ma. The worried anger when I’d broken my arm falling from his horse. The blueberry pie on my birthday.

I turn to glance at Lorcan and find he’s already staring at me, his hand on his throat. His mouth opens and he works to swallow. And then, so quiet I barely hear it, he croaks out one single word:

“Mine.”

I stare at him. That one word—the only word I’ve ever heard him say—changes everything. I don’t care what kind of game we’re all playing anymore.

“I’m not yours,” I say.

“Would it be so awful?” Kiran mutters.

“Yes!”

He doesn’t understand. It’s okay for a Trader to come and go as he pleases, to have no obligation to help or stay. It’s not okay for family. What would have happened if I had disappeared whenever I wanted? Who would have been there to do the hunting, to keep the twins safe?

I’m trying to meet Kiran’s gaze to figure out what I should say next, but he won’t look at me. He’s staring at the ground, and even from here I can see his jaw flexing under the skin.

Kyna adjusts her place on the crutch, and in her hand I see a spoon, not a knife. She pulls a bottle filled with green syrup from her hip pocket. Medicine.

“You’re a doctor,” I say.

In Kiran’s fever dreams he had said that Kyna needed a doctor, but he’d been delirious. Maybe he’d meant that she is a doctor.