Free Young Warriors by Tamora Pierce

you with it, they’ll know it was stolen.”
    â€œPerhaps they’ll mistake me for a duchess.” Clarisse cackled. Then she suddenly clutched her wrist and dropped the ring.
    Puzzled, Ada bent closer. Long red marks had appeared on the old woman’s forearm.
    â€œYou did it! You summoned spirits to attack me!” Clarisse pulled a crude knife from her belt.
    â€œWhat?” Ada stepped back. Her own knife was close to hand, but she didn’t want to drop the things she was carrying to get to it. She considered explaining about the manes and then decided that would make Clarisse more suspicious rather than less. “If I could summon spirits, I would put them to better use than scratching old women,” Ada said finally.
    Clarisse clapped her hand to her cheek as if she’d been struck. “You wretch! I’m not
old.
” She stood up and then looked around her, at the field of the dead and dying, as if she didn’t know how she’d come to be in such a place. “Take him if you want him so much. My other suitors give me plenty of gifts.” She began to stagger off, rubbing her arm.
    Ada knelt beside Julian and watched Clarisse go. She was so stunned that she almost forgot about the ring in the dirt. It was the blue of the stone that drew her eye. Gingerly, she picked it up. The gold was heavy in her hand. She smeared away mud to reveal a coat of arms with three ravens on it.
    â€œI’m just holding on to it for him,” she said aloud as she tucked it into the folds of the sash at her waist. Then she started stripping off his gilt-inlaid armor. The leather-and-cloth padding underneath was stained with sweat and blood.
    He moaned as Ada tugged him onto the blanket. Pulling his body over the field made her muscles ache. By the time they reached the burned village, she was exhausted. He had barely stirred.
    Even in the dying light, Ada easily found the way to her mother’s old house. She tugged at the blackened hatch to the root cellar. It opened in a great gust of soot.
    â€œThat’s the best I can do,” she said. “I can’t carry him down the stairs, and you don’t want me throwing him down.”
    A sudden gust of air made cinders whirl across the floor. The manes appeared and scuttled closer, pressing its beak so close to the wound that she wondered if its tongue would snake out for a taste.
    â€œJulian’s people will come,” it said. “The crows have brought my message. Just get him down there. You only need help a little while longer.”
    â€œAs you say.” Ada pressed lightly on the skin just to one side of Julian’s injury, but it was enough to make him awaken with a gasp. The manes cawed loudly, and she wondered what would happen to it if Julian died.
    The knight looked up at her, disoriented and afraid.
    â€œYour creature wants me to hide you. Can you stand?”
    He reached up and touched a stray lock of her hair, running it between his fingers as if he were spinning it into thread. “I don’t know your name.”
    She narrowed her eyes, confused. “Ada,” she said finally.
    â€œAda,” he repeated. “You have hair like my sister’s. Jeanne. She will be twelve soon.”
    â€œI’m fifteen,” Ada said. “Now get up.”
    He managed a thin smile. She could see his hands tremble as he rose. Pressing her shoulder under his arm, she led him down the stairs. He moved slowly, like a sleepwalker. The earthen room still stank of fire, but otherwise it was unchanged from her memory of it. By the dim moonlight, she could see well enough to wash his wound with the water she brought and to smear it with honey. He tried to hold still, but sometimes he shuddered convulsively, or gasped.
    â€œThe gash doesn’t stink yet,” she said. “That’s a good sign.”
    Julian moaned again, flushed with fever, moving restlessly into something like sleep.
    â€œMaybe