Read Promised for Free Online

climbing up a long, gradual hill of dusty rock and scrub two days after picking up Jack and Angie when she noticed the people in the caravan stopping ahead, on top of the next ridge. She glanced down at Maya, whom she carried straddled on her hip, supported with a sling. The little girl had her fingers in her mouth, and she made a petulant noise, tugging at her cloth hat.
    â€œYou have to keep your hat on,” Gaia said. “Look! Look up the hill. See Josephine and Junie? We’re going to catch them.”
    The people kept spreading out in a knobby line along the ridge top, and Gaia knew it could mean only one thing: the Enclave. She looked back eagerly for Leon, and moved aside with Maya to let others pass. Several girls and boys, her messengers, paused conveniently nearby, and over their heads rippled her standard: a yellow oval ring on a green background, reminiscent of the commons back in Sylum. Mikey, Dinah’s son, was in charge of bearing the flag, which made it easy for anyone in the caravan to locate Gaia.
    â€œWhat is it?” Norris asked her. The cook leaned heavily on his crutch to rest his peg leg.
    â€œWe must be close,” she said, smiling. “They’re stopping to see. Go on. I’ll be right there.”
    Adjusting the angle of her hat brim, she scanned back along the caravan, where every able-bodied person was heavily loaded. Men and women carried food, clothes, poles, and rolled tarps, sometimes in huge loads on their backs. Where there were no roads, they could use no wheels, but they’d rigged travois for the horses to drag. Angie was carrying a pole with two cages of chickens balanced over her shoulder, keeping it steady with her good hand as she followed Jack’s stretcher. Other children drove a small herd of close-shorn sheep, and far in the back, trailing slowly behind, came the crims with extra loads of water.
    Wanting to see the Enclave for the first time again with Leon beside her, Gaia automatically hitched Maya higher and started walking back along the line of travelers, with Mikey in her wake.
    In the distance, one of the crims stopped to wait while his chainmate maneuvered their ankle chain around a rock, and then they came forward again. The next pair of prisoners, each carrying a heavy skin full of water on his back, was impeded at the same place, and managed the same clumsy dance. She watched it twice more before she dragged her gaze away, looking for Leon, and found him in the back. Leon was helping to carry a platform laden with water sacks and spelling one of the crims who trailed behind, head bowed, hands on his hips, moving his legs in exact mimic of his chainmate so as not to disrupt his chainmate’s stride.
    Gaia had never been happy about the crims. Back in Sylum, after she’d been elected Matrarc, many of the prisoners had been retried and their sentences commuted. Others had been released to their families, leaving incarcerated only the forty who were convicted of the most violent crimes.
    The families who had elected to stay behind in Sylum, a minority of two hundred people, had not wanted to be burdened with running the prison. Their leader, Mlady Maudie, had argued vociferously that Gaia should take all the crims with her on trail, and after weeks of negotiating, they had ended up one night at a table in the lodge, dealing out the files of the prisoners into two piles and trading to see which crims would stay and which would go.
    Mlady Maudie had offered to swap a murderer for five of Gaia’s lesser criminals.
    â€œWe need to keep our numbers down,” Leon had said quietly, turning aside to confer with Gaia. He had once been unjustly imprisoned with the crims himself, and he’d been running the prison since Gaia had become Matrarc.
    â€œWe won’t be able to guard them forever,” Gaia had said to him, considering. “What if he breaks free and kills us all in the night? What if he kills us when we reach