33
Blue did not say a word to them. Instead, he knelt beside Half-ear and whispered in the larger gremlin’s remaining lug. They bickered back and forth for a while, yet Ignatius never wavered once, his eyes flicking between the gremlins surrounding them.
After what felt like an age, Half-ear appeared to admit defeat. He sighed deeply and snapped some orders at the surrounding warriors. They paused as if confused, until slowly but surely they lowered their blowpipes.
In response, Fletcher directed Ignatius to get off Half-ear’s chest, but to keep the tail poised above. They were still very much at the gremlins’ mercy and he did not want to give up the last card he had left to play just yet.
‘Thank you,’ Fletcher said, bowing his head to Blue.
Again Blue ignored them, pushing his way out of the crowd and into the jungle. Strangely, the other gremlins did the same, disappearing into the burrows. Only Half-ear remained, staring at them with hatred in his eyes.
Sweat trickled down Fletcher’s back as he waited, trying to ignore the gremlin’s gaze. He noticed the sun was near setting and wondered how long they had been unconscious. If it had been a few hours, it mattered less. But if they had been unconscious for more than a day, they might miss their rendezvous with the other teams.
‘So … what do we do now?’ Sylva mumbled from behind him, recovering first from the darts.
She shuffled closer and laid her head on his shoulder, though whether it was the paralysis, exhaustion or something more, he couldn’t tell. It mattered little to him why. He had not been so close to another person in a long time, and it felt right.
‘Nothing,’ Fletcher whispered.
He laid his own head on hers and they sat there, watching the setting sun filter through the leaves above. Despite their situation, his pounding heart stilled. Only Half-ear’s unwavering gaze tarnished a perfect moment.
‘You’re bleeding,’ Sylva said suddenly.
She lifted her head, and Fletcher saw a red stain on her temple.
‘Your cheek,’ she murmured, gently touching it with her fingers.
It was where the goblin spear had nicked him. The wound was deep, but somehow it did not hurt. A side-effect of the paralysis, perhaps.
‘Let me,’ she said, tracing a heart symbol on his face. It tingled strangely, as her mana merged with his skin. Then the cool, soothing pulse of healing energy began to seal his wound.
‘Thanks,’ Fletcher said.
She watched his face, her lips half-parted with concentration. Her wide blue eyes met his, and he felt a sudden urge to lean in closer.
Then Cress groaned from behind them, half lifting herself off the ground. Her elbows gave way and she collapsed in a spatter of mud, her face planting in Othello’s backside.
‘Uhhh, little help here,’ she moaned, her voice muffled by his trousers. His moment with Sylva was gone, but still, Fletcher couldn’t help but laugh aloud. He grabbed the back of Cress’s jacket and pulled her off.
‘Bloody hell,’ she gasped, taking a breath of fresh air. ‘I thought I was gonna suffocate in the worst possible way.’
Despite the headbutt to the behind, Othello snored even louder, completely oblivious to the world.
‘And what about the blue gremlin?’ Sylva asked, her face suddenly hard once again. ‘What are you not telling us?’
‘So … I might have rescued a gremlin from the fighting pits on the front lines …’ Fletcher admitted, avoiding her eyes. He had preferred the girl he had been with a minute ago, but the wall she kept between them had returned once more.
‘You what?’ Cress exclaimed, so loudly that a gremlin poked its head out of the nearest burrow. She tossed a pebble at it and it ducked back once again.
‘What do you mean, “rescued”? Sylva asked, narrowing her eyes.
‘I released him. Back into the jungle,’ Fletcher murmured, and felt himself redden with a strange mix of embarrassment and shame.
‘You’re joking, right?’ Cress said, hauling herself upright with a grunt. ‘Are you a complete idiot?’
Sylva was even less impressed:
‘We spend the past two days trying to avoid detection and you send them a damned messenger?’
‘Well, he just saved our lives, so I guess it’s a good thing I did!’ Fletcher said, crossing his arms stubbornly.
‘They came looking for us precisely because you let him escape,’ Sylva replied, curling her lip with anger. ‘They’ve probably been tracking us for days.’
Fletcher bit back a retort. What he had done was wrong, in almost every way. But watching that little creature refuse to give in against insurmountable odds … he couldn’t have let it die. He would never have been able to forgive himself if he had. At the same time, he wondered if he would have made the same decision if he had known gremlins could speak.
‘What’s done is done,’ Fletcher said, shaking his head. ‘We can discuss this later. Right now we need to work out what’s going on and how we’re going to …’
He caught Half-ear’s gaze and lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘… get out of here.’
A voice came from the hole nearest to them before the others could reply.
‘You is not needing to do that,’ it said. It had the same fluty tone of the voices of other gremlins, yet the intonation was clearer, if a little stilted and formal. A strange animal trotted out of the entrance, with Blue riding it bareback.
The creature looked a lot like a mountain hare, were it not for its slightly extended snout, shorter ears and long, coltish legs. It reminded Fletcher of what a hare might look like if it had the skeleton of an antelope and the hind-legs of a desert kangaroo.
‘A mara,’ Jeffrey breathed. ‘I’ve never seen one in the flesh.’
‘Is that a demon?’ Cress asked, her eyes widening at the sight.
‘No, it is a real animal,’ Jeffrey replied, keeping his voice low. ‘But an uncommon one.’
Blue halted the mara with a short tug of the fur on the back of its neck.
‘How do you speak our language?’ Sylva demanded, her voice laced with suspicion.
Blue dismounted and crouched beside Half-ear. He shook his head sadly.
‘Many gremlins is learning it from humans, when we is captured. Many gremlins is escaping the pits. Me friend here, he is played dead after fighting a dog. He is being left to rot in a grave with the corpses. You is understanding why he wants gremlins to kill you, even if it is meaning death from your demon.’
‘You learned to speak from that crass ringmaster?’ Fletcher said sceptically.
‘No. I is learning from another. A noblewoman, who is living in a cage. The human slaves are not being allowed to speak with she, so she taught I in secret. It was I who is being in charge of bringing woman food and water, changing woman’s straw.’
‘You know Captain Cavendish?’ Sylva exclaimed.
‘I do not know her name. She never trusted I enough to tell I. But she told I of you lands. How you hate the orcs like we. I did not believe the other gremlins, that you kill we like vermin.’
He trailed off for a moment, a wistful look in his enormous eyes.
‘She is losing her mind, in the later years. So I is escaping and coming here. Then I is being captured when I is scouting. Bad men put I in pit. Then you save I.’
It was a lot to process. But one glaring question remained unanswered.
‘Where the hell are we?’ Fletcher demanded.