“Right.” I snatch at the handrail again as the coach lurches off a divot in the track.
“Rat’s okay?”
“Scared spineless, probably, but yeah, he’s okay.”
She glances at me. “You’re okay?”
“I dunno, I think I left my sanity somewhere behind that rain barrel. You know they’re going to be after us like flies on rot?”
“We’ll ditch the coach,” she says. “Run the horses until we get some good distance, then unharness them. We can leave the track and ride toward the mountains. We should be able to get pretty close by sunup.”
“Minister Kobok,” I say, “will destroy us both.”
She grimaces again and flicks the whip.
“If he can catch us,” she says.
Tamsin
I have something stuck in my head.
This happens a lot, especially in the dead of night—like now. These deep, secret hours were frequently some of my most productive times as ashoki, when I would jolt out of sleep with a phrase or melody drifting at the very edge of my brain. In Tolukum Palace, I broke more than one bedside candlestick in my rush to throw off my covers and stagger to my writing desk before the thought could pass.
I haven’t been woken by an idea since my capture outside Vittenta. The time in my cell was so grim, so thick with pain, that the creative well inside me seemed to have vanished. The times I did lie awake at night, it was because I hurt too much to sleep, and those times were filled with the squeaking and leathery swooping of bats swarming in the darkness.
But now an idea has woken me up again. I lie on the floor of Soe’s workshop, tucked between Iano and the small press. The bags of walnuts and baskets of salal they collected earlier today sit just a few inches above my head, filling the room with the scent of tart berries.
Rain cannot soak dry ground.
I don’t know where this line came from, but it’s hanging right there in my head like a ripe fruit. I prod it, the shape of it, the feel of its syllables. I repeat it a few times. I taste its cadence.
Rain cannot soak dry ground.
Unlike those times in Tolukum Palace, though, I don’t rush to write it down. Why should I? What am I going to do with it? There is no court waiting to hear it. There is no song waiting to be written.
I shift on the floor. Soe’s scratchy winter rugs tickle my skin. I reach up until my fingers bump the nearest basket of salal berries. I sneak a few and pop them in my mouth. They burst over my sore tongue, their tart sweetness hinting at the deeper flavor they’ll carry as wine. It’ll be weeks before they’re ready—Soe plans to mash and cook them tomorrow, but then they’ll have to sit and ferment, transforming from sweet summer fruit to something with a bite.
I grimace. My transformation, on the other hand, has done the reverse—a journey from someone with a weapon to someone both harmless and useless. The salal will ferment. I am just rotting.
I wriggle back down next to Iano. He shifts, sliding his arm around my waist. He smells like berries, too—Soe roped him into picking with her along the road. He came back with stained fingers and a flush of sunburn over his cheeks. I set my head down beside his.
The string of words nudges my brain again.
Rain cannot soak dry ground.
I shut my eyes, turn my head into Iano’s shoulder, and try with all my might to ignore them.
Lark
The North Burr is not like the South Burr.
I’ve seen it before, but farther downstream, toward Pasul, where it’s the same kind of muddy, shallow river as the drainage below Three Lines. But here it’s a foaming, rocky current, with white-frothed rapids and sudden pools so clear it looks like there’s no water inside at all. I stand at the edge of the bank, staring at the bright golden-green riverbed under the rushing, glassy surface.
Veran sits back on his heels, his chin wet from his drink. The horses are watering a little way downstream, their sides dark with sweat. We abandoned the mud coach just before dawn, leaving it slouched tiredly behind a rocky outcrop. We unhitched the team and fitted them with the halters under the driver’s box and guided them off the road. We walked until the sun rose, took a short rest under a stand of pinyon pine, and then mounted and continued northwest, toward the towering blue line of the Moquovik Mountains.
