Page 202 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER NINE

Sam

A hand on my shoulder drags me out of the dreamspace. Maldek, and he is shaking me urgently, trying to rouse me. I blink, sleep fogged and confused, then push myself upright.

“What…?” I start, but Maldek shoves a hand over my mouth, holding a finger to his own lips to tell me to be quiet.

As my senses return to me, I start to hear the sound of commotion. Raised voices and loud bangs and the grunt and smack of flesh meeting flesh. Only just coming to fully awake as I am, it takes another moment before I realise what the sounds mean.

We’re under attack.

Maldek sees the realisation in my eyes and nods, removing his hand from my mouth and handing me my pack.

In it, he shoves my furs, and some food, then holds it out for me.

I pull on my shoes, still dressed in my nightgown, then take the pack onto my shoulders.

Maldek nods, then leads me out of the tent.

It’s still very dark out, the only light that of some torches moving around further out in the trees.

I don’t know if they belong to us or whoever is attacking, but Maldek doesn’t lead us towards them, anyway.

Instead, he follows the path of the river, sticking close to the bank.

Unlike when I watched the river from Dazzik’s outpost, the waterway doesn’t gleam silver.

Instead, it’s a torrent of black so dark, it’s almost as though it sucks in what light there is.

I can hear the water rushing by over the sound of our footsteps, but I can’t see far enough down from the bank to find its surface.

Maldek can see in the dark better than me, though, and he leads me with sure steps along the bank, keeping us both ducked low. Despite the fact that he’s twice my size, he’s much quieter than me, and I wince at every heavy footstep I take.

My heart pounds in my chest and I don’t know if it’s more fear or exertion causing it.

I knew there was a chance there would be hostile raskarrans out in the forest - we went to Walset because of the Cliff Top tribe, after all.

But surrounded by Walset’s brothers, and with Maldek sleeping at my side, I’ve never felt anything less than safe.

It never occurred to me to worry about something like this.

I remember the hushed words Maldek and Walset’s tribe exchanged this morning. Remember the concerned look on their faces. They were worried about something. Were there signs of other raskarrans out there? Had they seen something in the forest that I couldn’t?

From behind us somewhere, a triumphant yell.

Maldek squeezes my arm harder and starts running, dragging me behind him.

I move my feet as fast as I can, but my legs are only short and I don’t have the fitness he has from running through these trees all his life.

I’m gasping for air in seconds, my legs burning from the effort of running.

“I can’t,” I huff, nearly falling flat on my face as my feet snag on a root. “I can’t.”

Maldek seems to understand, for he swings me up into his arms, carrying me pack and all. He runs faster, and I have to close my eyes against the things I can only half see coming out of the darkness towards us.

A shout and a crash, and then we’re tumbling, a tangle of legs and arms. I crack my knee on something, a sharp pain lancing up through my leg, making me cry out, and then my head smacks into a rock, my vision turning white for a blinding second, before all I can really see or feel or hear is my pulse jack-hammering inside my skull.

Get up , I think, willing my suddenly sluggish limbs to do something, anything. Get up!

“Sam!” Maldek’s voice sounds very far away.

At last, my brain finds the right signals to send to my arms, and I drag myself upright, squinting through the darkness and my throbbing head to see him.

Eyes glint back at me in the darkness. More than one pair of eyes.

And then, with a snarl, they all turn on each other.

“Sam!” Maldek calls again. “Sam walk. Walk Sam. Walk.”

It’s not the right word, but it’s the only one he has. One of the few taught to him by Sally before we left. A good one to know when we were going to be walking a long way together. But I don’t need to be able to see him to know that what he really means right now is ‘run’.

I scramble to my feet, dizziness nearly knocking me sideways into the river.

I right myself, waiting a moment for my feet to steady under me, and then I start running, aiming in a vaguely straight line, my hands stretched out ahead of me so I don’t run headlong into a tree trunk.

Adrenaline floods me, powering me forwards when everything else in me wants to give up. Lie down.

Keep moving. Just keep moving.

I picture Dazzik somewhere on the path ahead of me, anxiously running to find me.

Linasha.

My next breath is half sob as I remember the way wonder shaped his mouth as he said that word to me. Called me his mate.

I am not dying in this forest tonight. Not when I’ve just got him to accept that I’m real, to name me as his.

Little by little, my eyes are starting to adjust, shapes resolving out of the gloom.

The river is still an inky black line, and I’m careful to stay away from it.

The uneven ground moves and slides beneath me, my ankles turning, my balance tipping.

I stagger from one tree trunk to the next, pushing myself along against them, hoping and hoping as loud as I can that Maldek and the others are okay, that they’ll win this fight and come for me.

