Iryana shrugged. The report of how she helped during the ambush had impressed Darish, but the others were still distant. And she hadn’t talked to Karvek yet beyond that brief encounter. She wasn’t dead though and hadn’t been kicked out, so there was that.
Hadima sighed. “Theyarerecruiting you though? You have food and somewhere to sleep?”
“Yeah.”
“I am working on a way to get messages through the liaison to you, to make this easier.”
“Nevesh Dyol is a cowardly, untrustworthy cockroach,” Iryana seethed. “You can’t trust him.”
“I never said I did,” Hadima snapped. “But I know how to properly motivate a man like him. You said to figure things out—I’m doing that.”
“Fine.” She wanted to argue more. The thought of her sister owing that slimy man anything was repulsive, but she was right. Hadima could fix this.
She stopped herself from bringing up Misha and the others, instead asking, “What about the hunts?”
“We killed one a few days ago, but it’s been… difficult.” Hadima avoided eye contact. “Levek twisted his ankle badly. He’s doing all right now, but I just don’t know if it’s worth trying again.”
Only one dakya in two weeks? Iryana’s heart sank. “Could more of you hunt together?”
“It’s hard enough to sneak a few of us out at a time. Grandmother is still not letting anyone leave, so we have to wait for one of us to be on watch to open the gate.”
“Maybe you need to come at it a different way?”
Hadima sighed, the twist of her usually gentle-looking face making her look even more rundown. “Different how? Hunting dakii is the only way to kill them any faster than we do normally.”
Iryana hesitated, trying to curb her frustration. “Have you thought about setting traps?”
Then she remembered a thought that she had been playing with since seeing the seer back at the water settlement village. There were more ways to use water-forgings than just amplifying healing properties.
“There’s a book in—” the word caught in Iryana’s throat. Would Hadima blame her if the idea didn’t pan out? Maybe it wasn’t worth bringing up.
“What book?”
Iryana had already been gone for so long, she couldn’t draw their meeting out by arguing.
“In mother’s things.” Iryana forced the words out like ripping off a bandage. “A book on poisons.”
“You can’t poison a dakya.”
Iryana shrugged. “Have you tried them all? Stronger ones?”
She remembered how hard her family had tried to defend Klees. When the dakii had surrounded their fortress. Boiling water barely made them flinch, flaming pitch stuck to their hair but didn’t seem to catch, and large stones didn’t crush them, they only slowed them down. Even when they were injured, the dakii didn’t seem to care, especially in those early days when they were more mindless than cunning. Her great uncle, the family’s water-forged healer who had been Hadima’s mentor, had helped make poisoned arrows, but they hadn’t seemed to do anything.
While her family was retreating toward the mountains, trying to guard as many as they could, they’d tried poisoning water sources and deer as a trap, but it hadn’t ever seemed to work. She had never seen a beast that looked to have died from illness or natural causes. Still, there were likely plenty of things they hadn’t tried.
Hadima shook her head slowly, her eyes getting far away.
“Maybe you will be the first,” Iryana suggested. Hadima was the golden child of the family—she had enough luck for that sort of thing. Always knew the right words to comfort one of their cousins, commonly perfected her herbal mixtures on the first try, and never seemed to stick her foot in her mouth.
Hadima’s face fell, and Iryana wasn’t sure why. “Here.” Iryana grabbed a jar from her pack and pushed it into Hadima’s hands.
Her sister turned it over, running a finger over the label gently before twisting it open to take a sniff. “This is earth-imbued. Where did you get this? No. Actually, I don’t want to know. This will help a lot. Thank you.”
Iryana looked out at the forest, avoiding the look in Hadima’s eyes. “We shouldn’t linger.”
“Oh, right.” Hadima sat the basket she had brought in front of Iryana. “This should be enough to explain the time.”
Iryana kneeled and searched inside, gauging how long it would have taken her to gather all the plants. It was hard to make it all out in the bit of lantern light, but she found a stack of bark strips tied neatly with a string, a large pile of fleshy, floral-smelling golden root wrapped in a spare cloth, a bundle of yellow avens, and a few other loose plants that Hadima probably harvested on the way to their meeting. It should be enough.
