by Amanda Sun
“Here,” Griffin rasps, and his fingers go to the cloak string around my neck. His hands are shaking as he fumbles with the knot. The fur falls from my back like a brick I hadn’t realized I was carrying. He unties his own cloak, and smooths it out on the floor to dry. “I’m not sure I can make a fire.”
“The only kindling we have is soaked,” I say, pointing to the wreckage of the wooden chair. We could maybe rip up some floorboards and burn those, but we might set the whole place on fire, or have it collapse in on us.
“It’s not long until morning,” he says. “Try and get some rest, and the sun will warm us. The storms here are thunderous, but they’re always over quickly.”
I remember the rain on my first night on earth, alone. It did come and go abruptly, and I hope this will be the same.
“Your leg,” I say, remembering.
“I could’ve lost it, without your help,” he says. He laughs, but it comes out as a sputter. “You must be thinking, ‘some monster hunter he is.’”
I’m not, not at all. That we survived a beast that giant is miraculous, a bounty from the Phoenix herself. I know she fueled the courage in me to swim toward Griffin in the water. I know she gave me the strength to walk all this distance. But then I remember that I can’t be sure the Phoenix is watching over us at all, so all I say is, “Without you, I would’ve been eaten by the chimera.”
“I’m grateful to you, as well,” Griffin says. “You swam right at that Dark Leviathan with your dagger. I’ve never known such bravery from a fallen. You saved my life.”
His eyes are deep and lovely, even in the darkness surrounded only by the gleaming marshland outside. The hazel of them draws me in like the Phoenix’s flame, healing the aching in my ribs and the pain in my legs. I don’t feel quite as cold when I look into them. “Can I do anything for your leg?”
He shakes his head. “I think the main thing is to stay off it for a bit,” he says. “It doesn’t look that deep, and if I made it this far, then it can’t be too serious, right? I’ll have a better look in the morning. Rest now.”
I nod and roll on my side on the wooden floor. I shiver, wishing I had the warm, plush blankets in my bedroom back in the citadel. I miss the crackle of the flames in the fireplace, the comforting sound of my father’s voice in the corridor. The iridescent lights of the plants and fireflies make gleaming spots on my eyelids even when they’re closed. I tremble and pray for morning, pray for the rain to stop.
“Kali,” Griffin’s voice says, and it’s so close to me that I turn to look. He’s lying on the floor beside me, his lips nearly blue as he shakes from the cold. He’s pulled his wet cloak over himself, and as he lifts his arm, the fur raises up like a wing.
I sidle against the paneled floor until I’m nearer to him, and he drapes the wet fur over both of us. It’s heavy with marsh water, even though he’s wrung it out, but it’s the best we can do to keep in what little heat we have. He lies beside me, his shell necklace clinking against the floor as he adjusts the fur over us. There is little heat radiating from him, but it’s more than I had alone. After a few minutes I stop shaking, breathing in the small warmth from our bodies side by side.
I feel safe next to him, enjoying this closeness that I know is only meant for survival, but feels like so much more. Slowly, I press the backs of my hands against his bare chest. Our skin feels like fire and steam against the sopping wet cold. Griffin doesn’t move from my touch. Instead he drapes a weary arm over me, pulling me closer into the little warmth we have.
My eyes close with exhaustion. Griffin is already breathing heavily, lost to dreams and sleep. Everything feels like ice and fire, heat and cold. I want to tell him everything, I think as I drift to sleep. I will tell him everything, and then I will be free.
SEVENTEEN
WHEN THE BIRDS begin to chirp, my groggy, waterlogged brain realizes it’s morning. I open an eye; sunlight streams in from the holes in the roof and the walls. Griffin is still asleep, his expression peaceful like a child’s. I watch as his body rises and falls with each breath. His face is smeared with blood and mud, the yellow and purple paint under his eyes smudged by the Leviathan struggle and the endless rains of the night. There are no more iridescent stars floating around the marshlands, only sunshine in the pale morning sky.
