Though truly, Askari didn’t seem to need the extra shove, even if the others might have. As Father spoke of Gryfelle, Askari’s face grew graver and graver. He eyed her in the other boat. Finally, he said, “We have our legends here. I know the help you seek.” But then he shook his head. “I do not know where it may be, my friend.”
Mor spoke up. “Please, sir. We have a map, and our situation is desperate.”
Askari cast his gaze back to Father, clearly amused. “Mwanume?”
Father laughed. “He is not a boy. He is the captain of that vessel.” He nodded out to sea where the Cethorelle was anchored.
“Ha! They give ships to younglings now.”
“Or perhaps we have grown old, my friend.”
“Perhaps.” Askari turned toward the harsh-voiced one and spoke in Haribian. After a moment of arguing, he turned back to Father. “Katili is warlord of Paka. This is his land here, and he does not want you. But I have told him he must, as a favor to me.”
“We will not stay,” Father assured him. “Our ship can’t be tethered too long.”
Askari nodded. “The village mother will look after you.”
I glanced up at Father. Village mother?
“A female elder,” he explained.
“She will look after the dying one.” Askari took another long look at Gryfelle. He didn’t speak his question, but when he turned to Father, I could see it in his eyes.
Is she not dead already?
“She is very sick,” Father said quietly. “But we must do all we can for her.”
“Haki,” Askari responded. “Indeed. I hope your map is a good one.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
TANWEN
I had no idea what the Pakan village mother was saying. I just knew it would be unwise to interfere with her. She reminded me of Karlith, but fiercer. The two of them together, guarding Gryfelle’s limp body, were more frightening than the hundred Haribian warriors had been.
Zel and I sat on a flat rock with one young warrior. He didn’t speak a word of Tirian, and of course Zel and I couldn’t understand anything he said, but he showed off the designs on his skin with a big grin and obvious pride.
“Tattoos,” Dylun said as he glanced over top of his map.
“What?”
“Those are white tattoos.”
“What’s a tattoo?”
That flicker of annoyance crossed Dylun’s face—the one that always showed up when the rest of the world proved itself less educated than he. “Permanent art markings on skin. Common practice in much of the world.” Then he wandered away from the other men, eyes on his map.
I looked closer at the designs. “Beautiful, of course. But . . .”
The young warrior said something to the Haribian men standing nearby, then laughed.
“He says they would not show on you,” Askari translated.
I looked down at my pale skin and grinned at the warrior. “True enough.”
“I am sorry you will not see our great cities,” Askari said suddenly.
My eyebrows rose. “Great cities?”
“Haki. We have great cities in Haribi.”
“I believe you.” I frowned. He seemed defensive. Like I had attacked him.
“Tirians believe we are uncivilized,” he explained, even though I hadn’t voiced my question.
Oh. I fought the urge to avert my eyes. “Not us,” I said at last, pointing to myself and Zel. “Zel and I come from small farming towns. I only saw my first great city this year. We grew up under thatched roofs.”
Askari tilted his head toward the south. “That way is Jila. Filled with sandstone temples and statues of great beauty.”
“You have stoneshapers,” I mused. “Seems Tir is the only place in the world that doesn’t.”
“We have many mwama.”
“Weavers?” I asked.
“Haki. Weavers.”
“I wish we could stay to see your cities.” I thought of Gryfelle lying in a hut with Karlith and the village mother, barely clinging to life. “But our friend is very sick.”
Just then, Dylun interrupted.
“I have a course plotted,” he said. “It’s not far, if I’ve done this properly. Tanwen, I’ll just need you and Mor.”
“What?” A note of panic crept into my voice.
“Just you two. You’ll do for this one. Again, if I’ve read it right . . .” He wandered off again, still staring at his map.
I found Mor a few paces away. He was looking at me intently. Then he turned away and gave his full attention to my father, who was saying something important, it seemed.
Aye. Just me and Mor for this one. I sighed.
Perfect.
My fingertips grazed the tops of long, wild grass as I walked through it. Sunshine warmed my face. A couple weeks remained of summer’s third moon, and Haribi was holding on. The air seemed twice as dry as a steamy Eastern Peninsular midsummer day, and I let the glow heat me all the way through.
“There!” Dylun’s voice sliced into my reverie. “That’s it, straight up ahead.”
“Already? No. We’ve only been walking an hour. Took us a whole day through the rocky Meridioni wilderness. Couldn’t we have at least half a day in the Haribian sunshine?”
Dylun looked personally offended. “Excuse me, but Meridione is not rocky, nor is it the wilderness. At least not the part we walked through.”
“All right, but this is so warm and lovely.” I closed my eyes and tilted my face toward the sun again. “A little while longer?”
“No.” Dylun couldn’t be dissuaded when he was on a mission.
Zel and Father had traveled with us, even though Dylun said it was just me and Mor he needed. It never hurt to have a couple extra swords about.
“Here,” Dylun said. And he pointed to . . . a rock.
“Really?” I squinted at it. “It’s just a big rock.”
“No, it appears to be a big rock. Come on.”
