Page 69 of Bannerless (The Bannerless Saga 1)

Then, the storm got worse. After calming for an hour or so, the wind picked up again, and the rain turned to hail. Not just water falling on them, but punches, a million little nails trying to drive straight through the earth, the branches, the blanket, and into them. It felt like it would go on forever. She’d read about storms in decades past, the mega-typhoons that would stall out and rotate on and on, continually drawing heat and water from the ocean to dump it out as rain that lasted for days and washed away whole towns.

The sky turned dark. She thought for a moment the storm was growing worse—the clouds blacker, angrier. But no—night had fallen. And still the rain fell. It couldn’t last forever; no storm lasted forever. But what if . . .

The night passed badly. Enid’s legs had cramped from huddling under their soaked blanket, and she was shivering.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, having to shout over the noise of the storm. The branches of the scrub oak lashed them; the vibrations rattled the twisting trunks down to the roots. The ground under them trembled as if the whole hillside might be swept away at any moment. But if they tried to run, where would they go?

“Me, neither.” Dak’s voice was taut, his jaw clamped against chattering teeth, just like hers.

“How long can we hold out like this?”

Any other time he might have had a quip, a smile. A word of encouragement. Now, he just shook his head. She was already soaked through, but a new wash of stabbing cold passed under her. Dak felt it too; his hands clenched on her.

The ground under them was turning into a river. Trickles of water the width of her hand poured down the hillside under them, carrying mud, and those trickles widened to sheets, joining together to become a solid, growing river, racing down the hill. The rock outcropping that she thought would shelt

er them made it worse, diverting more flowing water to the flood, driving it harder down the slope. The wider and more powerful the rivulets became, the more dirt they carried, the more slippery their footing. The ground was no longer stable, and then the scrub oak they were clinging to tilted. The mud washed away, exposing roots, which then came loose. The whole stand of scrub started sliding down the hill.

They didn’t even have to discuss it. They scrambled to their feet, grabbed their packs and blankets and each other’s hands, and braced against the deluge.

She squinted; everything seemed bright to her. It wasn’t sun—she’d just been huddled under that makeshift shelter for so long. Daytime again, the sky was a uniform gray, mist shrouding details. As her vision adjusted to the light, she tried to make out the landscape, figure out what was happening.

The grassy hillside had turned to a slope of brown shifting mud. All of it moving downward. Their feet were sliding as the water tried to pull them down, too. They clung to each other.

“Up or down?” Dak gasped.

She thought a minute, despairing. She didn’t know. The storm was everywhere; they had no place to go. The flood was traveling downhill. Torrential rivers lay downhill.

“Up,” she shouted into his ear.

They slogged with no promise of anything but more rain at the top. For every step they took, the mud pulled them half the distance back again. The wind was a wall, and they bent their heads into it and pushed on. But however cold and wet they got struggling through the storm in the open, they would not drown. In a way, the desperate, panicked movement up the hill got them warm again. Nice to have something to focus on.

Dak slipped. Enid cried out, grabbing for him as he went down in the mud and half the hillside seemed to fall with him. He rolled, and there was an ominous crunching sound. Something breaking, and she thought at first it was bone. Her worst nightmare come to life, one of them breaking a bone in the middle of nowhere, and they’d have to hobble onward, or one of them would have to go for help—

But it wasn’t bone; it was wood. Even as he plunged down a slick track of grass and mud, unable to find his footing, Dak scrambled after his guitar, trying to keep it off the ground, to keep from crushing it any more than he’d already done. Enid went after him, grabbing his arm, clutching the fabric of his tunic, and bracing to get some purchase. Finally, they slid to a stop, rain and mud pouring around them. Dak hugged the guitar case; Enid couldn’t see well enough to tell what had happened to it. Just that something had broken. She didn’t have time to think of that now, not when it felt like they were drowning without actually being underwater.

Hands digging into each other’s arms hard enough to bruise and unwilling to let go, they stumbled back up the hill, hunched against the rain and making progress by inches. Enid wanted to brace with her staff, use it to help haul them up, but she’d lost it somewhere. Back in the scrub, maybe.

They fell again, got bruised. For her part she was exhausted, but if she stopped, what would happen? That didn’t bear thinking on, so she hauled up Dak and herself, and Dak hauled the guitar, and somehow they made it to the top of the hill, until finally the mud wasn’t trying to suck them down anymore.

Getting to the top of the hill didn’t clarify anything. The rain still fell hard—at least it wasn’t hail anymore—and the sky was still solid gray, rain obscuring everything but their little patch of hilltop. Enid couldn’t see a break in the storm and couldn’t tell how much damage the rest of the plain leading back to the Coast Road had taken. The road itself seemed an impossible goal at the moment. But it was better than no goal at all.

Continuing hand in hand—she didn’t dare let go of Dak, and his grip on her was just as fierce—they sloshed and slipped along the top of the hill until they stumbled into a sheltered depression near another cleft of rocks. This gave them a moment to catch their breath out of the wind. The rush of water wasn’t so bad here—instead of being caught in a river, they just had to deal with soaked ground. Surely, the world would never dry out after this.

Dak’s leather guitar case was soaked through. She couldn’t guess what the instrument inside looked like, how damaged it must be. He still cradled the thing close. It made moving awkward, but she didn’t argue. She wasn’t going to tell him to leave it behind.

They huddled there for what seemed like a long time. But every moment of the storm had seemed like a long time.

“Is it breaking off?” Dak sounded more hopeful than sure.

The rain seemed to be coming down just as hard as ever. The wind still chilled her, and her clothes felt frozen to her skin. But it might have been a little less than it had been an hour ago. The clouds were no longer that terrible, ominous black they had been, and unless she’d gotten turned around, she still knew where west was, and west didn’t look any worse than anyplace else.

They should move. If they moved, they wouldn’t freeze.

“Come on,” she said, and noticed that she didn’t need to shout over the storm anymore. That was something. Maybe it was breaking off.

“Enid. Wait. I just need to rest.”

They’d been sitting for hours. But as he tried to stand, he stumbled, his legs unwilling to straighten.

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