I shift under the karu fur and find it’s less heavy than it was several hours ago. Most of the fur is sleek and dry, though my dress is still damp beneath it. My leg seizes up, and I stretch it to stop the cramping. The night’s walking, the fight with the Dark Leviathan—they all seem like dreams as I stare up at the clouds drifting above the shattered roof.
I get up as quietly as I can, but the motion stirs Griffin from sleep. He groans, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Don’t tell me the sun’s risen already,” he says, and in spite of everything, I almost laugh.
“It’s nighttime still. Go back to sleep.”
“Liar.”
I look out the doorway of the hut and across the marshlands. The surface is calm and misty, covered in the swirling labyrinth of reed paths and water channels. The land looks more solid to the south, the reeds clumping together and the grass turning greener. The mountain range is so close I don’t even see it at first, expecting it in the distance. I look straight up, the peaks high above. We’re nearly at the base, and the sight of it raises my spirits.
“Griffin,” I say. “We’re at the mountains. We’ve made it!”
“Great,” he mumbles, flipping over under the fur. “Now all we have to do is walk straight upward.”
My stomach grumbles, and I sit down near the doorway, opening my pouch for some of the hazu jerky Sayra packed for us. Griffin sits up finally, stretching his lean arms behind his head. His weapons lie in a pile on the floor beside him, and he begins to strap the leather lacings on. I try to look away, remembering how closely we slept together last night. It felt so nice to be together, a warmth rushing through my veins when I think of it—when I think of him. I never felt that with Jonash. I tried, and I couldn’t. With Griffin, I try not to, and I can’t help it. And I don’t even want to help it.
I shake my head, taking another bite of the jerky. Aliyah saw it from a mile away, and now I have to tell Griffin the truth, no matter how he reacts. My life isn’t my own. I’m used to it, and yet I feel that familiar panic rising up in my throat, the kind that makes me want to run to my outcrop on Ashra and be alone with the thistles and fireweed and greedy pikas.
We eat and drink in silence as the sun rises outside the tree house. The room is thick with unspoken words. The night made me brave, but the sunlight makes me afraid, frightened that I’ll lose everything I never knew I wanted.
Griffin gives voice to it a moment later. “If we’re fast enough, this could be our last couple days together,” he says.
I need to go home...don’t I? This is what I wanted. This is what I must do. So why do I feel so unsure?
Come with me, I want to ask again. Instead I say, “Do you think the airship will see me?”
“You’ll need to signal them somehow. How often do they fly over the mountains?”
I chew the last bite of a jerky strip thoughtfully. I’ve lost track of time, but the crowds from the Rending would’ve returned maybe five or six days ago. I can’t be sure. “I know airships travel between Burumu and Ashra at least once a week,” I say. “Sometimes twice. I’m not sure if they’ll still be looking for me. And if they are, they won’t think to look on the mountains.” It’s so far from the edge where I fell. Ashra looks so much smaller from here, like an inkblot floating in the sky.
“I’ll wait with you until they come,” Griffin says. “As long as it takes.”
We climb down the rickety ladder, our arms and legs aching and sore. Griffin washes the back of his leg in the marsh water until only the long jagged slice from the Dark Leviathan’s fan
g is left. He says he might need to stitch it up if it bursts open, but otherwise no harm done. I can’t imagine him taking his bone needle and sinew, stitching up the wound himself without a medic. But he says it wouldn’t be the first time.
We walk across the last of the reed islands and onto the greener grass, where our footprints don’t flood with murky water as soon as we’ve stepped onward.
An hour’s walk and there’s nothing but mountain straight ahead, a winding pathway making its way up the nearest peak. The sun is high in the sky because of our late start, and the hot breeze swirls around us, drying our cloaks and our clothes as we start up the mountain pass. After another hour or two, the path forks.
“Straight ahead is the pass,” Griffin tells me. “We need this route, which goes up to the summit.”
“What’s on the other side of the mountains?”
Griffin smiles. “The ocean. It’s where my father’s village used to be.”
