a moment in each cycle she had to cross her legs quite painfully out of shape. When Rel tried to imitate the step, though, he found the crossing came naturally - so naturally that he felt for a moment as if he was going to fall back into the normal hall.
They were steadily approaching the stepped dais at the head of the Hall. Apart from two neat rows of plain brass candle-stands and a plush red carpet, the dais bore no furniture or ornament, a testament to the Gift-Givers' humility. The vaults of the roof shaped the space around the dais to exalt nature and the Realm, not individuals.
Rel finally stumbled as Taslin shifted stride again, to a simple two-forward-one-sideways pattern, while he was still admiring the architecture. His foot landed across the border of two tiles, and the ground - or lack of it, whatever invisible surface they were on - twisted beneath his boot-sole. A sharp, hot tingle shot up his leg, but he gritted his teeth and managed not to slip further.
The tingling told him he'd been lucky. The stumble would not be fatal, though from the feel of it it was a close-run thing. He flapped his arms for balance and managed to throw his other foot forward and back into step without sliding out of the route altogether. It was still a heart-squeezing moment's straining before he could stand upright again, and his legs felt like jelly underneath him until he'd got his breath back.
Pevan squeezed his shoulder, and he reached up to cover her hand with his own for a moment before continuing. He didn't dare risk turning around, but his sister's fingers felt so thin and cold that the reassuring sense of her strength at his back dimmed. He gave her a squeeze for reassurance, trying not to picture her crying, then let go and picked up Taslin's trail.
Only a few strides later, he found he could follow the Gift-Giver's step without paying attention. The tiles were just right for his gait. He relaxed just in time for something ahead to catch his eye, alarm bells ringing up and down the inside of his skull where logic fatigue was slowly replacing his mind.
Realmspace seemed to be fragmenting, in some ninth-half-dimension way he had no frame of reference for. It was as if each ray of light reaching his eyes existed in a long, narrow universe of its own, all of them running in rough parallel to produce a disconcerting composite that fell just short of homogeneity. The strands writhed, never crossing, never tangling, but twisting past and against one another all the same.
His foot landed on the carpet of the dais. Looking at the rippling walls made him feel like his eyes were watering, badly. He squinted, but that only made it worse. Distorted light assaulted him, and his fatigue headache pulsed in time with its irregular motion. Caught in the midst of the madness ahead, Taslin was a watery blur of purple and satin white.
Colours flowed up and down along the spectrum, the marble and dark wood shades fragmenting and spreading out. Rel couldn't help ducking as all the greens of the leafy ceiling seemed to swoop down around him. Ochre reds and a purple so deep it was almost obsidian joined them, and suddenly the eye-straining haze and thumping behind his forehead were receding.
Surrendering to the relief, Rel squeezed his eyes shut and forced his mind forward. A wave of vague sensation washed over him, almost like stepping out of a Sherim's embrace, and when he opened his eyes, the scene had stabilised.
They were in a forest, walking towards a building that was, by First Realm standards, large and ornate. After the grandeur of the Court and the Great Hall, though, it seemed demure - not small, but modest. It had a peaked roof of terracotta tiles, black gables and white walls. A tower rose from the front of the building, its high-pointed roof reaching up what had to be sixty feet from the ground.
A tingle by Rel's ankle reminded him of the instruction to follow Taslin exactly. He looked down to see his boot ever so slightly out of line with the Gift-Giver's footprint. Ahead, she was stamping hard with every step, the almost-childish force of it at odds with her usual grace. Still, it was working; her trail was clear in the dry leaf-litter covering the ground.
He made his way forward more carefully, ears pinned back for any shout of alarm or pain from Pevan. If his mind could wander and almost lead him into danger, hers certainly could. There wouldn't be much he could do if she did put a foot wrong, but there was no way he was going back to Federas without her as well as Dora.
Outside the door to the building, which was apparently a single plank of almost-black wood, Taslin paused. Without looking back, she lifted her right hand, fist clenched, out to one side of her head. Somewhere along the journey, her purple-streaked sleeves and white gloves had disappeared, and the perfect right-angle of her pale-skinned elbow robbed her flesh of any humanity. Slowly and precisely, she moved the fist around a tight circle, then splayed her fingers wide, clenched her fist, splayed and clenched again.
