The Silver Ship and the Sea by Brenda Cooper

Author:Brenda Cooper [Cooper, Brenda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781429951869
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2007-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

War Stories and Success

By the time we found an old stump to use for a mounting block, the light had shaded to the soft gold that heralded dusk. The pack hebras refused to be ridden, standing stock still and ignoring all forms of encouragement either Alicia or Joseph could think of to offer. Stripes let me ride her bareback, although she swiveled her head around and looked at me balefully, as if telling me off for forgetting to drag tack up here. She took over the lead in Sugar Wheat’s absence, herding the other two. I pretty much hung on and let her trot up and down our tiny line. Between bouncing on Stripes’s backbone and running our conversations with Jenna over and over in my head, I felt dazed and bruised by the time we reached the edge of the meadow. There were so many questions I hadn’t had time to ask. About our parents. About us.

Tom waited for us by the new, closer high-line. The hebras called greetings as soon as they were in sight of each other, dancing and perking their ears forward. A sigh of relief escaped as I finally slid from Stripes’s back to stand on wobbly legs next to Tom. He looked around, as if expecting Jenna.

I answered his unspoken question. “She’s gone again. But we wouldn’t have found the hebras without her.”

“Where were they?” Tom asked.

I waved toward the wall of forest marching toward the crater rim. “Up there. It took a while.”

Tom and I helped Joseph and Alicia tie up the pack animals, and then we all dragged into the cabin to find Kayleen standing over a stew pot that smelled of djuri and pol-roots and herbs. Sweat beaded her forehead as she lifted a spoon for a taste, smiling at us. My stomach rolled with hunger. We’d run after Jenna, scrambled up the wash, been in and out of the cave, and herded the hebras home with nothing more than water and pongaberries since breakfast.

Kayleen spooned up bowls of her stew, a proud grin on her face. “I made it all myself. It kept me from wishing I was with you.”

“Mmmmm.” I took a steaming bowl from her hands and set it on the floor in front of me. “I wish you had been there. We’re exhausted.”

“You look like it. Your hands are all scratched up.”

Alicia grimaced tiredly. “We had to scramble up a lot of rocks and gravel.”

I shot her a warning glance. We didn’t want to give away the location of the cave. Her eyes flicked away from mine, but her grimace told me she understood. “They were hiding in a bunch of trees halfway to the rim,” she added. “It took a long time to find them.”

Tom frowned, looking confused. “Everything is so muddy it should have been easy to track them.”

I choked down my bite of the spicy stew, swallowing a pol-root almost whole. “Hard to see where they’d gone through the grassy parts and the water.” The little lies adding up made me squirm.

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