Into Dreams: A Gina Harwood Novel (Gina Harwood Series Book 3) Read online

  “Three hens,” he answered, curling up next to the tree. He was still fully armored, as he refused to take it off while they slept in the open. Gina couldn’t imagine how badly his fur itched underneath. It made her itchy just thinking about it.

  “Three?” she asked. She lay next to him, and hoped that travel would be light on the road. They were about fifty feet from the trail, but she had become an incredibly light sleeper, waking with every passing footfall.

  “Okay, four,” he amended sleepily, and smacked his lips. Within minutes, his breathing was regular and he was snoring lightly. Gina sighed and wished, not for the first time, that she could sleep as easily as he could. She gave up trying to quiet her mind and let it whirl, jumping from one worst-case scenario to the next, always ending with the lifeless blue eyes of Morgan Snyder staring up at her. She shivered. Underneath her thoughts lay the eternal, infernal buzz. Sleep didn’t come for many hours, and she lay, exhausted but awake, in the bright morning sun.

  44

  Morgan fell into an easy routine on the vaka, waking with the sun each morning and dumping himself unceremoniously out of his warm, fur-lined hammock onto the slick deck of the ship with the rest of the crew. They ate manioc chips and dried fish as they adjusted to being awake, and mused about their nonsensical dreams from the night before. Aden tended to the food and breaking down the hammocks for the day, essentially the steward of the ship, he figured. Toma and Morgan worked the nets and checked the bird traps. Morgan did little but watch for the second daily task while Toma leapt up the mast and threw down any seabirds that had become tangled in the snares. This had surprised Morgan the first time, but Toma assured him that they were excellent eating and could garner a fair trade at the markets. Nevan tended the sails and kept them on course, a zig-zagging hard tack course into the prevailing winds. “The voyages out are always longer,” Nevan explained to him one morning while Toma was in the rigging up the mast. “The winds are with us on the way home, we can sail straight.” There was usually a short burst of rain in the afternoons as a bank of dark, angry clouds seemed to form over their heads out of nothing before storming onto the land. Morgan liked the daily shower; it washed the salt off of his skin and out of his hair and beard. He was disappointed to find that the voyage to Aphorat would take seven suns, not the five he’d assumed, but the extra two days on the vaka weren't entirely unwelcome. The walking stick that Eliah had given him lay inside the hut among the baskets of shells and bartering goods; Morgan didn’t need it any longer. His legs were strong, and his arms stronger, and he generally felt pretty ready to take on whatever came next.

  “How will you travel with no money?” asked Toma on the fifth day. The sun was low in the sky, and they were sitting on the edge of the deck, waiting to check the nets a last time before the day was done.

  “I have no idea,” replied Morgan. The Men hadn’t spoken of his tale since the first night, the night it was told. He shrugged and looked out over the waves. “I’ve been lucky so far.”

  Toma chuckled. Morgan saw movement out of the corner of his eye and saw that Aden had walked out to join them. “You almost died, and then had to be nursed back to health by Eliah,” he said. “That is not lucky.”

  “I heard that,” called Nevan from across the deck. Toma glanced over nervously, but Nevan winked at him. “She can be a hard woman,” he admitted. “If you were lucky, you would have been found by Tyah instead.”

  Toma laughed heartily and clapped Morgan on the back. “That’s true. My wife would have been much kinder. But she would have cut your foot off to save your life.” He grinned. “Then you would still have to use your stick. So maybe it was lucky to have Eliah.”

  Aden poked Toma and pointed to his head, then gestured dropping something into his palm and pointed to Morgan. “Aden says you could make some money as a scribe,” interpreted Toma. Aden nodded.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” replied Morgan. “I need to get to Kadatheron as quickly as I can. Gina’s probably already there. My friend,” he reminded them.

  “I remember,” replied Toma. Aden nodded that he, too, remembered. “I will help where I can,” he added, under his breath. Aden leaned in close and pointed to himself and nodded. “Aden will, too. We believe that you are a Dreamer. Nevan is a good man, and we cannot abandon him, but we will give you our shares of the trade. It isn’t much,” he added quickly, embarrassed. “Most goes to the village, but we get a little.”

