Wordless by AdriAnne Strickland

Author:AdriAnne Strickland [Strickland, AdriAnne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: life, young adult, flesh, ya, gods, fiction, words, godspeakers
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2014-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

fourteen

The air hole only provided a pinpoint of light, so Khaya turned on the flashlight and shined it around the inside of the tree. Smoke was seeping through the bark and curling up to drift against the conical ceiling. She ran her hands along the wall of the trunk while I stuffed the emergency blanket in the pack and threw it over my shoulders. My arm no longer hurt. The swelling had gone down and the teeth marks were only ridges of pink flesh, but there wasn’t time to appreciate it.

“This side is hot!” Khaya said, leaping to the opposite side. She shouted some Words and the tree trunk parted before her like a curtain. Both of us went tumbling out.

Instead of the fresh air I’d been hoping for outside, smoke surrounded us, sunlight filtering through the sooty haze. And a bright red-orange glow. My first thought had been that someone had managed to track us to this exact spot and was burning us out of our tree. But instead of a small fire at the base of our trunk, a solid wall of flame blocked the way we’d come, stretching as far as I could see, bending in a ring that must have nearly encircled the forest. Even as we both watched in horror, the fire gained a few feet of ground, almost reaching the backside of our tree, which was already sizzling and smoking.

I backed away, but Khaya only stood, coughing and staring through red, watery eyes.

“They’re flushing us out,” she said. “And burning down a forest to do it.” Her eyes weren’t just watering, like mine. She was crying. “All these trees … how could you, Agonya?”

The Word of Fire.

“Khaya, come on!” I shouted, seizing her arm. The burning forest wasn’t something to callously ignore—it was actually hard to ignore—but now wasn’t the time to weep over dying trees when we were about to die ourselves. “We’ve got to run!”

I hauled her away without waiting. Soon, she no longer resisted and ran as fast as me. And we had to run fast. The fire spread like a tidal wave, spilling heat and flame behind us. If we tried to cut too far to either side, the wall closed in on us, forcing us back the other way.

“They’re herding us,” Khaya said.

A particularly wracking bout of coughing slowed me for a few seconds, but I picked up the pace again, leaping over fallen logs that wavered in the heat. “Where?”

“Probably to water, so Pavati—the Word of Water—can help protect their group. A fire this size would be difficult for Agonya to control. Fire is one of the hardest Words to manage.”

So it wasn’t only the Athenaeum’s police squad hunting us, but the Words themselves. At least two, by the sound of it: Pavati and Agonya, Water and Fire. And probably Luft, the Word of Air, since he’d been modifying the weather, and why not Herio, too? We were being herded into a trap more deadly than the blaze.

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