I shift, rubbing my backside. There were no saddles in the coach, only blankets, and my sit bones are aching like they’ve been beaten with a pike. Still, the minister had a fancy leather canteen and half a bottle of berry-red wine in his carriage, plus packets of ginger cookies and tender jerky and three scones with honest-to-goodness lemon in them. I’m still getting over the shock of that light, tangy taste on my tongue, along with the decadence of something baked with flour instead of cornmeal and sweet butter instead of lard, so that now, at the edge of the crystalline North Burr, I’m very close to being overwhelmed.
Veran wipes his mouth. “That’s good water. Are you going to drink?”
I crouch down and dip my fingers in the water. It’s shockingly cold. I cup my hand under the surface and bring a scoop to my mouth. It’s sweet and bright and makes my teeth ache.
“So the good news is, I think we’re pretty far north,” Veran says, shading his eyes against the midmorning sun. “I expect it’s nearly a straight shot west to Giantess at this point. The bad news is, we have to go over the ridge, of course, and I don’t know if there’s a track.”
I let the last handful of water seep through my fingers. Down near the stones are tiny rock-colored fish, beating their little tails to stay in one place in the current. Imagine that—fighting every second of your life just to stay right where you are.
“Lark?” Veran looks down at me. “You’re being awfully quiet. Are you all right?”
I stand up, reach to adjust my hat, and remember I don’t have it anymore. For lack of anything else to do with them, I shove my hands in my pockets. “Yeah. West, you think?”
“I don’t know how far we’ll make it without a track,” he says, still watching me. “The understory gets pretty thick once you cross the rainshadow, and the loose slopes can be tricky up near the summits. Maybe we ford and follow the river a little while to see if we find anything promising?”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” I repeat.
I don’t know what he expects me to say. We’re well outside my range, miles and miles away from anything I could call familiar. I don’t know why, but the North Burr feels like a boundary. On this side of the river is all the stuff I ever was—slave, runaway, rustler, outlaw. The Sunshield Bandit. I’ve left a trail of all the bits of myself—hat, eyeblack, sword, buckler. Jema—blazes, I wonder if I’ll ever find Jema again. My eyes travel to Rat—with a sickening swoop I remember how close I came to losing him, too.
The space between my shoulder blades prickles, as if I can feel the eyes of the distant Ferinno watching me hesitate. Back there, back behind me, is everything I ever was. I look across to the far shore.
Over there is nothing.
“All right, well.” Veran runs his fingers through his hair. “I guess we should get going. Unless you want to eat something?”
“Nah.” The instinct to save what few provisions we have kicks in, despite the rising hills thick with promising greenery. I turn for the horses. Without any more words between us, we mount and urge the horses across the broad, stony ford, Rat splashing along behind.
It soon becomes clear that my urge to conserve our supplies is wasted—the riverbank is thick with late-summer berries. Veran exclaims over each new thicket—“Oh, whortleberries! Look, a hackberry”—like it’s the greatest damn delight of his life. We dismount and adopt a leisurely pace to eat what we find.
We also find bears—two of them, to be exact, gorging themselves on the same berries we’re plucking. They’re black bears, thankfully, not grizzlies, but I pull up short at the sight of them sitting on their haunches, delicately slurping berries off the branches with th
eir lips. Coyotes and cats I know how to deal with, but there are no bears around Three Lines. Rat stops and growls, his hackles rising, but Veran barely blinks, merely lifting his arms over his head and giving a sharp, “Ha!” that sends them lumbering into the brush.
“You can come back after we pass through,” he calls after them, then catches me staring. “What?”
“Don’t tell them that,” I say incredulously.
“Oh, sorry.” He cups his hand to his mouth and calls, “Give us a few minutes, and then you can come back.”
I shake my head, wanting to tell him off for making fun of me—but I’m not sure he is.
We go on.
