Page 30 of The Poison Season

And gasped.

In the growing light of day, she could see that this wasn’t a man; not a full-grown one, anyway. He didn’t look much older than her, in fact. He was perched on the bench in the middle of the boat, clinging to it to keep from being tossed out by the waves. Suddenly, he looked up, and their eyes met.

It was the young man from the day of the festival.

She wasn’t sure how she knew. She hadn’t been able to make out his features that day, only his dark, tousled hair. But she could see his features clearly now, and he was terrified.

She looked around in vain, as if there were some adult nearby to help her. Why had he gotten in the boat? Why would he want to cross to Endla, knowing what he must about the island?

She walked to the water’s edge without meaning to. He wasn’t going to make it. Not at the rate he was going. He gesticulated at the stern of the boat, then at her, then back to the boat again.

She shook her head in confusion.

“The rope!” he screamed.

Of course. The rope. She could pull him to shore. It might not be enough, but she could try.

She could.

Her eyes darted to his face again. He wasn’t far offshore now, but the boat was listing dangerously, thrown off-balance by the water pooling inside it. Any second it would tip, he would fall into the lake, and he would die.

She groaned in anguish. She couldn’t kill an outsider, but she couldn’thelpan outsider, either. Every day of her life had been in preparation for this moment. So why was she hesitating? She reached for her knife, hefted it in her hand. Cut the rope, and he would die. She would have done her job. Would probably even be revered for it.

But then she saw the terror in his eyes and thought of her brother, of the dread he must be feeling as he fumbled his way through a dark, unfamiliar wood with a wolf on the prowl. She thought of Pieter and his last desperate cry for help. Somewhere, someone loved this boy, and if he died, their heart would break as surely as Isola’s had.Not all outsiders are evil, her mother had said, and it hadn’t been speculation. She had said it with as much quiet conviction as when she told her children she loved them.

The warring voices of her aunt and Sage echoed in her ears.We protect Endla above all else.

But Leelo wasn’t Ketty, and she wasn’t Sage. She couldn’t save her brother, but she could save this man’s life.

The knife slipped from Leelo’s fingers, and the next thing she knew she was grabbing the rope with both hands and pulling with all her might.

The young man was shouting now, but she didn’t look up. She didn’t want to know how close it was going to be. She was doing everything she could. A few moments later, she heard the sound of the hull scraping against the rocks and sand. Dawn was only minutes away. Sage would be here soon, and how would Leelo possibly explain this?

Without looking back at the boat, she dropped the rope, grabbed her knife, and fled.

Chapter Twenty

Leelo was breathless as she sprinted through the Forest toward home. Sage would be arriving for Watcher duty any second, and the council members would be returning for the boat soon. They would find it back on this side of the shore, either containing the remnants of an outsider, or empty. Despite what she’d just done, she was praying for the former. They would think an outsider had attempted to cross and failed, and she couldn’t be blamed for that.

If he wasn’t dead, he was certainly injured. The rough landing on shore would have made it impossible not to get any water on himself. She could only hope he was injured badly enough he wouldn’t remember that Leelo had helped him. It had only been for a minute or two, anyway. She wasn’t even sure that shehadhelped him. He might have made it to shore all on his own.

I should have killed him, she thought bitterly, but she couldn’t get the image of the young man’s panicked face out of her mind. She resented him for putting her in this position. He must have heard tales of Endla wherever he came from. What reason could he possibly have for coming here, other than to cause harm?

Leelo sobbed as she ran, her lungs burning. She couldn’t risk running into Sage in this state. She needed to calm down and come up with a plan.

She left the trail and headed into the Forest, which would at least help her avoid her cousin or a council member. She would skirt the pine grove and set a less direct course toward home. It would take longer, but it was her best option. When she was deep enough into the trees, she stopped to catch her breath and attempted to calm her racing thoughts.

The situation was bad; there was no denying that. But she had gone to the lake tonight for a reason: the wolf. Others must have heard it howling. And maybe it wasn’t her attack on the pine that brought it. Maybe the Forest had used it to alert the Endlans that danger, in the form of an outsider, was nearby. She should have woken her mother then, not come out here on her own. But her intentions had been pure, at least.

She sighed. Deep down, she knew that reasoning would never hold up under Sage’s and Ketty’s scrutiny, and certainly not the council’s. What kind of Endlansavedan outsider?

“Not an outsider,” she said out loud, trying to drown out the voices in her head. “A human being.”

After she’d collected herself, she resumed jogging at a more maintainable pace. She couldn’t call attention to herself, and she couldn’t be in a state of panic when she made it home. She would tell her family she’d heard the wolf, that she’d gone out to investigate and hadn’t found anything. A rabbit darted across her path, making her gasp, but aside from that, she saw no living creatures in the Forest. Most of them knew to stay away from the pine grove, at least the ones that had survived long enough to learn.

A bird flapped from a tree suddenly. Leelo froze, and in the silence, she heard the faint sound of someone talking.

Twosomeones talking.

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