In All Places (Stripling Warrior) Read online

  “Actually, I think he’s gaining color.”

  She glanced at me, then her full attention went back to the boy who was almost like a son to her. “Tell me what you’ve been doing for him.”

  Kneeling with care on the other side of his pallet, I explained what the healers had done to repair his leg. I told her what his unit and I had been doing—getting liquid down him, changing his dressings, and mostly just watching him sleep.

  “Have you given him anything for pain?”

  “He’s unconscious. He doesn’t seem to need it, though I have tried a weak willow tea.”

  “Sometimes when the body is in great pain, it shuts down like this, or the body wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

  “So if we relieve his pain, he will wake up?”

  “Not necessarily. You said he also lost much blood?”

  I nodded, remembering the pool of it soaking into the soil.

  “These things take time, Kanina. Be patient with him. He will heal in his own time.”

  I remembered the herbs Zach had shown me, and I got out my book to show Mother the pictures I had drawn of them.

  “Zachariah says these will ease pain much better than the willow, and these,” I turned over the folds, “will help him make blood.”

  She studied the pictures.

  “His grandfather was a healer,” I added.

  “Yes, I know,” she said, her eyes still on the pictures.

  That didn’t surprise me. She was very good at getting to know people, a talent I had not picked up from her.

  “Will they help? I wanted to ask you before I treated him with anything I was not familiar with.”

  “You will be a wise healer,” she said.

  Recognizing it as a compliment, I blushed.

  “It is no wonder all the boys love you. You’ve a pretty blush to your cheeks.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  Mother smiled, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “There is nothing wrong with being beautiful and amazing. Just be considerate of their feelings, hmm?” Turning her attention back to Zeke, she studied his face, and after a long moment, she added, “There is nothing wrong with following your heart if it leads you toward good, my Kanina.”

  I looked at Zeke’s face too.

  “Yes there is,” I said stonily, but she made no reply.

  After Mother had checked all of Zeke’s wounds, she said, “You’ve done well with these. The dressings are clean and the wounds are healing. I have seen other healers using those plants. Can you get them?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “Bring them to me, and we will see if we can get this boy to wake up. And Keturah?”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  “Take one of the men with you this time.”

  I grinned, but my heart ached when I stared at Zeke’s face again for long moments before I left. He was handsome even lying there so still. He was not a boy any longer. He was a man who had nearly died for his country.

  And for me.

  Chapter 2

  Corban was helping me launder tunics at the river when Lamech appeared from behind the trees. I had no idea how long he had been skulking there and as it always did, his brooding stare unnerved me.

  “Zeke’s awake,” he said finally.

  I jumped to my feet, water cascading from the hem of my sarong.

  “He doesn’t want you.”

  I felt my face fall.

  “Relax,” Lamech said with a smirk. “He doesn’t want you to see him all crippled, not until he can walk.” He looked deliberately around. “Where’s Gid?” Was there a note of contempt in his voice?

  “Zeke’s not crippled, and Gideon’s on guard duty with Joshua,” I said as I knelt to finish what I was doing. I wrung out the last tunic and handed it to Corban.

  “Why do you call him Gideon?”

  Because that was how he had introduced himself to me in the forest. Because he had told me he liked when I used his full name. He obviously wanted me to, so I did. He was Gideon to me.

  “That’s his name.”

  “No it’s not. It’s Gid.”

  “Is my mother with Zeke?”

  He didn’t answer, only stared at me with dark, unreadable eyes.

  I spoke slowly as if I was speaking to old Zequinim back in Melek. “His name is Gideon.”

  “A name is what people call you, and everyone calls my brother Gid.”

  “Fine. His name is Gid. Is my mother with Zeke?”

  “Then why do you call him Gideon?”

  I sent an exasperated look to Corban. “Will you take me to see him?”

  He nodded, already gathering up all the tunics that lay drying across rocks.

  Lamech smirked. “I said he didn’t want to see you.”

  I stepped to him and poked him hard in the chest with my finger. I had a little brother, two if you counted Jarom, and I knew how to handle annoying little brothers.

  “No you didn’t. You said he doesn’t want me to see him.”

  I yanked hard on one of his braids and walked away.

  After a few steps, Corban caught up, damp tunics in his arms. When I glanced at him, he was hiding a grin.

  I could see Mother fussing over Zeke long before we reached them. His head moved as he watched her, and they appeared to be conversing. Mother smiled and laughed. Sometimes, it was weird, but I thought she was half in love with Zeke herself.

  The moment Zeke noticed me approaching, his eyes tracked my face. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to Zeke, but when I saw the guarded look in his eyes, I couldn’t find words, let alone the right ones.

  “You’re awake,” I finally said, staying a short distance away. Maybe Lamech was right and Zeke didn’t want me there. I wouldn’t blame him. I couldn’t.

  Zeke shrugged. No one else would recognize it, but I knew he was embarrassed. About his wound? We were all wounded. I was flooded with relief when the corner of his mouth turned up.

  Corban cleared his throat and spoke up. “Glad to see you’re awake. We couldn’t keep Ket away from your bedside.” He dodged away from my elbow. “I’ll go see if I can help with any of the wounded.”

