A WIDE PAW BATTED AT MY CHEEK, ROUSING ME FROM restless sleep. I gently pushed the lynx aside. She gave me an affronted look and stalked off in the direction of the exit. Elder Mukira was nowhere to be seen, nor was anyone else. Though no sunlight penetrated the cave to help me determine the time, voices chattered unintelligibly outside and the smell of seared meat drifted into the cave. Morning had come.
“Hal,” I whispered, rising to my knees to hover over him. He’d shifted during the night and now lay on his side. He opened his eyes slowly, taking a minute to focus them fully on my face.
“I knew you’d come through,” he said, his voice a little scratchy. “Lovely accommodations you found. A bit rustic, mildly creepy . . . but they’ll do.”
“It’s hardly the time to joke,” I said, handing him the clay vessel of water one of the Tamers had brought us. All I could think about was finding Ina, and what might happen if I didn’t succeed. She would try to kill the king. She would die—and I would be completely alone in the world.
He took a slow drink.
“Thank you for not leaving me,” he said, and I recognized in the look he gave me that it meant more to him than words could communicate. Perhaps he’d been left before. Something broke in me as I remembered the feeling when Ina took to the sky, leaving me alone with the blood and chaos she’d strewn across the road.
I understood.
“So what trouble have you found now?” he asked with a half smile.
“The Tamers got us. I had to strike a bargain with them,” I said, twisting one of the wool blankets in my hands. “I may have promised them we could find a dragon and get her to leave the forest in exchange for our freedom.”
“Find a what?” Hal asked.
“Ina’s manifest is a dragon.” Telling someone felt strange. Manifests were not private business, but Ina the dragon was very different from Ina who had loved me in our long, quiet hours on the mountain. I didn’t feel qualified to explain who or what she was now when I hardly had it figured out.
Hal groaned. “Start from the beginning.”
I took a deep breath and cast a nervous glance toward the fissure in the wall that led outside. The absence of people in the cave didn’t mean that no one was listening. Mukira’s lynx stared at us from atop her cushion with a gaze far too keen for my liking. I whispered an explanation of everything else that had transpired after he collapsed, including the supposedly wind-cursed cliff.
“For the love of fewmets. I think my headache is coming back,” he said.
“Oh no! Let me get you some peppermint—”
“I’m teasing, Asra.” He laughed.
I glared at him. “That’s not funny.”
“On the bright side, if the Tamers’ dogs eat us, my headache will be the least of our problems.” He gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze.
His touch calmed me a little. “I’m afraid,” I admitted. I didn’t know how to be scared and not serious. It didn’t seem possible. Each situation I found myself in seemed worse than the last, and my anxiety rose with every day I failed to find Ina. I wanted to go back to my quiet life in the mountains, where long, solitary winters were the hardest part of my life. They hadn’t been so bad after all.
“Look at it this way—after we get out of here, this will make a great tale. What good is life if you don’t have wild stories to tell when you’re old?” He grinned again, making me wonder what stories he’d gathered before he met me. In spite of my better judgment, I wanted to know them. But first, I had to find a dragon.
“Between my Sight and your Farhearing, it could be fairly easy to find Ina. I don’t know about the cursed cliff, but that’s a mess to untangle once we get up there, I suppose,” I said.
Hal frowned and rolled onto his back with a grimace. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be very useful to you. After the headaches, it usually takes most of a day for me to get my energy back. I doubt I’ll make it far today. I certainly can’t climb up a cliff.”
My heart sank. “But can you Farhear? If you could send me in the right direction until I’m close enough to use my Sight . . . I think I can find her. Then I just have to hope she’ll listen to me.” I didn’t dare say more. If he knew the truth about what she’d already done—the violence of which she was capable—he might try to stop me. It scared me even more that part of me wanted him to. With no one left who cared, responsibility for my life and well-being was all my own.
Sometimes it was too heavy a burden to carry.
“I may not be able to scale a cliff, but I can listen for her. In the meantime, who do we have to charm to get some food?” Hal asked.
“I’ll go find something,” I said, grateful he’d changed the subject before digging too deeply into the history between me and Ina.
“Thank you.” Hal nodded, his eyes already closing again. Even the short conversation had exhausted him.
