Free The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) by Matthew Beard Page A

herself.
    At that, Nergei found himself smiling, despite his tired muscles, despite his nervousness about their journey, its seriousness still not something he had fully reckoned with. He couldn’t help his grin; Luzhon taking down Kohel is something he would have gladly watched.
    “What are you smiling about?” she asked, interrupting his descent again into his thoughts.
    But Nergei didn’t say, couldn’t say. He shook his head, and Luzhon didn’t press him. For a while theywalked together in silence, and for Nergei, that alone was enough, enough for a while.

    Luzhon lay awake throughout the night, her bedroll dragged beside the lowering flames of the fire, as close as it was safe to do, while behind her slept her father in the tent they were meant to share, and in another Nergei and Padlur. Only Kohel was still awake, keeping watch farther away, in the edges of the lit space beside the still-wide road, where he claimed he would be able to see better, his eyes better adjusted to the dimmer light. Luzhon had no doubt that was true, but of course she also knew he was avoiding her, both for what he had done to her in the woods, and also what he had failed to do, after the attack. His pride had been injured, and if there was one thing Luzhon had learned about the boys of the village, it was that no good would come from injuring their pride.
    All her life, Luzhon had been among the most beautiful girls in the village, but that was something she could not control, and so thought little about. What she had wanted instead was to be like the boys, with their archery, their forestry skills, their abilities with hammer and anvil, with the butcher’s tools. She had been told from the first that there were no constraints upon her in those ways—that if she wanted to be ahunter, she could—but that had not turned out to be true, and mostly that was her father’s fault, and even there on that trip she was along not because her father believed her the equal of the three boys, but because he feared to leave her alone in the village.
    No, what Luzhon had learned was that when you showed the boys that you could wrestle as good as they could, that you could throw a knife or shoot a boy, all you did was push them further away. The boys of Haven did not want to be bested by a girl, did not believe her when she claimed that had never been her intent after she had hit some target, or won some race.
    And then there was the journey, another chance to prove herself, and still she did not know if she would take it. There were no women in Haven who Luzhon wanted to grow up to be like, and she was not sure that what the men were was what she wanted, either. Somewhere, there would be some better model for her, and Luzhon would keep her eyes open for it.
    Until then, there was the night all around, and the fire to keep fed, helping even though no one had asked her to help. Outside the halo of light from the fire, the land was flatter than Luzhon had ever seen, if not exactly flat. Above, where Haven was perched, the slopes were steeper, the paths less sure, and the sounds different, or at least less noticeable. There in the dark, Luzhon heard the wing beats of bats overhead, thehoots of owls, the scurrying sound of animals in the brush, hopefully small ones. Two nights before there had been a bear somewhere in the dark, growling in the distance before Padlur moved through the trees to scare it away, and after that Luzhon felt safer in a way that had persisted not just the rest of that night but in the days after. Yet again she felt anxious, but more for the longer-away future to come, the danger in the city to come, the danger at home in Haven, waiting for their return. And what if the kenku attacked before they returned?
    The idea of returning to find their home gone was unthinkable, and so Luzhon stopped herself from thinking it.
    Still, some other worry nagged at her too, some feeling that something watched them from the trees, or from above