  I gave him a grateful smile, even though my cheeks were burning.

  Mother said, “I’ll be back later,” and she squeezed my arm as she brushed past me.

  “You can come closer.” Zeke’s smile faded when, after several moments, I did not move forward, just stood staring dumbly at him. His voice turned cool. “I can hardly harm you from this position.”

  His words startled me into moving, and I stepped toward him, my limp still evident.

  “You’re hurt,” he said, concern darkening the coolness in his eyes, and he shifted as if he would get up.

  “I took a javelin in the leg,” I said and eased down beside his pallet, effectively hiding my wound from him. I shrugged it off. “It was better than the alternative, and anyway, the wound is not as bad as yours.”

  His eyes went to his wound which was high up on his thigh, and his cheeks flushed. “It was just that I lost so much blood. The wounds are healing. There are lots of men worse off, or so Leah says.”

  Zeke hadn’t even lost the leg. He was lucky. I nodded absently as I looked him over. He was really awake and healing. He was going to be okay.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I did not want to put it off any longer.

  The coolness returned to his eyes, already tight against the pain, and his voice held a challenge. “For what?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but I choked on the words. I stared at my hands for a while, and then when I still could not talk through the lump that had formed in my throat, I began fingering the frayed edge of one of the bandages on his arm. He let me. Sometimes, Zeke had amazing patience like that.

  Finally, he reached up and stopped my nervous hand by covering it with his. He wanted me to say the words, to say I was sorry for…what? For having feelings for Gideon? I couldn’t be sorry for that, and I wasn’t going to sa
y I was. I was only sorry that I had hurt Zeke with my expression of them.

  “Can you forgive me?” I asked instead.

  He wanted the words, but he didn’t pretend not to know what I was asking.

  “I don’t know,” he said resolutely, like he had been thinking about it for a while.

  I glanced down, swallowing my disappointment. I shouldn’t have expected any more than that from him, but somehow I had let myself hope everything I had done to hurt him could be forgiven so easily.

  I reached out and felt his head, his cheeks, with the back of my hand. “How is your pain level?”

  He shrugged.

  “I can give you something that will ease the pain.”

  He snorted his disbelieving reply. “My leg is fine. The pain is bearable. What happened with your mother?”

  I grimaced. “She told you about that?”

  “A little.”

  “We were confronted in the woods by two Lamanite deserters.”

  “Leah said you were attacked.”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said slowly. “They did not attack us. I attacked them.”

  The corner of his mouth tipped up again. “My Keturah.”

  “They didn’t carry any weapons,” I continued. “So I incapacitated them, and we ran for the city walls.”

  He stared at me for a moment. I bristled. It probably hadn’t been the right thing to say, but I was tired of filtering what I said to him.

  “Not many of us get to protect our parents so directly,” he said.

  I tilted my head and frowned. “No.”

  “I’m glad you were with her. But what were the two of you doing alone out there?”

  He was controlling his voice well, but I could tell he was upset. I wondered if he had chastised my mother this way.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I admitted, but I wasn’t going to tell him we had been gathering herbs to ease his pain. He didn’t need guilt on top of everything else. “It was careless of me. I think Lib felt the imminent danger when he left me at Mother’s camp.” I paused for a moment and then sought his eyes and confided, “But I felt nothing, no warning of danger. It makes me wonder what’s wrong with me.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you.” Zeke sounded affronted. “Perhaps there was no danger, since you were easily able to deal with the men.”

  I certainly hadn’t thought of it that way.

  “Or perhaps you were just excited to see Leah,” he went on, quickly taking back his beautiful compliment. “You were preoccupied.”

  “A good warrior doesn’t allow preoccupation. That’s what happened in the battle. When I stopped fighting. The man you fought, the man who did this—” I gestured to his leg. “I knew him, and in that moment, with the battle raging around us, he wasn’t an enemy soldier. He was one of God’s children, and I couldn’t fight him. It was stupid. It was dangerous.” I glanced at his leg again.

  “Knew him? A Lamanite soldier? How?” he demanded.

  My leg was aching, and I shifted my weight. “His name is Muloki. He was the guard at the gate of Antiparah.” Then I had to tell him everything about the day Kenai had ordered me into the enemy stronghold in broad daylight. I did not tell him how Muloki had flirted with me at the gate of Antiparah, and I did not tell him I had spent three nights alone with Gideon.

  Zeke’s jaw clenched as I talked. He was holding back his anger, but he looked as murderous as Gideon had.

  “Kenai?” he ground out.

  “Don’t be mad at him for sending me in,” I nearly begged on my brother’s behalf. “We needed information, and he did not have to order me. I volunteered. I went with faith, and I was met with miracles for it.” I told him about the voice I had heard and meeting my mother’s sister and the little girl who looked so much like Chloe.

  By the time I was finished, Corban stood over us. “I’ve got a guard detail soon,” he said regretfully when I looked up at him. “Do you want me to send someone else over?”

  “No, I’ll come with you. Zeke needs to sleep.”

  I caught the look of worry on Zeke’s face when he saw I needed Corban’s help to get to my feet, but he hid it well behind a swallow and a nod when I turned to say goodbye.