The ocean? My eyes widen. So close to the vision I’ve always wanted to see. I’m tempted to forget Ashra and her lands. They can survive another week without me, or a month, or maybe my whole life. I could take Griffin’s hand and race along the pass, and in a few days we’d be waist-deep in the cool salt water, surrounded by fish and dolphins and seashells.
It’s a lovely dream, but that’s all it is. Griffin looks at me, waiting. I know he’d take me if I asked. But without a word, I turn up the winding path to the summit, and neither of us talks about it at all. I’m the wick and the wax. My life isn’t my own.
I wonder what kind of monsters the mountains hold, but Griffin says there aren’t many. “Slim pickings for lunch up here,” he says. “No humans, so there aren’t any monsters bigger than basilisks, and they’re only the size of deer.”
The mountain path is hard sand stomped flat, and it reminds me of the paths from the citadel to Lake Agur and the outlands. The fields around the path are crammed with wildflowers in vibrant yellows and pinks, flaming oranges like Phoenix wings and blues like the storm dragon’s scales. The red bees swarm the blossoms, gathering nectar to make scarlet honey, while the flicker wasps flap their wings lazily in the heat. We wind around the mountain over and over, like a carousel from the annals, always spinning higher to the top.
By dinnertime, the breeze around us has grown colder. It reminds me of the wind on Ashra. It reminds me that I’ll never feel warmth in the wind again. We’ve stopped for the day, since there’s no airship in sight, and we could step right off the mountainside in the dark. There’s a thin waterfall running down a jagged outcrop of rock, and a small hollow underneath its ledge where we’ll sleep for the night. Around us, the trees are full of mournful birds, chirping as they anticipate sunset.
As we sit chewing the dried berries from our pouches, there’s a sound like hissing and slithering. Griffin jumps up, his bow and arrow in hand. A basilisk rounds the corner, looking as startled to see us as we are to see him. He fans out webbed skin like a mane around his face, shaking his tail with a rattling warning. The sun beams off his scales in a rainbow of iridescent colors. The monster’s forked purple tongue darts in and out of its mouth as it hisses at Griffin, unsure whether to lunge or retreat.
Griffin holds his arrow ready, nocked on the string, but doesn’t let it fly. Suddenly the basilisk lunges forward, and the arrow looses straight into its neck. The basilisk hisses and chomps his toothless maw at Griffin, who leaps out of the way and holds the monster behind the frill of its mane. The basilisk tries to charge at me, snapping and rattling his tail, but Griffin holds him back. The two tangle about until the chimera venom takes hold, and then the basilisk’s eyes roll upward and his head hits the ground.
I help Griffin slowly carve away at the rainbow scales that I remember now he’s promised to Sayra. Each is the size of my hand but barely weighs a thing. I wonder if she’ll make necklaces out of them, but Griffin shakes his head. “They’re pretty, but they’re also impossible to cut through. They’ll make good armor, if Sayra has time. If not, we can sell them when we make our next trip to the weapon smith in the lava lands. They disintegrate, though, so the armor’s only good for a couple months.”
“What’s it like in the lava lands?” I ask, prying another rainbow scale off the basilisk. “Is it hot there? With...what are they called...volcanos?”
Griffin laughs. “Not where we lived,” he says. “Much farther northwest there are a few active ones. The soil is rich and black from the lava flows, but there are hard ridges of stone rippling across the land. Not so great for farming on those, so you have to pick your field carefully. Plus behemoth packs like to hide in the ridges. But there’s lots of iron in the rock, so it’s a good place to be a weapon smith. The lava lands start just north of where I found you, around the other side of Ashra’s shadow.”
“I wish I could see it,” I say, clinking another scale onto the pile. “The land where you grew up.”
Griffin smiles and rubs the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He gathers the scales into his pouch, then starts to carve some meat for us to roast. “I wish I could see your home, too,” he says. “In Ashra. Do you and your father have a farm?”
The truth is filtering in again, no matter how much I want to block it out. “Not really,” I say. “But my friend Elisha lives on one. She owns pygmy goats and chickens, and bakes the most delicious bread.”
