“Rue.”
“No! It isn’t fair! He can navigate just as well as I can! You can’t tell me not to go just because I—“
“Rue!” His voice would have melted iron. “Four of us are risk enough. You stay.”
“Then Bek stays with me! He’s injured, too!”
Alt Mer stared at her. What was she talking about? Bek wasn’t her concern. “Not like you. Besides, we might need his magic.”
She glared at him for a moment, and he could see she was on the verge of breaking down. He had never seen her do that, never even seen her come close. For a moment, he reconsidered his decision, realizing that something about this was more important than what her words were telling him.
But before he could say anything, she wheeled away and stalked back toward the airship, rigid with anger and frustration. “Fine!” she shouted over her shoulder. “Do what you want! You’re all fools!”
He watched her disappear into the trees, thinking that was that, there was nothing he could do about it. Anyway, his next confrontation was already at hand. If Rue Meridian was angry, Quentin Leah was livid. “I told you I wouldn’t go if Bek went! Did you think I didn’t mean it?” He could barely bring himself to speak. “Tell him he can’t go, Big Red. Tell him, or I’m not going.”
Bek started to speak, but Alt Mer held up his hand to silence him. “I can’t do that, Highlander. I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way you wanted, but I can’t change that, so threats are meaningless. Bek has the right to decide for himself what he wants to do. So do you. If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.”
There was a long silence as the Rover and the Highlander stared each other down. There was a dangerous edge to Quentin Leah, as if nothing much mattered to him anymore. Alt Mer couldn’t know what Quentin had gone through to get clear of Castledown and find them, but it must have been horrendous and it had left him scarred.
“I’m sorry, Highlander,” he said, not knowing what he was sorry about, save for the look he saw in the other’s eyes.
“Quentin,” Bek interjected quietly, laying one hand on his shoulder. “Don’t let’s argue like this.”
“You can’t go, Bek.”
“Of course I can. I have to. We promised to look out for each other from here on, remember? We made that promise only a day or so ago. That meant something to me. It should mean something to you. This is when we have to make it count. Please.”
Quentin stayed silent for a moment, looking so desperate that Alt Mer wouldn’t have been surprised at anything he did. Then Quentin shook his head and put his hand over Bek’s. “All right. I don’t like it, but all right. We’ll both go.”
They stood looking at each another for a moment, aware that Quentin’s words had made final their commitment to undertake a task that on balance was far too dangerous even to consider. Yet it was only the latest in a long line, and their decision to take this one, as well, no longer had the edge to it that it might have had once. Gambling with their lives had become commonplace.
“We’ll need a plan,” Panax said.
Big Red glanced over his shoulder in search of his sister. She was out of sight now, and he wished suddenly that they hadn’t left things as they had between them.
“I have one,” he said.
The Dwarf stared down into the leafy depths of the Crake. “When do we do this?”
Alt Mer considered. The sun had eased westward, but most of the afternoon light still remained, and the sky was clear. It would not get dark for hours.
“We do it now,” he said.
TWENTY TWO
Quentin Leah was not in the least mollified by Big Red’s and Bek’s attempts to justify Bek’s foolhardy decision to brave the Graak. It did not matter what reasoning they used, the Highlander could not help feeling that this would end badly. He knew it wasn’t his place to tell Bek not to come with them. He knew that none of them thought him any better qualified than they were to judge the nature of the danger they would face. If anyone had the right to do so, in fact, it was Redden Alt Mer, who had already done battle with the creature and lived to tell about it.