A Tune to Make Them Follow by Lawrence T.A

Author:Lawrence, T.A.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: T. A. Lawrence
Published: 2023-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

I was the first to leave the council meeting.

Apparently, Elias was the second.

I heard him coming from halfway down the cascading ramps.

It was my own fault for not taking the ladders this time.

“Is your life really so important that you must sprint everywhere you go?” he asked, huffing as he caught up to me, his hand still clutching his side.

“I don’t know. You tell me. Was it all that important when I rescued you from shoveling cow manure?” I asked, whipping around to face him and accidentally smacking myself in the face with my curls in the process.

Elias laughed, then winced, squeezing his side. “Please don’t make a fool of yourself, Pipe. You’ll burst my stitches.”

“You going to tell me what happened to you?” I asked, eyeing the spot as if I could examine the wound through his thick tunic.

“Didn’t plan on it.”

“Why not? Afraid I’d make fun of you?”

“Something like that.”

“I take it you didn’t recruit the Umbra?”

Elias brought a finger to his lips and shushed me. I tried not to smile, but that was a feat of faelike strength when Elias was around. While people like James poured their rage into...well, more rage, and people like Van beat theirs into submission in the training ring, Elias had suffered more than most of us, and yet he was always trying to get a smile out of me. Out of everyone.

He was pretty good at it too.

The way his eyes wrinkled when he grinned was more infectious than consumption.

“I didn’t. But I do have a pretty gnarly scar to show for my efforts.”

“Great.”

“What do you have to show for yours?”

“I broke my arm. Well, someone else broke my arm.”

“It doesn’t look broken.”

“That’s because it healed.”

“Remind me, why were you trying to compare your healed arm to my collapsed lung?”

I went to nudge him in the ribs, as was our custom, but thought better of it. Freshly inflated lung, and all.

“When did you get so considerate?” he asked. “I’m not sure I like it.”

“I wouldn’t test me if I were you.”

“So are we going to talk about what happened in there?”

I almost stopped in place, but then I remembered I was putting as much space as possible between myself and Bronger, so I persisted down the ramp. “No.”

“Alright then. If we aren’t going to talk about it, I will talk about it.”

“I’d rather you not.”

“I’m aware. Anyway, what’s going on between you and Bronger? I’ve never seen so much tension between the two of you.”

“I don’t know. Maybe James has been weaseling up to him while I’ve been gone.”

Elias flared his nose at the name. “James has been doing that for years, now. I doubt a couple of months made a difference.”

I shrugged. “Bronger and I had a disagreement about where the newest recruit should be placed. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Elias raised an eyebrow, which I could barely see under his shaggy mess of hair.

“What?” I shoved him this time. Hard.

He bit his lip to swallow a yelp. “Ouch, Pipe. I didn’t say anything.

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