Around noontime, we come to an old ramshackle hut by a bend in the river. Several tanning frames stand out in the sun, where beaver pelts are stretched to dry. A stooped man comes to the door of the hut with a crossbow and a wary glint in his eye, but Veran talks politely to him in Moquoian, and after a moment, the man points up the river a little way. From their conversation I gather we’re approaching a footpath that leads up the mountain slopes. Veran thanks him and offers the last of the minister’s rich wine in return for the promise that the man will deny seeing us if anyone comes inquiring. We come to the path just a few minutes later, marked with a stone cairn, and we turn our horses’ noses west, toward the soaring Moquoviks.
We climb.
The canyons around Three Lines are steep and rocky, but they conveniently slope off right around the time you get really tired. These mountains soar up and up, turning the distances blue and blurry. The scraggly trail switchbacks this way and that, passing through dense copses of fir and pine, breaking apart to reveal sudden rock fields that ring with the squeaks of an animal Veran calls a pika.
It gets cooler. The track joins the course of a noisy stream, and soon its chatter fills our ears as it rushes down the mountainside. Two days ago, we were nearly dead of dehydration in the water scrape, and now there’s a torrent of cool, clear water splashing right by our feet. It feels indulgent, selfish, wasteful—a luxury I haven’t earned. Veran, Rat, and the horses take full advantage, stopping to drink whenever the fancy takes them, but I can’t make myself do the same. I think of the couple hundred folk being separated out of Tellman’s Ditch, and the ones farther south in Redalo, all the ones with Port Iskon in their records—like me. Soon they’ll be marching inland with the dust in their eyes and throats, and then loaded on ships, parched by the salty breeze. I keep the minister’s canteen full, but I only sip when my throat prickles. Stored in the canteen, the water is lukewarm and leathery.
There are birds, and bugs, and pikas, marmots, martens, and three more bears. I do have the crossbow from the minister’s coach, and I suppose if I was feeling up to it, I could attempt to shoot something. The fat, golden marmots are especially bold, watching us from atop rocks so close I expect I could reach out and grab one with my bare hands. But I don’t—I feel like an intruder here, and it feels too much like breaking into someone’s pantry and making off with their canned goods.
Which, upon reflection, I have done in the past, so I don’t understand why I should be so bothered now.
Late in the afternoon, when the mountains are throwing long purple shadows behind us, we reach a small, flat grove of spicy-smelling fir. We’re walking at this point, resting the horses and our butts. For no particular reason I turn and look behind us.
“Blazes,” I say—the first word I’ve spoken in hours.
The land ripples away from us, first the falling blue-green of the mountain slopes, and then the dull brown of the water scrape, and beyond it, barely more than a golden smudge on the horizon—the Ferinno. It flashes like a line of fire, ignited by the sinking sun.
Veran comes to stand at my elbow, letting his horse nose in some grass. “We’ve come a long way,” he says.
“A lot of it was in the coach,” I say.
He gives me a funny look. “We still came a long way.”
I shrug. “I guess.”
He keeps watching me for a moment, like he did down by the river, and then he looks around us. “What do you say we camp here? We’ll lose the light in an hour or so, and it’s only going to get colder the farther up we get.”
“Okay.”
We don’t have much camp to set up—just fluffing around in the fir needles to find a soft place to lie down. Veran blankets the horses and collects some of the downed branches for firewood, and I occupy myself for a good twenty minutes with hollowing out a fire ring and coaxing a spark from my knife and flint. Once the blaze has caught, I hold the rock in my palm—a tiny chunk of the mesa behind Three Lines. It’s completely unremarkable—when I picked it up it was only because it had a good surface for striking. If I had realized it would ultimately be the only thing I’d have left from the Ferinno . . .
I’d probably have scoffed at myself for being sentimental.
I close my fingers over it.
Veran, meanwhile, opens the jerky pouch, tosses a strip to Rat, and then hands me the bag.
“So,” he says, chewing on his own strip. “Another day or so over the mountains, then we get our bearings and make for Giantess. If Iano and Tamsin are there, we tell them about Kobok and try to make a plan.”
“Yeah.” I take a piece of jerky but don’t eat it.
“Lark, are you okay?”
“Yeah, are you?”
