“Caleb,” she said, smiling through the pain in her left arm. He smiled back, his white teeth gleaming brightly against his dark skin. “It’s really good to see you,” she said, resting her forehead against his.
“Sorry we’re late,” he said, hugging her carefully.
Tristan was already bent over Rowan, helping him remove his blood-soaked clothes. He looked up at Lily and smiled warmly. “Hi,” Tristan said simply.
“It’s good to see you, too,” she told him. “Even though I’ve been seeing you,” she added with a grimace. The other Tristan gave her a strange look, but Rowan interjected.
“You’ll see in a second, Tristan,” Rowan said through a groan as he peeled off what was left of his shredded shirt.
“Who’s that?” Caleb asked, pointing to Una. Before she could answer, Breakfast and Lily’s Tristan caught up with them, already apologizing before they had even reached the clearing. They had a couple of bruises and some scraped knuckles, but they didn’t look anywhere near as banged up as Rowan did. He scowled at the two of them, and probably added a few choice words in mindspeak that Lily wasn’t privy to.
Introductions and explanations were made while Una and Caleb put salve on Lily’s and Rowan’s cuts. Although Lily’s bite wounds and the lashing that Rowan had taken cut deep, they were still only flesh wounds. With no broken bones, severed nerves, or torn ligaments to mend, the salve did its job quickly. It wasn’t nearly enough time for the two Tristans to absorb the fact that they had just met themselves.
The two Tristans sat across the fire from each other, both of them looking like they’d just seen a ghost. They were mirrors of each other, except that Rowan’s Tristan had streaks of red and black paint on his face, indicating that he had become one of Alaric’s elite fighters, like Caleb.
Lily knew how disoriented both Tristans must be feeling, but she didn’t want to bring up right then what she’d felt when she met Lillian. She was still too emotional about what she saw in Lillian’s last memory and she knew that if she focused on it now, Rowan would be able to pluck the thought out of her mind easily. Instead, she thought about the pale Woven.
“Do you guys think Woven can mindspeak?” Lily asked, seemingly out of the blue. Everyone stared at her. “You know, with their relatives if they’re pack animals. I’m wondering because that pack of Woven seemed really, like, together. Mentally, I mean.” The more she talked, the more worried everyone looked.
Caleb finally spoke up. “A good pack animal is part of a whole. He follows his alpha without question. I guess that could look like they’re reading one another’s minds.”
“Well, has anyone ever tried to mindspeak with a Woven?” she asked.
Rowan, Caleb, and the Tristan from this world all shuddered simultaneously like the thought disgusted them.
“No, Lily,” Rowan said, his lips tight as if he’d tasted something sour. “The tame Woven in the cities are trained to respond to very subtle cues from their masters. But they don’t mindspeak. They can’t speak, Lily.”
“I know that, but mindspeak isn’t always speech, is it? Sometimes it’s more like a sensation or an emotion that you convey. Or a scent?” She said the last word hesitantly, still trying to describe—even for herself—what she’d experienced. “That’s crazy, right?”
Everyone nodded and looked at the fire, relieved that Lily could at least recognize how far out on a limb she’d climbed.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” Caleb said sensibly. “And it’s normal to wonder if animals can think when they’ve just outsmarted you with an ambush. Sometimes with the wolf-like Woven packs out west it can seem like what they’re doing is planned, but they’re only acting on instinct, Lily. They’re not thinking or feeling anything.”
But Lily had felt emotion coming from the pale Woven—fear and awe, even determination. She held her tongue. She didn’t know what point she was trying to prove about the Woven, she just felt like there was more to them, some layer that hadn’t been peeled back yet. She looked at Rowan, sitting to her right. He hated the Woven and hated it even more when Lily talked about them as being anything but the mindless killers he understood them to be. She decided to let it go for now. Again.
“Lunchtime,” Breakfast said cheerfully. He pulled out his pack and started distributing the food he and Tristan had bought before they got into some trouble with the locals. There was some heavy discrimination toward the Outlanders here in Baltimore. Lily supposed there had been discrimination in Salem, too. She just hadn’t seen much of it because people there didn’t show it when Rowan was around. They were too scared of him.
“Why do people keep thinking I’m an Outlander?” Breakfast asked as he chewed pensively on a sandwich.
Caleb gave Breakfast a complicated look. “It was years ago—I can’t be sure. Tristan?” he said, turning to his stone kin for input.
“Yeah?” both Tristans responded. They looked at each other and shared a laugh. The other Tristan spoke first.
“I think that’s for me,” he said. “What, Caleb?”
“Forget it,” Caleb said, still shaken by weirdness of the two-Tristan situation. Caleb turned back to Breakfast. “You look like an Outlander I met once,” he said. “But he was a kid back then.”
“So some Outlanders are white?” Lily’s Tristan asked his other self.
“Sure. Technically, I’m an Outlander now. I gave up my citizenship and joined a tribe,” Tristan replied, pointing to his painted cheek.
“Rowan’s mom was white,” Caleb replied. He smiled to himself. “She had red hair like Lily.”
“You remember her,” Lily said, surprised. Caleb was four years older than Rowan, and they were from the same tribe. It made sense that Caleb remembered Rowan’s mom, even if Rowan couldn’t.
“A little. Of course I remember River much better,” Caleb said, his face growing sad. “But he fixed my dad’s leg once. Hell, he patched together everyone in our tribe at one point or another. He was a great man. Remember my twisted knee that time?” Caleb turned to Rowan, who laughed under his breath.
“The infamous gully incident,” Rowan said, smiling in a bittersweet way.