Free Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) by Brenda Cooper Page A

Kayleen called, setting out three plates of hot pancakes, cold djuri jerky, and some dried apples from Artistos’ stores. As we sat down, she asked, “Which way shall we go?”
    At least she was asking and not telling. I squinted at her face. Shelooked relaxed and happy; no sign of the crazy Kayleen who had kidnapped us showed. She didn’t stare at us—either in mistrust or with naked need written all over her.
    “Not in the direction of the demon dogs.” Liam took a bite of pancakes, his brow furrowed. I’d heard the dogs again during my watch last night, far off, but either the fire or the previous night’s explosion had kept them away. Their calls had all come from the low hills between us and the mountain, to the southwest. Liam set his fork down. “We’ll go toward the forest, where there’s likely to be more game.” He pointed southeast, toward the mountains still, but about forty-five degrees away from where we’d heard the dogs.
    I swallowed, wanting to go in the opposite direction entirely. “Wouldn’t we be better off heading toward the north shore? On our way down, it looked like there were plains, and we’d be able to see anything coming our way better.”
    Liam continued as if I hadn’t even spoken. “We should leave as soon as possible.”
    I cleared my throat, demanding his attention. “I don’t want to go into the hills. It’s safer in the open.”
    Liam looked at me as if I had two heads, and it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t about the direction of our travel at all. He expected to make the decisions.
    Kayleen appeared to share my observation. She stopped midbite, her fork poised in the air. “Wherever we go, we need access to wood. We’ll need wood to build a house and corral. And we shouldn’t go too far. If we can’t get the skimmer unstuck we’ll need to carry everything.”
    I grinned, pleased she understood about making decisions together. “But you also need to keep Windy safe from packs of those demon dogs,” I countered. “And we can see them better if we’re in the open.”
    Liam waved a hand back in the direction he’d first proposed. “We won’t go more than a half-day’s walk anyway, so we can come back here at night. I don’t want to leave the skimmer unattended.”
    I frowned at him. “There aren’t any people on Islandia. The Burning Void should be safe enough.”
    “I don’t know yet if there is anyplace safer for us to be.”
    He still wasn’t getting it. “We need to make decisions together.”
    Liam raised an eyebrow at me. “And that means?”
    “That means you sound like you’re telling us what to do.”
    He stared out over my head, his jaw tight. I spoke softly into his stubbornness. “You are the most experienced of us, being raised in the roamer band. I listened to you there, because you are Akashi’s second. But Akashi doesn’t lead by giving orders unless it’s an emergency. We’ll generally follow you, and we’ll listen in an emergency, but we all get voices in major decisions.” I’d be damned if I was going to train Liam to give me orders.
    Liam swallowed, then looked down at me, his dark eyes softening. “All right. We should make a list of what we need. A place to land the skimmer. A sheltered place we can protect from demon dogs. Safe food storage. We need to be near water.” He looked from me to Kayleen. “What else?”
    Good.
    Kayleen suggested, “Shelter from weather. I don’t know what kind of storms there are here.”
    I nodded. The band’s winter shelters were all near protected cliffs and one was in a shallow cave. Nothing like the multiple rooms in the Cave of Power, but enough to huddle inside during a cold wind. We survived by living lightly. Not cowardly, just… sliding through the balance of the wild as best as possible. Blending with it, leaving it unchanged unless we had to fight. That’s how we always won the stick-dance, too. Blending with the movement, the rhythm. We would have to do that