The fog is too dense. Nok can barely breathe. Even his limbs seem inhibited by it; his movements indolent, disobedient. He keeps on, forcing one foot in front of the other, feels himself move forward. When had he started walking? When did he get here? How?
Someone is just ahead of him. As he closes in, he recognizes her. She moves like mist, slow, there but not quite. Distant as a star. But he recognizes her in spite of it. Perhaps because of it. Perhaps that vagueness of body, that inbetweeness is as much a part of her as the cool eyes, the close-shorn hair.
The wolf huffs at his side. Nok strokes the creature, fond and absent. His hand passes through it like water. The wolf is not of the Inbetween, but it too has some inbetweeness in its nature. Neither here nor there, not quite spirit, not quite flesh.
And what of me? What am I made of?
There is no answer. He walks.
Vrea seems to sense him trailing behind her. There’s something almost amused to the set of her shoulders—he can imagine the quirk of a smile upon her wide mouth.
They’re silent for a time, and then he asks: “Where are we?”
“Nowhere at all, I fear.” She stops walking, turns and waits until he and the wolf are at her side. “We are in the remains of the Inbetween.”
“I thought it had been destroyed? Isn’t that what happened?” Odd; he can’t remember.
“That which was Inbetween is gone, but the space holds,” Vrea tells him. “It has simply been . . . emptied. Remade. Wherever there are two, there must be something dividing them.”
Are you one, or two? He asked that to someone, something, once.
“Not the Ana and Aba,” he says. “They are both.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “They are both one and two. They are harmony. But we are not.”
He’s silent at that, and she lets him think. He feels he could think for a lifetime, for the span of kingdoms, long enough for stars to blaze into creation and collapse in upon themselves, and still she would wait.
Maybe he will. He feels . . . unhurried. He would feel nothing at all were it not for the nagging in his heart. A finger worrying some loose thread there. He’s forgotten.
He remembers. Not everything, but it’s something.
“Are we dead?” The thought makes him sad—but only vaguely. From an arm’s length.
“Not quite dead,” Vrea says. “Not yet.”
He thinks on that, his hand stroking through the wolf’s there-and-gone-again fur. He looks down and sees the path has disappeared. They’re standing on stone. No, rocks. The shore of a lake. That seems familiar, somehow. “Not dead,” he repeats to himself.
Vrea toes off her sandals and sits. “Do you want to be?”
He thinks about that, too, as he sits. “No. I thought—but, no.”
She nods seriously. “A good choice for you.”
The wolf lies down next to him, pressing warmly against his thigh. He feels a relaxed sigh shudder through it, no different from a sleeping dog. “Do we get to choose?”
“Right now, you do.”
“And you?”
Her mouth makes the saddest smile. “I’m afraid not. I’ve lived too long as it is.”
He remembers something else. “You seemed certain it would end. You said that Yunis’s time was coming to a close. But . . .” He understands now. “You still hoped, didn’t you?”
“I thought we might have a chance. To stay. Or to go elsewhere. The Ana and the Aba, they told me the way was unclear. That there might be another. Or that’s what I believed they said. It’s hard to know for certain. Perhaps I only heard what I wanted to hear, because I was afraid to die, after all.”
“I thought you were supposed to see the future,” he says. “Isn’t that what an Oracle does? Know all our fates? Or are you saying fate isn’t real?”
“Oh, fate is real, Nokhai. Those of us with the Gift see it the way you see light—simultaneously washing over and penetrating all things. But like light, it can play tricks on the eye. Sometimes it can be manipulated. Sometimes it can blind the seer. And sometimes the thing that sways it cannot be foreseen.”
“So,” he says. “What you’re telling me is, sometimes you just get it wrong.”
Vrea smiles faintly at him. “Sometimes we just get it wrong,” she agrees.
The soft light emanating through the fog shifts, almost imperceptibly. Bluer. Cooler. And now he can hear water. Like the Milk River lapping against its retaining walls. Jostling boats in the Yulan City harbor.
Nok’s sense of unease grows. The loose thread in his heart is now a pinprick hole. Perhaps that thing he’s forgotten isn’t so unimportant, after all.
“What am I supposed to do now?” he asks.
