The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Four

They trudged around the edge of the water silently, headed for the Training Field Corridor. For the most part Quara stared at her feet as she placed them carefully on the smooth granite shoreline, but she lifted her eyes now and then to watch the small, squared shoulders of her younger sister. Lina stepped lightly, as if she weren't weighted down by two battered wooden buckets filled almost to the brim with water. Her head was tilted back, as if she were staring at the sky, and Quara glanced up , following her gaze, half expecting to see something other than the dark expanse of nothingness that cloaked the ceiling of the enormous room.

If they'd walked the other way, towards the water source, they would have eventually come to a place where the ceiling dipped low to meet one of the Cavern walls, a place where stalagmites and stalactites rose up from the ground and hung down from the ceiling, fused together in places where the enormous rock formations had met after millions of years of drip, drip, dripping.

She turned her head to look back in the direction they'd come, wondering if her sister was even capable of keeping her promise to stay below ground, and marveling at the number of words Lina had just said to reassure her. Sometimes weeks passed when Lina hardly spoke that many words in an entire day, let alone in a single a conversation.

Lost in her thoughts she didn't notice that she'd veered off slightly to the left until she felt her left foot slip on the slick stone. She fumbled, trying to regain her footing, scrambling for a moment before losing control of her long limbs altogether. There was a brief moment when she found herself in midair before she came crashing back to earth, managing to land flat on her back with a dull thud, the air forced from her lungs on impact.

Lina was immediately at her side, putting her slender yet strong arm around her sister's shoulders and telling her to stay calm, while she quickly looked the older girl over for signs that she was more injured than she appeared. "You're okay. You're okay." She murmured the words over and over again, sounding surprisingly like their mother. "You're lucky you didn't fall a bit further that way," she continued and as Quara's lungs finally began to fill with air, she glanced down and saw that she was inches away from plunging into the water. "Now can you see why I have to follow you?"

Quara was surprised when she met her sister's pale blue eyes and realized that she was absolutely in earnest. Lina really did believe that her sister would get into some sort of trouble down here on her own, although she couldn't help but think that if she hadn't been so distracted by the danger that seemed to cling to the younger girl's every decision, she wouldn't have fallen at all.

Yet she couldn't entirely blame Lina for her fall. Quara was known in the Caverns as a beautiful and yet incredibly clumsy young woman. She seldom made it through an hour, much less a day without bumping into something or stumbling, and she was frequently covered in bruises, especially up and down her long limbs. Her mother shook her head in exasperation that someone could bump into so many things just walking across a room, but her father laughed and said that she was a growing girl and that she reminded him of the puppies that they trained down by the Garrison, with paws too big for their bodies and legs going every direction at once.

Stretching out her legs she glanced down at her boot clad feet. They were large for a girl, or even a boy of her age, but if her lengthening limbs were any indication it was almost certain that she would grow into them. She was the tallest student in her level in the Upper Classroom and it seemed likely that she'd tower over most of the boys in the class by the time that they were all fully grown. She knew from the histories that she'd read in the library that the plains people had been known for their tall, lengthy figures and so she guessed that this was simply one more feature that had somehow managed to last through nine generations of life below ground. Quara couldn't help but wonder if her family would ever truly belong in this world below the earth's crust, or if they would always find themselves somehow set apart.