  Morgan was taken aback. He opened his mouth to make a knee-jerk protest, but stopped himself before he voiced it. He knew he wasn’t in a position to turn away charity. “Thank you,” he said. “Really, thank you.”

  “I would come with you, if I could,” said Toma, and his eyes were full of sorrow. “I grew up on tales of heroic dreamquests. I always imagined that one day I would fight alongside a Dreamer on one.” He glanced back at Nevan and lowered his eyes to the nets, mechanically lifting the nearest one hand over hand.

  Morgan joined in automatically, helping pull the net up. Toma had regaled him with a few of his mother’s tales to pass the time, and Morgan grimaced as his muscles groaned with the weight of the net. “Just trying to get home,” he grunted between pulls. “Not heroic.” With a final pull the two attached the net to the deck for inspection and began filing through the fish, pulling out the small ones and throwing them back into the water.

  “Anything can be heroic,” replied Toma, picking up several fish and walking them over to the hold. “Maybe you’ll have to battle a great lizard on your way, or a ghoul!” Toma perked up and Aden looked nauseous.

  “I hope not,” chuckled Morgan. “I don’t have a weapon.”

  Aden mimicked his hobble with the walking stick and pointed at his hand holding the imaginary staff.

  “Well, yes,” admitted Morgan. “I guess I have a stick.”

  “Better than nothing!” chirped Toma, gesturing for Morgan to help him throw the nets back into the water.

  45

  The evening came too soon for Gina, and she protested against Kyrri’s shaking. He had both paws against her shoulder and was rocking her back and forth, and he was a heavy Cat. She shrugged away from him and sat up, dizzy. She tried to say good morning, but the words were garbled. “Ugh,” she managed. They were now four days out of Calephais, and Gina doubted she had managed more than thirty minutes of uninterrupted sleep at any of their resting points. At least this day had passed a little more comfortably - there was a soft moss covering the ground here instead of the prickly underbrush or the gravelly desert sand. She watched the last rays of the sun disappear behind the trees and rubbed the crust out of her eyes.

  “I know,” agreed Kyrri, holding the waterskin out to her. She accepted it gratefully and sipped the lukewarm water. It was nearly empty, she noticed, and she screwed the lid back on tightly.

  “How far out are we, do you think?”

  “I think we should arrive at Beersheba on tomorrow’s travels. Maybe. Might be the sun after,” Kyrri replied, and his ears were flat against his head. Gina’s stomach rumbled in protest of this news, and she reached over to her pack.

  “We’re going to eat this,” she said, pulling out the tin.

  “Gina-Dreamer, that’s our last one,” reminded the Cat, bouncing anxiously.

  “I know. We’ll ask the travelers we pass if they have any food that we can buy off of them.”

  Kyrri bared his teeth. “We are trying to stay hidden,” he reminded her. “We don’t know who is searching for us.”

  “And if we’re half-dead of starvation, we’ll be easy prey,” countered Gina, opening the tin. “We’re already worn down. You need to eat, and you’re right, I need to eat more, too. How many miles are we walking a day?”

  Kyrri shrugged, but his attention was on the small tin of beef. Gina dug half of the meat out with her fingers, too hungry to be concerned with being sanitary, and set the tin in front of Kyrri. “A long way,” he said between bites.

  “So, let me talk
to whoever we pass and I’ll buy us some food,” she reasoned.

  Kyrri looked up. “Not alone, though,” he verified.

  “Yes, alone. If anyone’s looking for us, then they’ll be looking for a woman and a Cat. They won’t understand you anyway,” she said, eating the strips of beef as slowly as she could manage. “They don’t speak Cat.”

  Kyrri grumbled but continued chewing.

  “You can watch and jump in if there’s any trouble.”

  “Fine,” he agreed. “But I don’t like it, Dreamer. I am not as fast as I should be right now.”

  “Which is why we need more food. You’ll be fast enough, if it even comes to that,” reassured Gina. “We’ll be fine.” She hoped she was right.