“I’m fine. My stomach hurts—I’m not sure if it’s from all the berries or all the bad water we drank out in the scrape,” he says, rubbing his middle. I know how he feels—I’ve been cramping too. “But I’m feeling a lot better since crossing the Burr.” He nods at the jerky in my hand. “We might as well eat everything we have left—we don’t have a way to hang our food up high, and chances are good some critter will chew through the bag during the night.”
I take a bite of jerky. We eat in silence for a moment, watching the light fade. The eastern sky over the distant Ferinno turns dusty blue, speckled with stars. At one point, Veran cranes his head, as if to see past a few of the branches.
“What?” I ask.
“Oh, just looking. We have a summer star called Suitor Firefly—he’s higher than I thought. I lost track of the stars in Tolukum Palace.” He finishes off his jerky. “Do you know any star stories?”
“No.” The rustlers only ever used the stars to navigate.
“The Alcorans have a blue-zillion of them—it’s where they see the Light. But my folk call them fireflies, because they’re what first coaxed my folk out of the ground. So every summer, instead of dying, the fireflies go up to take their place in the sky. We have a sending-up ceremony in September.”
“What’s a firefly?” I ask.
He throws back his head and laughs—but it’s a laugh at himself, not me, evidenced by the palm he smacks to his forehead. “Oh, earth and sky, I’m sorry. They’re a beetle that lights up. That pin you stole from me—blazes, that feels like years ago, doesn’t it? That pin was a firefly. This is, too.” He holds out his hand, where his seal ring sits, imprinted with a bug with spread wings and an oval abdomen. “It’s a sacred symbol to my folk—one of the places we see the Light.”
I remember him calling it a firefly, but I thought it was a fancy name for the jewel itself. “What’s the other place you see the Light?”
“Foxfire—glowing mushrooms.” He looks around. “Those aren’t limited to just the Silverwood Mountains—we might see some after crossing the rainshadow.”
“When you say . . . ,” I begin, and then stop, considering my words. “When you say it’s where you see the Light . . . I know a lot of people who swear by the Light, and I know the Alcorans have that holiday with the shooting stars, but I never really . . .”
“Ah. Okay. I’ll tell you what my folk think, but you have to remember that every culture understands the Light differently—even people within the same country.” He bends his knees and wraps his arms around them, looking out at the dark horizon, where the belt of stars is materializing in the d
arkness. “The Light is a—a force, I guess, that guides. It pulls plants up and turns the seasons. It tells animals when to forage or shed or hibernate. When my folk began, under the ground, we were called up to the surface by the sky Light, and given the courage to stay there by earth Light—the fireflies, the foxfire. The Light reminds us that we’re small, but strong—the two sides of our nature, and that means that we should be humble, but brave. Does any of that make sense?”
I think of the light out in the Ferinno—like fresh water, it was frequently all or nothing. Burning sun, or cold, empty darkness.
“I guess,” I say.
“Now, the Alcorans, like I said, see the Light in the stars. They think of the Light more in a tangible sense—that it can actually give messages and visions, sometimes prophecies. The Moquoians have sort of a distant view of things—the Light is out there, but doesn’t do much to impact daily life. They see it in the rainbow, colored light—sort of like decoration. It’s nice and pretty, but the things it does are mostly inconsequential.”
I nod, even though both of those seem foreign to me—there have never been any colorful decorations in my life, and I’ve always associated visions with hunger or eating the wrong plant.
“Then the Cypri—I guess I should have told you about them first—the Cypri are different from almost everybody else. They see the Light as an internal force.” He touches his chest. “The Light is a spark inside everybody, something intimate and individual. Something that burns even when everything else seems dark. They see the Light in fire.” He nudges one of the burning logs in the ring, and a cloud of sparks goes up. “So the Light is a tool, as well—a means of creation and destruction, just like our own impulses.”
I like that a little better—the idea of a flame inside me, threatening to break loose and burn everything to the ground.
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