The Poison Season(36)

When she didn’t take the feather, he lowered it to his side and managed to sit up, running his free hand through his hair and ruffling it further.

“What’s your name?” the man asked her.

Leelo had been staring. She blinked and glanced around, sure that someone must be watching them and waiting for her to do the right thing, to sound the alarm and turn him over to the council. But she was still paralyzed with indecision. She’d heard once that the human body reacted one of three ways in an emergency: fight, flight, or freeze. And she was firmly in the third category.

“I’m Jaren Kask,” he said when she didn’t respond. She had the distinct impression he was trying to calm her, like one might a spooked animal, but it was just as likely he was distracting her, buying himself time to attack. “I recognize you, from the day of the... I suppose it was a festival of some sort. You waved to me?”

Leelo’s breath caught. He recognized her. She pulled the arrow back a fraction more.

He hurried to fill the silence. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. I know I’m not supposed to be here. This wolf...”

As the man rambled on, explaining how he’d managed to get here in the first place, Leelo was scrambling for a solution to what was turning out to be an even larger problem than she could have possibly imagined. If Sage had also seen the blood, if she knew there was an outsider on Endla and that Leelo was partially responsible...

She had to get rid of him. It was the only option. But ending his life here seemed impossible. If she hadn’t done it back when he was still on the boat, when she didn’t know his name, how could she possibly kill him now? Jaren didn’t look menacing, lying on the ground at her feet with his pupils blown wide.

He looked terrified.

Do it, Sage’s voice said in her mind. Kill him and be done with it.

If Leelo did, she’d be lauded as a hero. Even Aunt Ketty would have to respect her for taking down an outsider all on her own. The man was only a few feet from her. One shot through the throat, and he’d be finished. He was already injured; he might die anyway. She’d be doing him a favor.

Jaren Kask probably wasn’t even his real name.

Leelo glanced at his leg again and saw something pearly white flash beneath the wound. Saints, it was down to the bone. “Can you stand?”

He nodded. “I think so? I might need some help.”

Help. As in, he needed her to provide him more aid than she’d already given. Leelo didn’t know what the consequences for helping an outsider were. Isola was ruined for life just for sheltering an incantu, someone who had been born here. Pieter clearly hadn’t meant Endla harm. But though this man claimed to have been driven here by accident—by the very wolf she’d heard, in fact—how could she trust him? Of course he would try to convince her he meant no harm; she was his only hope for getting off Endla.

Jaren’s hand was out, waiting for Leelo to help him to his feet. If she refused, he might not be able to move, and she needed to get him away from the shore, away from Sage and Hollis. Sage was shrewd; if she found the outsider, she’d put together Leelo’s absence this morning and her question about the boat and know this was her fault. She wouldn’t be a hero. She’d be a traitor.

Confused, frightened, and more unsure of herself than she’d ever been, Leelo reached for him. The sight of her small hand wrapped in a large, male hand was so strange that she couldn’t stop looking at it, even as she pulled him to his feet.

As soon as he was upright, she yanked her hand free of his. “Come on,” she said, plowing into the undergrowth in the opposite direction of home. She wasn’t sure she could find the hut again. It had been an accident the first time, and she had never planned to go back. But she had to hide him until she could cobble together a way out of this mess, and Isola’s secret hideaway was the only place she could think of right now.

For all his bewilderment, Jaren must have sensed she wasn’t trying to kill him, because he followed.

After a few minutes, she glanced over her shoulder. “I’m Leelo.” She added, “You really shouldn’t be here,” in case it wasn’t obvious.

He gave a low, ironic chuckle, doing his best to limp along behind her. “Believe me, I know.”

“You said the wolf chased you here? That doesn’t make sense. Wolves don’t come to Endla.”

He paused to rest against a tree, his brow beaded with sweat. “I can’t explain it. I found the lake by accident, months ago now, and ever since then, since the singing, it’s like a part of me has been trying to come back.”

She had been rummaging in the undergrowth for something that would work as a walking stick, but she froze at his words.

Jaren was tall, at least a head taller than she was. She swallowed, grateful that he wasn’t big the way Hollis Harding was, in the way that felt menacing even when he was just standing there. “You heard us sing?”

She saw his throat bob as he, too, swallowed down his apprehension, as if her presence unnerved him. Then she remembered the bow slung over her shoulder, the knife at her waist. He was gravely injured, and she was supposed to kill him. He had good reason to be scared.

“That can’t be right. You would have gone into the lake, if you had.”

“That’s what everyone in Bricklebury said. But I heard it. Once at the festival, and once when you were... Well, I didn’t see anything, but it sounded like you were slaughtering animals.”