Nanowrimo Day 25
Tamara nodded. "Okay," she said. "You're still sure that you don't want to stay?"
Brittany wrinkled her nose. "Maybe if it was summertime and we could say we were going camping or something. But I've got a paper due the day after tomorrow. And aren't you in that class with me?"
"Am I?" Tamara asked. She hadn't done any homework since... when was the last time she'd done homework? Before Arsal died?
Brittany seemed to see what she was thinking. "Yeah, yeah, I know, this is more important and all. And it is. But we can do both, so why not do both?"
"Whatever," Tamara said.
* * *
She thought about it some when she got home. She'd assumed that as things ramped up, the other girls hadn't been doing things like homework or hanging out with their friends either. After all, Michael had broken up with Midori over it, and Tamara herself felt like she hadn't had enough time to do anything else. It was strange to think that Brittany and Candace (and Midori too) had been running their regular lives just as they had before. Tamara couldn't imagine herself doing that.
She thought about her friends-- not her fellow Warriors, but the friends she'd had before all this started. She still saw them at lunch, but they never hung out or talked on the telephone anymore. She thought to herself: Michael broke up with Midori. She remembered that. And Lachante... Lachante was the same as always, still hung up on the same person. At least, she thought. And Crystal... Crystal had been dating some guy. Was she still with him? Or had they broken up too? She couldn't remember, for the life of her.
Even sitting and eating lunch, when was the last time she'd actually said something? She used to talk a lot, didn't she? What had happened to that girl?
But of course, what could she talk about? Her entire life had become the other world. Killing obia, evading the Dusk People, making hazy plans to crown the Dawn Queen in some distant future. After that, Tamara thought to herself. After that, she would really be able to kick back and relax. She'd be able to talk to Lachante and Michael and even Crystal again... she'd be able to keep track of what Tiana was doing... she'd be able to pull her grades back up. Everything would be fine then, she thought, and she drifted off to sleep.
She'd half-forgotten about those thoughts the next day. Instead of paying attention in class, her mind was consumed with half-baked plans based on whatever scenarios she could concoct. What if the Dusk People brought an army to the capital? How many soldiers could the Warriors take down? What if there was another assassin? What if Ammu was an assassin? What if it was Yin? What if they managed to kill the girl who was going to be crowned Dawn Queen? What if they tried some trick and put the real crown on their candidate instead? Was that even how it worked? What if they were ambushed in Manu? What if Midori broke down under all the stress?
Even at lunch time, those thoughts consumed her. While she was vaguely aware that the entire table was quiet that day, she certainly didn't have the resources to try to start a conversation. So she let Michael make a few comments that mostly fell flat, and concentrated on her food, her thoughts still a-whirl.
When she saw the other Warriors, she could tell that they'd been dealing with things much as she had. Their faces were drawn, but their expressions were calculating. It made Tamara relax, actually. With the four of them, there was no way that they could lose.
Things went well through Manu. Ammu was a skilled tracker, and with her help Yin became more proficient in the forests as well. The food was different-- seafood had started showing up, and rice, and people here didn't seem to eat as much beef. The obia were becoming more and more numerous, so each fight was a struggle, but the Warriors persevered and were able to defeat all of their foes without serious injury. They saw five or six more of the large nests, but each time they were able to kill all the obia in them before whatever bad thing Brittany was talking about happened. Brittany didn't look much more relieved, though. She looked worried.
The land was not only heavily forested, but it was steep as well. As the Warriors went from village to village, they always headed downhill. In this place they started seeing well-maintained roads, and Tamara could understand why: unlike the plains of Sibi and Assou, here there was more and more rainfall. Tromping around in the trees, they all got incredibly muddy, though when the Warriors returned to their own world, their Warrior outfits were always clean again when they came back. The roads they took between the villages were paved with stones, so they didn't turn into mudpits every time it rained. It was sensible, although walking on the stones in their thin sandals (or bare feet, in the case of Candace) was rather unpleasant. Though then, the same was true of the mud.
And finally, they reached it. Their first glimpse of the capital city was from the road, a simple glimpse between the trees. Ammu was the one who spotted it first, of course, but she brought Yin and the Warriors right away to see their destination.
"It's beautiful," Candace whispered.
