Rangers of Linwood (The Five Kingdoms Book 1) by LeAnn Anderson Page A

That was odd. It normally wasn’t in use until after lunch. She went over to the parchment hanging outside the exit to see who was running. Her eyes went wide when she saw Tesni’s name next to a time that was rapidly rising past the three hour mark. Even if Tesni’s age weren’t an issue, the time alone would have alarmed her. It was three times the longest even a young beginner ever took.
    Knowing something was severely wrong, Arya forced the exit door open. She slid down one of the vines, jumped up, and grabbed hold of the zip line, going up it, moving hand over hand. She swung herself up onto the platform and saw that the tight rope had broken. Looking down into the pit, she saw Tesni’s crumpled, unconscious form, and her heart leapt into her throat.
    Taking a deep breath to calm herself, she snapped out a loud “End!” Immediately, the parchment paper outside the door stopped recording the time. Arya scrambled down the ladder into the pit and ran over to Tesni, unable to discern why the girl was so badly hurt. Her left ankle was swollen, indicating that it had been reinjured, but beyond that, there was nothing obvious.
    Arya grabbed the end of the broken rope and tied it around Tesni’s chest, just beneath her arm pits. She climbed back up the ladder and used the broken rope to pull Tesni up, being slow and careful not to jerk or bang her too much. But how was she going to get her down the zip line and up the vines?
    Finally, Arya just draped Tesni’s body over her shoulders and carried her that way. The zip line posed no problem, but the vines were a lot trickier. Still, Arya was good at what she did, and she raced Tesni to Enid’s tent. “Enid!”
    “What did she manage to do to herself this time?” Enid asked good-naturedly. Tesni had a unique gift for getting herself into minor scrapes. Then she looked up and gasped. “Not another head injury!”
    “I don’t know,” Arya admitted, laying Tesni down. “I found her near the end of the ropes course. The tightrope broke. She shouldn’t be in such bad shape. Those mattresses at the bottom of the pit are there for a reason. Plenty of people have fallen off that tight rope and never gotten worse than a sprained ankle or wrist!”
    Enid examined Tesni, frowning. “What was she doing on the ropes course?”
    “That’s something else I don’t know,” Arya said with a sigh. “She never even expressed an interest in trying it out. I can only guess that she got bored, thought she could do it on her own, and didn’t think it was necessary to ask permission.”
    “Well, there isn’t a single external injury,” Enid said after a while, “except for a reinjured ankle. That alone should not cause her current state of unconsciousness, or such shallow breathing.”
    “I didn’t even notice how shallow her breathing was,” Arya said.
    Enid shook her head. “She’s fighting for each breath, Arya. This goes well beyond her fall into either some other health issue that we never caught before this, which is highly unlikely, or a dark curse.”
    “I’d put my money on dark curse,” Arya muttered. “Agrona seems to have it out for her for reasons we don’t understand other than using Tesni’s skills to steal the orb.” Not more than a month prior, some of Agrona’s henchmen had been seen outside the camp. They had tried to kidnap Tesni, with the emphasis on tried. Arya and Ryder had put a quick stop to that.
    “I would as well, Arya. I would, as well.”
     
    
     
    Tesni felt her fall slowing. She landed on her feet in a beautiful field filled with wildflowers. The forest line was not far away. She could hear a stream running and birds singing. When she looked down, she was not in the clothes she normally wore around camp. Instead, she was in a pretty, pink, flowing dress with big bell sleeves. On her feet were silk slippers, and when she reached to check her braid, she found that her hair now flowed loose, and she was wearing a circlet.