Rel froze for a moment, chills spreading out across his shoulders, head pounding again. The gesture meant gather close - I'm changing the environment. Occasionally, particularly dangerous or complex routes required such drastic measures from a Guide. He didn't want to think too much about what obstacle might demand it from a Gift-Giver.
Still, he crowded up behind Taslin as best he could, his toes to her heels, his head turned sideways so that he wasn't breathing through her ponytail. Her hair tickled his cheek all the same, a blur of red, fiercer and more fluid than blood, at the corner of his vision. She had no scent, or there was no air here to carry scent to his nostrils, but he felt as if he was breathing her in all the same. He kept his breathing shallow, trying not to inhale too much.
Where her neck met her shoulder, Taslin's dress looked loose, translucent, insubstantial. It moved over her prominent, delicate collarbone as she breathed, and Rel was sure it would slowly slide down, baring ever more skin and graceful muscle. He shook himself back to the present, trying to glare at his own imagination, and repeated the changing environment gesture for Pevan's benefit.
No sooner had he lowered his hand back to his side than something brushed chill fingers over the back of it. He started, then realised the fingers were actual fingers, not some quirk of the Realmspace; Taslin had reached back to grasp his hand. Her skin was cool, but not cold enough to be uncomfortable. The way she held him, across the back of his hand with her thumb along his index finger, though, pinched at his knuckles - the Gift-Giver's grip was strong and firm.
Pevan's arrival, right behind him, her head pressing gently against his back, robbed him of the opportunity to make any private enquiry about Taslin's touch. At best, he might be able to reach forward and tap a message to her, but he realised that if he did so, he'd be tapping on her hip, through the gauzy fabric of her skirt, and just the thought of that made him swallow. Dora would no doubt scold his ears off at the idea.
Behind him, he could feel Pevan's unease - she, too, was breathing shallowly, and Rel didn't think it was anything to do with the fact he hadn't washed properly in days. He couldn't match Taslin's hand-holding exactly, but he reached back with his free hand. It took him three attempts to find Pevan's fingers, but she didn't pull away. Hard though it was to resist the urge to cling tightly, he managed to relax. Pevan's hands always felt like fragile porcelain, her fingers girlish and terribly slender.
Taslin let the moment drag out, tension building. It was strange to be prisoned between the two women, very different to his encounters with the team of Dora and Taslin, back in Vessit. Pevan was no substitute for the Four Knot, but her presence, the awkward combination of the fire in her eyes and the vulnerability in her hands, came with its own demands. He had to get her safely back to Federas.
That thought made him impatient, suddenly. Why wasn't Taslin doing anything? Or perhaps she was, imperceptibly combing through the structure of the Realmspace around them, preparing it for whatever change she was about to work. She could even be making the change already, never mind that Rel could see no evidence of it. He resisted the idea of Clearseeing again, choking off the thought before it could rough up his fatigue.
He was beginning to string together the sequence of taps that would ask what the dela
y was when Taslin reached forward and gripped the handle of the door. She squeezed his captive hand as she did so, almost as if involuntarily. It couldn't be, of course - how could a Wilder make sense of the subconscious link between a human pair of hands? - but it was a fine simulacrum of it.
Then she opened the door, and concentrated analysis reeled right out of Rel's head, drunk on a rush of thumping pain as his headache flared. The walls of the building stretched outward like a pullover being turned inside-out, swooping overhead and closing around them so that the forest became an overlarge, empty hall, white-walled and bare-floored.
For a long moment, jagged shivers of hot pain darted up and down the middle of Rel's mind. His vision doubled and watered as the two images - forest and room - overlaid themselves on one another and fought for reconciliation. Tickle or no tickle, he turned to bury his face in Taslin's hair, but the Gift-Giver chose that moment to step forwards, and he found himself stumbling after her.
The doorway swallowed them in welcome relief. Beyond was a plain, straight corridor, floored in what looked like bare concrete, of all things. The walls were similar, but with countless irregular lines pressed into them, roughly in
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