Tamara's first impression, when she saw it, was of a gigantic seashell sliced in half, the shape roughly rectangular, but with compartments and raised walls everywhere. Unlike a real seashell, however, the smallest and most crowded sections were on the outside, while at the center there was a wide space, full of white and green.
"Is that the palace, there in the middle?" she asked.
"Yeah," Brittany said. She pointed to it. "That right there, that's our goal."
They talked more and more as they started descending, full of manic energy now that the end of their quest-- and the most difficult part-- was about to be fulfilled, one way or another.
"What about this girl who's going to be the Dawn Queen?" Candace asked. "Where is she now?"
"She should be in the city, or nearly there," Brittany said. "It's-- well, it's kind of a mystical thing, but she will have been drawn to the city, and she'll be able to get into it without any harm. Of course, once she's there, all bets are off. Hopefully she's hiding herself. The Dawn People of the city will find and protect her, they've been doing this for generations."
"But there aren't only Dawn People living there, right?" Midori asked.
"Yes, this is the one place where Dawn and Dusk People live together, and even here it doesn't work very well," Brittany said. "The Dawn People here will help us, of course, and the Dusk People will try to kill us. They'll both know we're coming, there's pretty much no way to disguise that. From here on, we've got to be extra vigilant."
That brought a question to Tamara's mind. "How are we supposed to know who the Dawn People are to help us?" Tamara asked. "Just from looking, you can't tell the difference between them and Dusk People. How can we know that something isn't a trap?"
Brittany bit her lip. "Listen, we're just going to have to be careful, okay?"
Tamara sighed. "Look, I know that," she said. "What I'm saying is, we can trust the six people on this path. Or five, at least-- sorry Ammu."
"No problem," Ammu said. "I'd suspect me too!"
"But we can't trust anyone else. Are we going to know this Dawn Princess or whatever when we see her? Like, instinctively."
"I... I think so," Brittany said.
"Okay, so we can trust each other, and we can trust her. Nobody else. Nobody at all."
Midori started to laugh, a little nervously. "Yeah, I think we get it, Tamara. Don't worry. We haven't gotten this far by being stupid."
Candace put her hand on Tamara's shoulder. "Don't worry," she said. "All of us are going to get through this. None of us are going to die."
She couldn't really know that, of course, but Tamara was still touched. She looked around the group, meeting everyone's eyes. "Okay," she said. "Let's do this."
The first step in being incredibly paranoid was getting off the main road into the city. Ammu was the one who guided them there. "Though it's not like we could miss it," she said.
There were a few locations where she pointed out marks. "Scouts, and watchers," she said. "These are the paths they take."
"There are people hiding near here," Candace murmured a few times.
"Easy, it's okay," Brittany said. "They'll report that we're here, but we already knew that they'd do that, and they won't have anything prepared for us around here."
"There's a ghost too, he says there isn't anything," Candace said. But she still seemed on-edge, Tamara noticed. But then, weren't they all on-edge right now?
The city seemed to grow suddenly out of the forest. There was something white and gleaming ahead of them, as far as they could see. As they grew closer, they started to see what it was: stone.
A light-colored stone, the color of sand, was used to construct all the buildings of the capital. The city had no wall and no gate, unlike the villages. Tamara wondered why, and asked Brittany as they walked.
"I'm not sure," Brittany admitted. "Maybe it's because the city is so big that there's no point. It's unlikely for a hole to open in a village, but there's probably about a million of them in the city right now. You'd be keeping obia out, but you'd also be keeping them in."
Tamara shuddered.
She felt the sense of an obia for a little while, but it waned as they approached the city, and no one else seemed to think it was important. According to Brittany, once the Dawn Queen was crowned, all the obia would be destroyed at once, so there wasn't much point in hunting down a single obia at the moment. They had bigger fish to fry.
There were a few wooden hovels outside the bright stone buildings of the city, but far fewer than Tamara might have expected. As if anticipating her question, Brittany spoke first.
"I think that when we aren't here, there are more people in the slums. But the Dawn People and Dusk Peoplehere will have been fighting pretty much since the obia reappeared and we came into the world. All the slums were probably burnt or dismantled months ago."
"Sad," MIdori said. "We're here to protect these people, but we weren't here when they needed us." She looked to Brittany. "If the obia are all destroyed when the queen is crowned, then what was the point of working our way across the kingdom? Why couldn't we just be put here to start with?"
But Brittany could only shrug. "I don't know," she said. "I just don't know."