“Bread,” Griffin says, his eyes gleaming. “Like my mother’s, hot from the oven.”
“You’d burn your fingers over Elisha’s bread, too,” I say. “There’s nothing like the first loaves of the Ulan harvest.”
I gather branches to make a campfire while Griffin prepares the basilisk meat. The sun is low in the sky, the colors of sunset spilled across the heavens like upturned paint cans. The view from the mountain is breathtaking. It isn’t as high up as Ashra, where the earth looks like a flattened, dead painting. From here, everything is vibrant and moving. I can see the hazus and dragons circling over the plains in the fading light, the water of the marshlands reflecting the falling sunlight like a shattered mirror. I can see the river looping toward the forest where Aliyah and Sayra must be. And past that, the floating shadow of Ashra, looming silently in the sky.
Who could guess that a world overridden with monsters wouldn’t itself be monstrous?
Griffin’s voice is quiet beside my ear. “You can still change your mind.”
I turn to face him. His hazel eyes are gleaming, his floppy brown hair falling into his eyes. I’ve never been given a choice before, not really. But he’s ready to support any path I choose. We’re standing so close to each other that the world seems to fall away. I could move toward him now, and I think he would let me. I could wrap my arms around his neck and see what he would do—to see what I would do. There’s nothing in the world but us, and it’s all in my hands.
And then Griffin erupts into a string of curse words I’ve never heard before and dashes back to the campfire where the basilisk meat has lit on fire. I hurry over and we blow out the flames on the meat, laughing until tears spring to the corners of our eyes. We peel off the charred outsides and eat the steaming meat inside, and then douse our burning fingertips in the waterfall. The water mists over our faces with its cool droplets, and suddenly the sky has turned a pale purple, and the sun is gone, and the day is over.
It’s warmer by the fire, but Griffin insists we sleep in the cavern under the waterfall ledge. “Basilisks have bad eyesight at night,” he says. “I’ve seen them walk straight off the mountain’s edge before. But they won’t miss us in the open next to a fire.” The mountain breeze is cool, but the tiny cavern has trapped the warmth of the day’s sunlight and keeps the wind away. Griffin spreads out his karu fur on the ground, and I spread mine out beside his. The cloak has dried from the long trek in the sunlight and the fur is soft and warm. We watch the stars alight in the sky around the sides of the
waterfall’s veil.
“It’s probably a full day’s walk tomorrow,” he says. “From there we’ll wait until the airship comes by. Do they travel at night?”
I shake my head. I’ve only ever seen them travel by daylight. “They’re not the most stable machines. Our technology is pretty limited.”
“Ours, too,” Griffin says. “Scholars always get picked off first. No fighting skills. That’s why monster hunters are trying to make a safe space, so we can get civilization running again.”
“You said there might be a whole village left on the Frost Sea.”
“There are a couple villages rumored to be left. But the Frost Sea is so far, and I haven’t dealt with many ice-type monsters. If there is a village there, they must have good monster hunters of their own.”
“When I... When I get on the airship,” I say slowly, “what will you do next?”
Griffin stretches his legs out, resting his arms on his knees. “I’ll head back to Aliyah and Sayra and see if they’re still in the haven,” he says. “If not, I might head to the lava lands to drop these basilisk scales off at the weapon smith. And then? I’ll keep roaming, fighting monsters that are threatening survivors and keeping my eyes on the sky for more fallen, like you.” He takes a drink from his water flask and corks the lid back in. “And you?”
“I...” I’ve been so desperate to get back, to escape the earth. And for what? The rebellion worries me, yes, but I know my father will deal with it swiftly. And then life will go back to those quiet times in the library, reading the annals and dreaming of the world below. I’ll sneak out to Lake Agur and to my outcrop, dodging responsibilities with Elisha at my side. Then, next year, I’ll marry the Sargon’s son, whom I don’t love. I’ll take on all the responsibility that awaits me in a life I dread. I want to be with my father again, yes...but I know more now. I’ve seen more. There’s a whole world down here that I want to explore.
“Kali.”
