To Best the Boys(58)

“Says the dead jerk in our camp who ate those berries that your friend gave him last night.” He yanks Seleni’s head backward and waves the berries nearer her closed mouth.

Her eyes go wide as her breathing quickens and her foot stamps around to connect with either his man jewels or his shin. He dodges and moves two of his fingers up, as if to plug her nose. “A life for a life. Or you can give us the boat.”

Seleni seeks out my gaze. Her expression is a mix of fear and a confidence that he’s bluffing. She drops her eyes to his hands to indicate how bad they’re shaking. I frown. She’s right. This kid’s never killed anything in his life—and from the look of him, he’s just as terrified as the rest of us. I bite my lip and calculate the chances if Seleni and I are wrong.

“Fine, take it.” Lute lifts his hands in the air and steps away, then looks at Sam and me to do the same. “We’ll find another way.”

“But—”

“We’ll find another way,” Lute says to Sam.

“Good choice,” the kid holding Seleni says. He tips his head at the two boys with him, who run ahead and promptly push past us to confiscate the boat. When they have it full in the water, the kid drags Seleni backward until he reaches it, then releases her and the berries before he jumps up to hoist himself aboard.

The three loosen the sails, and the wind whips and fills them, and within seconds they are following Vincent and Germaine and Rubin, whose boat is already bobbing on the waves thirty feet out. And sixty feet beyond them, the first vessel full of the other boys is reaching the quarter point between us and the island.

Sam lets out a low curse and scans the lake’s edge. “We could’ve taken ’em.”

Seleni nods even as she rubs her arms to stop from trembling. “He was more scared than me.”

“That might have made him more dangerous—simply because it made him incompetent,” I say.

From the corner of my eye, I see Beryll. He’s been standing in the same place for two minutes, staring at Seleni. He rubs his neck, then looks at me before he turns back to the water and promptly tugs off his shirt. “Guess that means we get to swim.”

“There are sirens in the lake,” Lute and I say at the same time.

“I suggest we salvage this wood for a raft.” Sam indicates the boat taking on water.

“Won’t that take too long?” Seleni stares at Beryll’s bare chest, which is surprisingly more muscular than one would’ve thought.

I raise a brow. Then turn back to scanning the bank and then the campsite—with its smoking coals, white tent, and black-painted question that’s too tiny to see but keeps asking, “What do you want?”

The tent sides ripple in the wind that’s picking up. I can almost hear the ropes and white linen snap from all the way down here.

Like a sail from one of the boats we should be on.

I squint. “Lute. What would happen if we attached a sail to a person rather than a boat?”

He follows my gaze and studies the tent with a look of surprise. I can see the wheels turning in his brain. After a moment he nods. “That actually might work. If you three can do some calculations, Sam and I can handle the tents.”

Eighteen minutes later, we’re standing at the top of the hill. Seleni, Beryll, and I are estimating the size of the sails and how long the rope tethering them needs to be, while Sam and Lute are busy stripping down three tents, two of which they dragged over from the other encampment. Once finished, they rig the ropes and sheets together with nautical knots until they have what appear to be a cross between kites and those festival balloons we saw last night.

“We’re doing this by size and weight.” Lute holds out a rope to me. “Sam and I will each take one of you smaller kids. Beryll, you’ll have to go on your own. Think you can handle that?”

To Beryll’s credit, he pushes back any expression of fear, simply tilts his head, and begins tying the rope Sam hands him beneath his arms and around his chest. I watch this braver version of him. What’s gotten into him? Apparently Seleni’s thinking the same, because when I glance over, her face is alight with admiration. So much so that I nudge her to knock it off and let Sam tie her to himself.

Once Lute has lashed the balloon-sail to his and my rope harness, he fastens me to himself—my back to his chest, my waist to his waist, one of my thighs to his. He tugs and pulls long enough to ensure we’re locked in tight, then leans down to my ear. “Ready, Rhen Tellur? Match your steps to mine.”

I’m about to ask what he means when we’re suddenly running and tripping down the steep hill—testing to see how fast and from what part of the sharp incline we have to launch for the sheets to catch the perfect gust of wind. It’s a lot higher and faster than one would guess, which means we end up face-planting into the cliffed slope of grass more times than I care to talk about. As do the others.

But by the time the sun is high enough for its warmth to flood the small valley, we’ve figured it out enough to believe this might actually work. That or we might die.

“Fingers crossed,” Lute mutters. And with that, we take a final run beside Sam and Seleni and Beryll. It’s magic the way it happens. How, just before we hit the second ledge of the mountain slope, the air currents catch the sails and yank them up behind us, and then they’ve lifted us off the ground and we are soaring ten feet off the grass, and then over the mountainside—and then out over the water.