  I smelled cook fires and roasting meat as we walked through the city back to our camp. The hunting parties must have had success that afternoon.

  “Well,” Corban ventured after a while. “He didn’t kill you.”

  “Reb will be so disappointed,” I said dryly. “I think he lost a bet.”

  Corban shrugged sheepishly, obviously having taken part in the wagering, but I couldn’t help a small smile, relieved at Zeke’s reaction.

  Our unit was already eating when we got back to camp. Corban and Mathoni took their food and left for their guard detail. I got mine and sat between Lib and Ethanim. I had come to feel safe between them, and since the grisly battle a week before, I had found myself seeking their company.

  When I finished eating, I was still hungry. So were the others.

  “Who cooked?” I asked.

  Lib nodded toward Cyrus, who gave a little shrug.

  “That’s all they gave me,” he said regretfully.

  “It was good,” I told him over the embers of the cook fire. Everything tasted good when you were starving.

  Every last one of us could hunt our own food, but doing so was not allowed unless we were assigned to a hunting detail, and then we had to give anything we killed to the army. There was an order to things, and we had to preserve it. Hunting parties went out each day, but they weren’t bringing in enough game to feed an army of hungry boys. The grains in the storehouses and supply tents were getting low. Consequently, our rations had been pared down. We had gone to Cumeni to lay siege on the city, but we were the ones who were starving.

  After we cleaned up, I asked Zachariah to take me into the forest to pick more of the plants he had shown me. Maybe we could find some roots to eat, too, though much of the forest had already been scavenged for edibles.

  The terrain was steep. We had been moving about on it for many weeks, but I had to let him help me over the trickier areas.

  “Thanks,” I said when he caught my arm to keep me from sliding down the mountainside.

  He didn’t reply beyond a grunt and a curt nod, just kept moving along with his eyes on the vegetation.

  When we came to a small gully, he hopped easily over it and held out his hand to me. I grasped it for balance and hopped the gully too, but not as gracefully. He dropped my hand quickly, when some of the others might have held it for an extra moment or two.

  “What’s your home like?” I asked him, trying to draw him out into a conversation.

  He shrugged. “Same as everyone else’s, I guess.”

  “Do you have a girl at home?”

  “Hopefully.”

  That surprised me. Though some of the oldest boys in the army were betrothed—some were even married—none of the boys in my unit had any such arrangements, though they frequently talked about girls from their town of Orihah, girls I didn’t know and, frankly, never wanted to know.

  “Do you think she has gotten married?” I asked him.

  It had been three years. She would likely be married, even considering how many of the marriageable young men were away with the armies. There were plenty of older boys, boys who had been old enough at the time of the oath to make it and who had remained in Melek.

  He shrugged as he inspected a cluster of leaves. “It’s not totally up to her.”

  Her father might have betrothed her to someone, he meant.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Elizabeth.” He took a slow breath and set a handful of stems and leaves into the basket I carried. “Beth.”

  I wondered if Zeke said my name like that.

  “She is the only one,” he went on, wiping off his knife on his tunic to avoid my eyes. “I could never love someone else. If Beth is already promised, I’ll go to Zarahemla with Gid and become a guard.”


  It took him a moment to realize what he had said. When he did, he flushed, glanced at me, and then crouched to cut some more stems.

  “I know that’s what he wants,” I said. “Everyone knows it.”

  He stood. “I know it’s not a secret, Ket.” He sighed, placed his hands on his hips and set one foot farther up on the incline for balance. “But I know what it feels like to part with someone you love, not knowing if you’ll ever see them again.”

  I imagined this tall, handsome boy saying goodbye, possibly forever, to the girl he loved.

  “You’ll know it too.”

  “Zach. It will be okay. God knows our hearts. We might get hurt, but in the end we will find that He has prepared the perfect way for us.”

  “Say that again when you watch Gid walk away,” he said with pain in his eyes. But then he gave his head a shake. “Sorry.”

  He missed Beth. The ache and confusion were clear on his face, and I had never noticed them. Having to leave Beth had hurt him deeply, but I knew why he had joined Helaman’s army. The same reason we all had.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go back. We have enough plants.”

  Many days passed with small rations and little to do. Some of the troops were deployed to other cities to hold them from the Lamanites, but we stayed in Cumeni waiting on provisions from Zarahemla.

  Finally one morning Micah showed up in my camp. He had all his gear strapped to his back, and when I glanced behind him, I saw eight or nine other men prepared the same way.

  “Where are you going?” I asked before he could tell me, which was obviously why he was there.

  “We’re taking a communication to the governor, a petition for more supplies.”

  I nodded even as I felt my stomach rumble.

  At my worried look, my oldest brother put a hand on my shoulder and said, “There’s food out there, Ket. It’s not a famine or anything. We just need to get it here.”

  I nodded, melancholy seeping into my smile. “Be safe.”

  He kissed me on the top of my head and led his men away. It was a comfort, at least, to know the leaders were trying to do something about the problem we faced.

  I thought of the way the Lamanite women had looked when we had let them leave Cumeni after the siege, and I hoped things would not get so bad as that for us.