  They packed up their camp, such as it was. Kyrri slunk out to the trail and checked for others on the road before he called out for Gina to join him. She tried to keep up a quick pace, but it felt like she was slogging through mud. Her eyelids drooped and she had just enough in her stomach to make it queasy. She walked in a daze of misery. Kyrri stumbled along beside her, hardly his usual, graceful self. The landscape blurred and she hyperfocused on the road in front of her, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other.

  “Dreamer,” he hissed suddenly, stopping her leg with a paw. “Someone’s coming.”

  Gina looked up to see a bouncing light down the road, not very far away. She chastised herself for not paying closer attention - they should have noticed it much earlier. “Get into the bushes,” she whispered, trying in vain to smooth down her frizzy hair. Kyrri crawled off the road and disappeared from view. She watched the approaching light nervously, biting her lip.

  “Hello!” she called out. She could see the dim outline of two figures behind the lantern. They stopped.

  “Who’s there?” one called back gruffly. It was definitely a man’s voice.

  “Just a traveler,” said Gina. “I’ve run out of food, but I have money. Do you have any food I can buy?”

  Gina winced as whoever was holding the lantern walked toward her, shining the light into her eyes. She could see the man’s face, hard and lined, his eyes the same disconcerting black as most of the Men she’d seen. “Are you alone?” he asked, peering at the sides of the trail.

  “Yes,” she replied evenly.

  The Man returned his full attention to her and inspected her up and down. “You’re a woman traveling alone on the road to Beersheba? You must be very brave, or very stupid.” He had a hint of a smile on his lips, and it wasn’t a kind one.

  Gina drew herself up straight and looked him in the eye, her jaw square. “Maybe both,” she said. “Do you have food that I can buy?”

  “Oh, give the girl some food,” said a smooth female voice, and the second figure glided forward into the lantern light. She was a tall woman, taller than Gina, and her features were sharp in the flickering glow. She wore a long, heavy cloak and was pulling a heavily laden horned camel behind her. “She looks like she could use it.”

  “Fine. I have some extra bread. You can have it for 10 dinar,” grumbled the Man, and the woman slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Don’t overcharge the poor thing,” she reprimanded before turning to Gina with a smile. “We’ll give you a few loaves of bread and a small cask of mead for 5. We always bring extra and it always goes stale before we get to the city.”

  “Deal,” agreed Gina breathlessly, dumping out a handful of coins to sort through them.

  The Man let out a long, low whistle and cocked an eyebrow at the coins glittering in Gina’s hand. “You want anything else? We have lots of other things to sell,” he offered, his demeanor changing in an instant.

  The woman lit a second lantern and set it on the ground, unloading several baskets from the camel’s back. He smiled a toothy grin at Gina and waved for her to come forward and examine his wares. She did so, and heard the faintest of rustling in the bushes as Kyrri crept forward to keep his view. “Do you have any clothes?” she asked quickly to cover the noise.

  The cloaked woman grabbed several silks from the back of the camel and unhooked a large sack. “Certainly, we do,” she replied smoothly, folding the bag open. Gina quickly pulled out a simple dress and a heavy grey cloak, similar to the one the merchant woman was wearing. She grabbed a bar of sweet-smelling soap from a box and handed the items to the woman.

  “These,” she said, walking over to the baskets of food. There were dried fruits and vegetables, dried meats, and many different kinds of tins and jars. “And as much of this as you’re willing to part with.”

  The Man grumbled something about the food but the woman slapped his shoulder again and he went to packing the food. “The cloak is expensive,” said the woman. “150 dinar for all of it.”

  “Fine,” replied Gina, ecstatic. The bushes rustled in protest.

  “What on earth is that?” asked the woman, repacking the camel.

  “I… I think I saw a rabbit run in there earlier,” stammered Gina, gritting her teeth. “Here, please double-check, that should be right.”

  The man glanced up at her quizzically and chuckled, already recounting the coins. “You think I trust some strange woman walking on a road at night?”

  “Thank you,” she told them, and hoisted the now-full bags on her aching shoulder. She picked up the two loaves of bread and looked sadly down at the small cask. “Uh, go ahead and take this. I don’t think I can carry it.”

