The Offering (The Pledge 3)

The woman with the crate froze, her eyes finding us, and then searching out the others who were rummaging around our campsite. I wondered if she were calculating their odds. I tried to imagine what we must look like, three women out here on our own in the middle of nowhere, with a vehicle chock-full of supplies. Then I really considered who I was traveling with, and how we appeared.

Eden, with her shorn purple hair and muscled arms, was menacing on a good day. But today, after her skirmish with Brooklynn, she was donning a shiner of a black eye that only served to make her more intimidating than ever. And Brooklynn might have been pretty, but she wore an air of confidence about her, especially when, like now, her shoulders were squared and her jaw was set. Her own bruises and bedraggled hair only served to emphasize the fact that she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.

Me? I had no idea how I appeared. Certainly less daunting than the other two, but looks could be deceiving. I was determined to make it across the border. To get to Elena, to discover the meaning of her message, and to attempt to keep my country at peace. I’d do anything to make that happen. Besides, I told myself, I’d survived Sabara. I could certainly survive some local scavengers.

If I’d had to lay odds right then, my money would have been on the three of us.

“We don’t want no trouble,” the woman said in strangely punctuated Parshon, her southern Ludanian accent giving it a lilting sound. She bent slowly at the waist to set the crate on the ground at her feet. When she rose again, she kept her hands in front of her. “Din’t know there was someone laid claim to this stuff already.”

I shot a meaningful glance at the embers of the barely dead fire and doubted the veracity of her statement.

“We don’t want trouble either,” Brook chimed in, speaking in Englaise. She didn’t bother to hide her blade as she approached the strangers. Her feet were bare, but her confidence was in full force. Both Eden and I were right at her back. “But this ‘stuff,’” she added bitingly, “is most definitely ours.” As we neared, it became clearer who we were up against, and suddenly my belief that we would come out of this unscathed spiked.

They were kids, mostly. But not like the ones we’d just left behind with Caspar at the abandoned work camp. These kids seemed scrawnier and less organized. The longer I studied them, the more certain I was that the woman who’d spoken was their mother. They all bore hair that was the same honeyed shade of auburn, and their eyes were all varying shades of green—moss, jade, emerald, and even one pair that reminded me of the sea I had just been in.

Two of them, a girl and a boy, both of whom had freckles peppered across their noses, wore clothing fashioned from identical fabric, with perfectly sewn stitches. Since the mother had spoken in Parshon—the vendor’s tongue—I wondered if she was a seamstress by trade.

The boy, who’d been poking a stick into the remnants of the fire, dropped it when his jade eyes settled on Brook’s knife. He raised his hands in the air, so high it was nearly comical. The mother whacked him on the backside. “Drop your hands,” she muttered, speaking again in Parshon. And then to us, in Englaise, she tossed back, “Honestly, we want no trouble at all. We’ll be on our way now.” As if reading the knowing look she cast their way, the children—four of them in all, ranging in age from about five or six years to somewhere around ten or eleven—gathered around her, making her look very much like a mother duck gathering her brood of ducklings.

The idea of mistaking them as dangerous thieves now seemed absurd.

Brook sheathed her knife and replaced it in her boot. The girl who was the smallest of the children and part of the matched set with her brother tugged at the woman’s skirt. “But, Mama, I’m hungry. And it’s so far.”

I hadn’t even had the chance to respond when Eden turned to scowl at me, already shaking her head as if she’d read my thoughts. “No, Your Maje—” She lowered her voice. “No way,” she amended from between gritted teeth. “They’re thieves,” she insisted. “We can’t. We won’t.”

But I was already shoving my way past her, my mind made. “They’re children, Eden.” And then I told the woman, “We have more than enough. Stay and eat with us before you go.” I couldn’t imagine casting them off without at least feeding them first. I smiled at the little girl, who peeked at me from behind her mother’s back.

Eden sighed, her exasperation as loud as the wind.

“No, no. We couldn’t,” the woman said, but the little boy, his eyes still wide and transfixed on Brooklynn, despite the fact that she no longer held her knife, quietly pleaded, “Please. Just a little . . .”

That was it for Brook, and she too came over to my side of the argument, proving she indeed had a heart. “Really,” she asserted, although a little less adamantly than I had. “It’s okay. We have plenty.”

The woman’s shoulders sagged as she looked around at her ginger-haired brood, all of them watching her eagerly for a sign of consent. Then she nodded, turning to meet my eyes as she reached out to pat the boy’s head. “Thank you,” she told me.

The children ate voraciously, finishing a first round of salted squirrel and sliced cheese, and then asking for more. We sliced fresh fruit, which they devoured just as ravenously, letting the juices run down their chins and slurping it from their fingers. But even after that they weren’t satisfied, so I pulled out a loaf of bread and we warmed it in front of the fire before drizzling it with honey.