Kingdom of Monsters - Empire of Sand Series

Chapter 5.1

At daybreak, a god-fist punched the ground.

The tremble shook them from their beds, moaning and crying. Rocks clattered down slides and trees swayed. Many cast eyes to the pale horizon and spit at the ground. That the army had angered a god surprised no one, and they spit to hide their breath from that god, should the wrath turn to a particular offender.

Lunsa's usual tormentors avoided her. Whispers filled the ominous air.

As the rest of the army broke from camp, she deliberately lingered, tying her pack more tightly, scrounging hardier cloth from those unlucky to pass in the night.

A soldier ordered her heavy cauldron on another conscript, leaving her hands free to collect plants according to the under-general's bidding.

Awareness lifted her crown. This was a sign, truly, of Eleana.

Because she needed movement today, Lunsa unpicked the bitter-thorn from her hemlines, pricking her tiny finger. No sweet root softened the injury; she had used it all. She bit the sore and spit out the fester until she tasted blood.

The slowest conscripts trudged ahead of her, eyes on the churned muck. She kept pace, careful to lag farther and farther into the brush. At the army's tail, passing the denuded hillside where her village had rested on their journey, Lunsa sought her braided corpse-flower offerings in the foreign earth.

Bless me, father-ka, that I will survive today with your flight.

He had left immediately after the disappearance of her brother, their first misfortune, to seek the Blue Fin elder, who was said to have faced down a hundred blood curses. While her father-ka was away, Mara had been attacked, and their mother-ka compounded the injury by accusing Demian.

In retaliation for her family's growing nest of lies, Cumulus blew a rare sickness onto her father-ka, which usually afflicted the very old or the very young.

As he struggled to return home to his family, according to his travel companions, his last thoughts focused on his children. He had been more fearful of their dire condition than of his own.

Mislead your daughter's persecutors and lead her to freedom.

The road turned on itself and slid down the hillside to Stone Bridge arching over the Hundred Strokes River at a swift, deep channel.

The army's footsteps forked away from the river, curving ever upward into the frosted foothills and shale cliffs that eventually formed the impassable Blade Mountains. Their mailed boots mulched vegetation into mashed earth, forging a trail where one had not existed for a hundred generations.

At the fork in the road, the very last soldier leaned against his staff, stretched out an injured foot, and yawned.

He was waiting for Lunsa. Or, he was resting? No, waiting.

She strolled to a large patch of plains thistle growing in the middle of the fork. A showy plant with large blossoms that danced like rattles in springtime, it made noise as she sliced into old stalks.

The soldier yawned again, turned away from her, and limped after the army. His back grew smaller in the distance.

Lunsa's heart threw itself against her ribs, a bird whose cage had been left open. She gripped swathes of the thistle and backed away from the soldiers' path.

Once that very last soldier disappeared from view, she casually turned the other way at the fork and meandered down the hill toward the river . . . around the curve. . . She turned and strode for the bridge. No one was coming after her. She had escaped.