  The bushes rustled again and Kyrri emerged, picking up the cask and clipping it to his armor, where it hung heavily against his side. He walked down the path, the cask making him limp as it banged against his side.

  “Oh!” exclaimed the woman in surprise.

  “Uh, thanks again,” called Gina, and she jogged off after Kyrri, not interested in explaining his presence to the merchants. “What are you doing?” she hissed at him.

  “We paid for the mead,” reasoned Kyrri, panting from the weight of it. “I didn’t want us to waste the coin.”

  Gina glanced back and saw that the merchants were still staring after them. “Let’s get a bit down the road and then we’ll eat,” she said, and her tired legs pumped underneath her at the promise of food.

  Gina’s eyes had finally recovered from the bright lanterns, and she noticed that the forest had grown much more dense and lush. Kyrri stopped, and it took Gina a few paces to stop with the extra weight on her back. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I hear something, a hiss,” he said, his head cocked and his ears flitting left to right. “It’s steady.”

  “Water?” asked Gina, her heart soaring.

  “I think so,” admitted Kyrri wonderingly. He grinned his old lopsided grin and bounded down the road. “A stream!” he called from a distance, and she wondered how he was moving so quickly while carrying half his weight on his side.

  Gina jogged as quickly as she could manage to catch up; Kyrri had run much farther than she’d thought. She heard the faint trickle of the stream and smiled, relieved. Rounding a bend in the road, the trickle jumped in volume and she saw a wide creek with a narrow wooden bridge erected across it. The water shimmered in the moonlight invitingly. She laughed aloud.

  Kyrri wasted no time in unbuckling his armor and jumping into the water. He disappeared below the rippling surface, and when he emerged, he looked like a skeleton, his fur flat against his thin frame. Gina smiled sadly and pulled out one of the large tins marked “Hen.” She ripped open the cover. “Kyrri,” she called, and he slunk out of the creek, shaking violently and sending water flying in all directions. Gina was glad he chose to do that outside of the food radius. He bounded over and set to eating immediately without comment. She broke a loaf of bread in half and tore a large chunk off, chewing it with a happy moan.

  They ate their fill, which for Kyrri meant two of the large “hen” tins and several strips of beef jerky, and for Gina meant an entire loaf of bread and several handfuls of salted nuts and fruit. She felt sluggish and heavy, but the water looked too invit
ing for her not to go in. She laid out her new dress and cloak and stripped off her filthy clothes. She took the bar of soap and walked shamelessly into the river. The water was crisp and cold, but not bone-chilling, and it was a warm enough night that Gina was comfortable. She didn’t think it would have mattered even if it was freezing. The water rushing against her skin was worth any amount of discomfort. She waded deeper until the water reached her hips and held her breath as she dunked herself underneath to wet her hair.

  “Today is a good day, Dreamer,” called Kyrri from the shore. He had a piece of jerky in his paw and was gnawing on it happily when Gina saw him jerk to the side.

  “Kyrri?” she asked. Her hand flew to her neck reflexively, followed swiftly by sharp pain. She felt a dart sticking out of her skin and she broke into a sprint towards the shore. The current worked against her and she slipped on a rock, crashing to her knees; vertigo set in hard and she struggled to tell which way was up. She crouched in the water, willing the blackness invading her vision away. For a brief, blissful moment it obeyed her wishes, before the buzz refilled her ears and she fell into the water.

  46

  Morgan awoke to the sounds of activity on the deck, and he stirred in his hammock, sitting up blindly and swinging his feet over the side to the deck. He had been dreaming, and though the memory of it faded fast, he remembered vivid slivers of it. He wondered how it was possible for him to dream, if he were already dreaming. Morgan cracked his blue eyes open and winced against the bright morning sun.

  “Aphorat,” said the shape in front of him, and he blinked to see Toma pointing behind him. Morgan followed his gaze and turned to see a sprawling city on the horizon, a geometric series of lines that broke up the lines of distant mountains. Seemingly innumerable ships dotted the sea, their sails grey and dim, stretching as far as Morgan could see.

  “That’s a lot of ships,” he commented, leaning forward and shielding his eyes from the sun. They looked like they were organized into an arc around the city.