Outside, I followed my nose and found the Tamers taking a communal breakfast farther north alongside the cliff. They sat in a scattered circle on rocks and logs, eating and laughing as they challenged one another to see whose Tamed animal would do the best trick for a scrap. Rather than hot oatmeal laden with fruit preserves, which was a common morning meal in Amalska, the Tamers started their day with meat. A woman and a man stood over a small but intense cook fire, searing thin strips of spiced venison over smooth river rocks pulled fresh from the embers. My mouth watered.
As I passed by clusters of Tamers, conversations among them silenced. I caught only bits and pieces—most of them were sharing tales of their hunts and of the latest city folk they’d managed to scare out of their woods. Instead of trying to talk to them, I took the plates of food they gave me back to the cave and ate in silence with Hal. The meat nearly melted in my mouth, tender from the quick sear. Hal ate even more greedily than I did, so much that I ended up giving him a few more pieces from my portion.
Afterward, Hal and I took turns scrubbing ourselves and our clothes clean in a hot spring deep in the mountains at Mukira’s insistence. “You’re no use at hunting if your prey can smell you coming,” she’d said. Neither of us objected. The bath was a luxury we were all too grateful to have. When he saw me shivering in my damp shirt, Hal dried my clothes with a whirling gust of warm air beckoned by his fingers. We did our hair in companionable silence; I detangled and braided mine while he applied a thick, buttery cream to his and styled it back into the twists he’d been wearing before.
We emerged from the cave just as the sun peeked over the edge of the cliff at the apex of its journey across the sky. The hunters were already waiting to escort me and, I supposed, to bear witness to my failure if that came to pass. I half expected Kaja to be among them, but the Tamers accompanying us today were different, their animals diurnal. Mukira’s lynx sat beside her in a patch of sunlight streaming down from above the cliff. Hal squinted and shaded his eyes even though it wasn’t bright—another aftereffect of the headache, no doubt.
The hunters led us north along the base of the cliff until we reached a waterfall. The air smelled wet and green, and moss clung to the rocks just out of reach of the pounding water. As soon as our group stopped, Hal closed his eyes and tipped his face to the sky. Luminous mist danced through sunbeams streaking through the treetops, and a rainbow arched through the myriad droplets that broke and re-formed in the ever-changing light.
I bit my lower lip and waited, suddenly aware of every sound—the whisper of our cloaks as the breeze nudged against them, the distant crack of a twig under a person’s boot, and the sharp bark of a coyote somewhere in the hills. I wished I could hold the world still for Hal and silence any potential distractions. Though he looked all right, if I dropped into my Sight, the glow of his magic was more dim than usual. He wasn’t fully recovered.
“I Hear her,” he finally said.
I exhaled a long breath. “Where?”
“It sounds like someone or something is splashing in the stream.” Hal pointed up the waterfall. “But I also Hear something else. . . .” He furrowed his brow, then shook his head.
“How do we get to the top?” I asked Mukira.
Mukira considered her next words. The rushing of the waterfall hung in the silence between us, mist making my hair curl around my face.
“Your determination is impressive,” she said at last. She hobbled toward the face of the cliff, deeper into the mist. Her lynx stayed back, huddled behind a rock where the water couldn’t get to her.
“Asra, I don’t like this,” Hal said. “I Hear something else up there. Something like wind, but it sounds . . . wrong.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s like a whispering voice, but I can’t make out what it’s saying. It sounds angry.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. My Hearing must be weaker than usual from the headache.”
“The elder said the winds were strong up there. It must be that. I’ll be all right.” I said the words as much for myself as him, then followed Mukira. I’d spent enough time being afraid. If this was my chance to stop Ina from sacrificing herself in a misguided attempt to kill the boar king, I had to take it.
The elder stopped a few paces from the cliff. “A cave lies behind this part of the falls. Inside you’ll find a tunnel that switches back all the way up to the top. It comes out in the trees, safe from the edge. Do not go near the cliff if you value your life. And if you can’t reason with your dragon friend, know that we won’t hesitate to shoot her.”
“As you say,” I said, wondering silently if falling off a cliff would kill me. Or was spilling my blood the only real danger if I fell? The rocks at the base of the waterfall were worn smooth from years of pounding water, but that didn’t mean I could fall without bloodshed, and I had no idea what would happen if I did. Once I had scraped my hand on a sharp rock while gathering herbs and a tree had sprouted out of the stone, cracking it in half. A few years before that I had accidentally cut myself slicing turnips for stew, and any vegetable my blood touched withered into a desiccated husk.