The five of us moved closer. It still looked rather like a big rock, but the nearer I got, the easier I could see an opening within the boulder. And then we got even closer, and I felt the gentle breath of hot air exhaling from it.
“What . . . ?” I peered toward the hole. “What in the world?”
“Pum yakoj—the breath of the beast,” Dylun said.
“Great.” I eyed the rock warily. “So, what are we supposed to do? We tell a story and the strand comes out?”
“No, we go inside.”
I turned and stared at him. “Pardon me?”
“We’re going inside.”
“Into the breath of the beast?”
“Yes.”
I looked elsewhere for help. “Father?”
“I’ll go first,” was his response.
“No!” I said it louder than I meant to. “You can’t go in there.”
“Tannie, if that’s where the strand is, that’s where we have to go.”
My mouth opened and closed twice, but I couldn’t drum up an argument. “It doesn’t seem safe.”
“It might not be,” Dylun admitted. “But it’s not safe for you or Gryfelle if we don’t try.”
Blast.
“All right.” I sighed. “Then what’s the plan?”
“I’ll go first,” Father repeated. “I can help the rest of you inside.”
“Let me go first, General,” Mor insisted. “It could be a long drop. Or maybe there’s a literal beast in there. None of us is exactly an expert in reading these runes.”
Dylun squinted at his map. “That’s true enough,” he said absently.
Brilliant.
Father examined the rock a little closer. “If there is a real beast in there, my sword would be of use.”
He was too polite to come right out and say he was a better fighter than Mor, but we all knew that to be true.
Mor nodded to his own sword belt. “I’m armed.” He gave a lopsided grin. “I’m no Yestin Bo-Arthio, but I did help take down a mountainbeast once.�
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I turned to look at him. “Are you jesting?”
He shrugged. “My crew and I needed money, and mountainbeast furs sell for a fortune up north. We only did it the once, and once was enough—both for our treasury and our nerves.”
I stood in stunned silence, and before I regathered my wits, Father was lowering Mor down into the gap.
“Mor, wait—”
But Father released Mor’s hands, and he disappeared completely. I waited for the thunk that would signal Mor had arrived at the bottom of whatever we had just dropped him into.
But it never came.
Without pausing to think, I tumbled toward the warm stream of air flowing from this strange rock formation. “Mor!” I shouted into the gap. “Mor!”
“It’s all right,” his voice carried back softly, as though through water. “It’s not far.”
“You next, Tannie,” Father said. “Mor will help on the other side.” He grabbed my hands, and not for the first time, I was very thankful to be wearing Aeron’s extra trousers.
Father and Zel lowered me into the narrow gap backward.
I suppose Father, Zel, and Dylun jumped in after that, but I couldn’t say for sure. Because once I was down, my mind was bedazzled by the beauty of the place.
“It’s a cave,” I whispered aloud, and the walls did strange things with the sound of my voice.
“Aye.” Mor nodded to the ground. “Look at that.”
Water traced a path through the bottom of the cave, like a small creek. It caught the light through the narrow opening above us and tossed it back onto the cave walls in shades like a sparkling amber-brown gemstone.
“Wow.” The word danced off the walls, then died in the cave creek. I laughed and just barely resisted the urge to say more so I could hear how the cave toyed with the sound.
“I don’t know where the warm air comes from,” Mor said, turning slowly. “Something about the water, maybe.”
Dylun didn’t seem keen to speculate about the natural wonders of Haribi. “The strand is in here, or so the map tells us,” he said. “And we need you two to link.”
Mor and I looked at each other across the space. Then I glanced down. His hands were still encased in leather gloves.
“You’ll have to take those off,” I said.
“Aye.”
I held his gaze as he took off his gloves and handed them to Zel.
He cleared his throat and nodded to Dylun’s notes. “What are we supposed to say?”
Dylun shrugged. “Not sure you’re supposed to say anything. It just says link.”
“All right, then,” I said. “Are you ready?”
Mor looked like he was considering saying no, even though he smiled a little. Then he simply held out his hands.
And I took them.
A shock of energy raced through me and grasped my breath. Ribbons spilled from our connection—every shade of green you can imagine, from deepest evergreen to palest waterlily, sea foam to emerald, fern to moss.
Without meaning to, I giggled. Something about the spilling of so many strands at once tickled my palms and made me giddy.
It didn’t help any when Mor leaned over and said, “Tannie, this is serious,” though he himself had a smile on his face.
In this moment, the rush of creating whatever we were making was enough to erase all the cares and troubles so weighing on us. We both relaxed in the peacefulness and let the link do its work, whatever it was.
I closed my eyes, just to bask in the feeling and to imagine that perhaps someday Mor and I might be able to link like this without shame. That I might be able to tell stories without fear, without the weight of a curse or a tyrant king or a harsh mentor pressing against the creativity that wanted to spill out.
A long moment passed. When I opened my eyes, I knew the creation was done. I looked around, but Mor and I did not release our hands.
“Look at that,” he said.
There, in the middle of an underground cave on the golden, windswept plains of Haribi, Mor and I had made an exact image of the Corsyth—trees, moss, clear-water marshes, glowing lanterns, and splashes of color. I inhaled the scent of Tirian pines.