My foot snags on something. Another root, another stone.

I tumble, my knee taking a second blow. I catch myself, skinning my palms as I push myself back to standing, stumbling onwards.

Each step I take, pain slices through my knee, the joint growing stiffer, more swollen, every time I force it to take my weight.

Before long, I’m limping heavily, barely above walking pace.

But it’s my head that’s the real problem. My vision is swimming, the pulsing, throbbing pain at my temple getting louder and louder. I touch my hand to my head, as if I could press that pain back down, and my fingers come away sticky. I don’t need light to know that it’s blood.

Footsteps crash through the trees behind me.

I turn, knowing I won’t be able to outrun them.

My only hope is that it’s Maldek or one of the others come to find me.

A figure steps out of the trees - I can just about pick out the shape of them, but with no light to see their features by, I can’t tell who it is.

The fact that they don’t say my name, don’t try to reassure me, has me feeling nervous, but I hold on to hope that they’re just catching their breath, even as I cast my eyes around me for some kind of weapon.

A fallen branch light enough for me to swing.

But I can’t make out the branches from the roots. It all just looks like a tangle in the dark.

Then another raskarran comes running up to us, this one carrying a torch - a tree branch burning at one end.

The light it casts into the space around us reveals the features of the two raskarrans, and they’re not faces I know.

Worse, they look on me with a hunger in their eyes.

The same kind of look the Cliff Top assholes gave us before they attacked.

Behind me, the river continues rushing. I think of Ellie and Anghar, diving into the river and letting it carry them away from the Cliff Top tribe.

It sounded so dashing and romantic when they told the story, but now, the reality of letting myself fall into that dark, dark water…

I can’t do it. Even if it were daytime, even if my head wasn’t spinning, if I fell in that water, I would drown.

I unhook my pack from my shoulders, gripping one shoulder strap in my hand.

The raskarrans leer at me as they come closer, raising their torch to better get a look at me.

I squint against the sudden brightness, pain spiking into my skull.

Black starts to creep in at the edges of my vision and I blink it back, biting my tongue in a bid to stay conscious.

The first raskarran says something, and the one with the torch lowers it dangerously close to my face. I have visions of my hair catching. My wild, ridiculous hair that’s taken so long to grow out. The thought of it going up in flames almost makes me sob.

Then the first raskarran reaches for me.

I don’t hesitate, swinging my bag round into him as hard as I can.

He yelps, and my collection of stones - safely tucked into a side pocket - scatters on the floor.

We both stagger, him taking a single step backwards before recovering himself, my blow more of a surprise than something damaging.

I drop like my legs have been swept out from underneath me, all my remaining strength spent.

I flip forward, falling to the ground next to my pack.

Several lumps dig into my chest, my legs.

My stones, I realise, my pretty stones. I reach out, patting my hands across the ground as I hunt for them, as if finding them all won’t just put my collection back together, but the future in which they lived in my hut, making me smile every morning.

That future seems so improbable now.

I close my fingers round the closest one, and it happens to be the stone that matches Dazzik’s eyes. Tucked away in my bag for safekeeping overnight before I moved it back to my trouser pocket in the morning. I grip it close to my heart, try to draw strength from it.

But it’s no good. The black is stealing across my vision again and my legs feel like they don’t belong to me.

The torch-carrying raskarran is laughing at his companion, who snaps something in response, but then comes back over to me, hauling me into his arms. I kick out with my legs, but I’ve got all the strength of an insect compared to the lean, muscled raskarran manhandling me.

Still, it must annoy him, for he strikes me across my face with the back of his hand, knocking me right back to my days in the orphanage after Dad died, the matron staring down at me, berating me for whatever transgression I’d committed this time.

A growling voice says something, and I’m wrenched back to the present as the raskarran lifts me into his arms before throwing me over his shoulder. My head throbs harder as blood rushes to it, the black spreading further, only a narrow circle of sight left to me.

Dazzik , I think, my mate’s name swimming to the front of my muddled mind.

The unfairness of all this strikes me almost as hard as the blow to my cheek. I’d just got him on side, just had him thinking I’m real.

Linasha.

I still have his stone in my hand. I grip it, thinking to use it to strike the raskarran who has me, but the only thing I can see is his back, and a blow from my puny hands, even armed with a stone, isn’t going to do more than irritate him.

Besides, my hands don’t feel very much like they’re my own right now. I think I’m gripping, but when my eyes manage to focus, I can see the loose cage my fingers make around the stone.

Hold on, I tell myself, and I’m not sure if I’m talking about the stone or consciousness. Both are slipping out of my grasp.

The last thing I see before I black out completely is the stone falling from my hand and tumbling to the floor.