Vrea stands, brushing invisible dust from her robes. The water-smoothed rocks beneath her feet clink together. She squints out toward the water. There’s a boat in it now, floating toward them. Two figures sit inside, and he recognizes the closer of the two as Prince Shen. The other is only a purpled shadow. It is wearing a hood, but Nok suspects that even if it weren’t, he wouldn’t be able to see its face.
“It is my time,” Vrea tells him. “I am no longer of this place. I am on to your . . . what was it you said? Your nothing. On to the unknown.”
“What am I supposed to do?” he repeats.
“What it is you were meant to do,” she tells him.
“But I don’t know what that is,” he protests, standing.
“You do,” she says. She makes as though to step into her sandals, but seems to think better of it and leaves them on the shore. Then she wades out into the white surf. He follows her, but stops halfway between the boat and the shore. The water is cool against his ankles.
Vrea turns back to him. “You do. Or at least, you will. Goodbye, Nokhai. You are an interesting person. I am glad to have met you, even if our time together was so brief.”
She gives a little wave of one hand. Nok watches her climb gracefully into the boat. He feels bereft and yet calm. He feels there is something else he is meant to say now, some final words to send along in the modest wind pulling her boat farther and farther from shore, but he can think of nothing. And then, the boat is gone.
Foam churns on the lake surface, like cream on whey. Fog still shrouds the shore, but whereas before he could scarcely see more than an arm’s length around him, now there are shapes and shadows to decipher into trees, distant mountains. Quiet and awesome and vast.
It is so still here. So empty that there is nothing for time and perception to cling to. He has the sense of an entire day passing as he draws a single breath.
There is movement at the corner of his eye, and he looks back to the shore, expecting to see his wolf. He does, but now there are new figures emerging from the fog, lining up like they are on display. The first that comes clear into view is a spotted deer with a rack of silvery antlers. It gingerly appoints its delicate feet amid the smooth rocks. Nok’s heart leaps as his wolf looks toward it, but the deer shows no concern at all.
Next comes a tawny cougar, followed by a glittering blue-green cobra, a boar, a black panther, a white owl riding upon the back of a wild ox—more and more, until Nok can scarcely name them as quickly as they appear.
For a moment, he thinks he sees the stark black and orange stripes of a tiger moving behind a dun-colored coyote, but then it is gone again, vanished amid the wall of fur and flesh before him.
He knows them, though some are creatures he has never seen before. Knows them even before the golden eagle of the Iarudi sails down from the sky and lights upon a log of drift-wood, talons seizing it in a shower of splinters.
Gifters. Gods. Each the patron of a Kith. And every pair of eyes—golden to black to green—are upon him. Waiting.
He steps forward.
The golden eagle comes at him first, swooping from its perch, that curved, cruel beak aimed for his face. Nok throws his hands up, but the eagle is like smoke, like wind. It breaks over him—through him. He feels it settle deep inside, its airy energy spreading buoyant through his bones. A red bear charges next, its great paws kicking up stones and surf.
It is too much. They slam through him, one after the other, and his body hums with it, a cacophony of power and energy. He feels too small, like there’s too much blood beneath his skin. His heart bangs against his ribs, bursting with it . . .
He’s stumbling backward into the brackish water, only now there is none. Only open air, through which he plummets like a stone.
He awoke drowning. A gasp like a scream tore out of him as he broke the surface of the water. Air, Nok thought, sucking it in, greedy. Air.
So caught up in the animal joy of merely breathing, it took him a moment to realize he was alone in open water. He cast about for the shore, but there was none to see. Fear lanced through him then, cold. His muscles were aching—for how much longer could he hope to tread?
I’m going to die, he realized.
Something prickled his scalp—a half memory.
Am I dead?
No. Not dead yet. Focus.
He could make out a lumpy shadow far off on the horizon. Land. A strip of it beneath the bright blue sky. Blue. No longer was he in the Inbetween. This was the earth, and he, like any other earthly thing, was alive.
So he swam. Until his hands felt as cold and heavy as stone, until the muscles in his shoulders spasmed and seized, he swam. Past weakness, then the end of weakness, then the point where his body felt consumed by pain, and then was pain, and then the blazing absence, the nothing that followed.
Still he swam, until his hands were paddling against stone.
He threw himself upon the shore, choking and sputtering water from his belly and his lungs. Every part of him ached—cramps seized his calves, his guts, his hands. As the feeling returned to his cold-numbed fingers, it felt like his flesh was afire. Violently, viscerally alive.
He’d never known anything sweeter.