If I fell off the cliff, broken bones might punch through my skin like those I’d once seen jutting out of a deer carcass at the bottom of a ravine. Perhaps magic would burst out of me, killing everyone in central Zumorda. I shuddered at the thought, and then pushed it away. I didn’t have time to play out every disaster scenario in my mind. All that mattered was finding Ina and telling her the truth.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said, straightening my shoulders.
“Be careful,” Hal said. “I didn’t save you from those Valenko guardsmen so you could die falling off a cliff.” This time I knew he was teasing me.
“Well, I didn’t treat your headache and find you a place to sleep so I could die falling off a cliff, either,” I retorted.
A smile tugged at his mouth, but the dark hollows under his eyes betrayed more of his true feelings. Exhaustion. Worry. If I failed, his life would be forfeit, too. He was in no shape to be able to use his gift to talk his way out of this one.
“A few hunters will wait here for you to return—at least until the sun hits the treetops to the west,” Mukira said.
“I’ll wait here too, if that’s all right,” Hal said.
Mukira shrugged. “Your fate is tied to hers, so why not?”
They didn’t expect me to come back.
I entered the cave, which was every bit as dank as I expected. My chest constricted the instant the light from outside vanished. The stench of guano hit me, a reek that lingered even when I tried to hold my breath.
I sank into my Sight and used it to navigate the cave by picking up on the life within it. The perpetual presence of water made everything slick. Root formations and fungus lined the walls, and bats nested overhead, their sleep only mildly disturbed as I passed beneath them. Salamanders scurried away from me as I navigated the path, vanishing into cracks in the rock.
I crawled through sections of the passage too overgrown with roots to stand upright, and climbed up rugged stairs in the steeper portions nearly on my hands and knees. Water dripped onto my back, making me cringe with each drop. When I thought my legs might give out, I finally emerged. Sunlight filtered through willowy pine branches thinner than those back home. They rustled in a gentle breeze, but the wind was only a caress, nothing like the gales of doom the Tamers had described. Somewhere nearby the stream whooshed and gurgled as it raced toward the waterfall.
I saw no signs of Ina.
I sat down for a moment to catch my breath, relishing the solitude. Pangs of longing for home cut through me with every heartbeat. There was something familiar as mountain honey about the way the sun struck my face and filled my soul. This was how the world was meant to be. Me, alone, only the sound of rushing water in my ears, sunlight streaming through the trees onto my face, the shadow tethered to my feet given time to shift over the course of the day. But today I couldn’t afford to watch the shadows change or bask in the false sense of peace. Pining for a home that no longer existed wouldn’t help me find Ina. If I wanted to start over, I needed to find her first.
I shook off the damp of the cave and walked through the forest, following the sound of water, but stopped cold when the trees suddenly gave way to an escarpment. A mixture of half-dead winter grass and new spring growth rippled and hissed in the wind like a warning. The stream cut shallowly through the grass in a wide, rocky expanse not far from where I stood. Past the rushing water and trembling grass, the cliff fell away into nothingness, the pine trees jutting into the sky like distant swords beyond it.
It was very beautiful for a cursed place.
I edged along the tree line, fearful of Mukira’s warning that visibility of the cliff meant doom. Perhaps it was only Tamer superstition, or didn’t affect demigods the same as mortals, but only a fool would take the chance. As I followed the tree line in the direction of the stream, the wind increased, whipping my cloak around my ankles. The area around the stream became rockier, and about ten paces ahead, a group of massive boulders jutted out of the land. Timeworn carvings decorated the rocks, shallow in some places and deep in others. That had to be where the entrance to the Sanctum lay.
Never even in the worst mountain storm had I felt the kind of wind that gripped me the moment I stepped away from the trees. It blew through me, cutting down to the bone. Sorrow swiftly followed it. No longer could I trust that the wind god was looking out for me. I had never belonged to him. I fought against the gale with stinging eyes, staggering from side to side until I got close enough to press myself against the boulders for stability.
On the other side of the rocks, sunlight glittered off the stream as the wind shattered the surface into a thousand gilded mirrors. I edged around until I could see all the way to the falls. The gusts seemed to ease for a moment as I took in the view, at the center of which was the person I’d walked leagues for, the girl who still held what pieces remained of my heart.