“Missed home, did you, Captain?” I asked with a grin.
“Or you did.”
“Guess we both did.” I breathed in again. “It does smell nice.”
“General.” Dylun’s voice barely registered through my happy haze. “Do you have the box?”
“Yes, I have it here.”
I watched a sparkling gold strand dance out from one of our Corsyth lanterns. “Oh. That’s why we came here, isn’t it?”
“Aye,” Mor said slowly as he followed the path of the strand with his gaze.
Did he feel as sleepy as I did? Sleepy, happy, and hazy.
Father held open the box. The blue Meridioni strand still lay coiled up there, like it was napping.
Father inclined his head toward the strand and extended the box. “If you please.”
The gold strand jumped as if startled, then ribboned into the box, coiled itself up, and lay still next to its blue fellow.
Mor and I held the connection a heartbeat longer than necessary. I knew—and maybe he did too—that as soon as we broke it, the weight of the real world would return to us.
I held his gaze one more moment. Then I unlaced my fingers from his.
The Corsyth vanished into a puff of green smoke. Golden-brown light sparkled from the walls again, and the warm air of the “beast’s breath” lingered all around us.
Mor’s expression fell, painfully slow, so that I could see every single worry return to his mind, every care burden his heart.
My face must have mirrored his.
Father put his hand on my shoulder. His grip was sure, but his eyes were kind. “Let’s get back, Tannie girl. For Gryfelle’s sake, we need to make haste.”
Aye. For Gryfelle’s sake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
TANWEN
Askari insisted we spend the night in Haribi and give the villagers time to make enough bread to last us a couple days. It had taken two full weeks to sail from the Western Wildlands of Tir to Paka, so we weren’t going to refuse a nice stock of fresh bread. Or their hospitality. Father said it would be very rude in Haribian culture for us to refuse the woven mat beds in their huts.
And to tell you the truth, those mats were more comfortable than I could have imagined. Between the squishy mat and the warm summer night’s air, I slept like a swaddled sniffler.
The next morning, I worried our rowboats might sink under the weight of the bread they loaded us up with.
I waved to the Haribians who stood among the marshes to see us off.
“Someday we’ll go back,” Father said to me. “I’ll show you Haribi’s great cities.”
“Askari mentioned them. He said they have statues and temples.”
Father nodded. “Exquisite stoneshapers in Haribi. Some of those temples are thousands of years old.”
Hard to imagine a building standing for a thousand years. We had some old castle ruins around Tir, or so I’d been told. I wondered if I would ever get to see them.
Best not to pull at that strand. Better to focus on finding the cure and doing what we could, especially for Gryfelle. We had left Physgot about seven weeks before, and she had barely been alive then. I didn’t know how she clung on, but I was glad for it.
Jule, Wylie, and the crewmen had been busy during our night away. The Cethorelle sparkled. The men looked mighty happy for the haul of bread we brought along with us.
“Have porridge for breakfast?” Wylie asked with a grin.
“No, even better.” I handed him a piece of bread. “I had this, fresh off a hot stone.”
Over Wylie’s shoulder, I spotted Mor finishing up a conversation with Jule, then Jule beginning to give the men orders to get underway.
“Excuse me a second, Wylie.”
He nodded and shoved another piece of bread in his mouth.
I walked up to Mor, keenly aware it was the first time I’d intentionally done so since I stumbled on him pouring his heart out in strands back in Meridione.
“Ho, Mor.”
His face registered surprise. “Ho, Tannie.”
I steeled myself and spoke quickly. “I just wanted to say I’m sure that retrieving the gold strand was a little awkward for you. It was for me. That we had to link, and all that. If you think it’s better if we avoid each other for a while, I promise not to be angry about it. I don’t really understand this whole linking business. It’s a bit mortifying when it happens.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Mor-tifying?”
I stared at him. Then I laughed and felt a bit of sorrow vanish from my heart. This was the Mor I had been friends with in the Corsyth. The one who had helped me learn to use my gift in new ways. It felt nice to talk to this Mor and not the one who had gone all twisted up inside on account of Gryfelle and me.
“Well, I just wanted you to know,” I said.
“I don’t really understand linking either, if it makes you feel better.”
“No?” I thought a moment. “I don’t know why that surprises me. I guess it’s been squashed out of existence for most of your life too.”
“Aye. It seems there’s a reawakening of sorts happening.”
“And we get to be in the middle of it.” I raised an eyebrow wryly. “Hooray?”
“My father talked about linking. He thought it was happening with me and Diggy once.”
“Your sister? Was she a weaver?”
“I don’t think so. Usually a weaving gift would be apparent by age thirteen, though I suppose not always. She didn’t seem to produce strands. But my strands would do strange things around her sometimes. When we were children, I’d be telling a story to the crew, she would laugh, and suddenly my strand would burst into a puff of glitter.” His eyes softened at the memory. “My father mentioned something about weaver gifts connecting at times, and maybe that’s what it was, but her gift never really showed itself. So I always supposed it must have been something else.”
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