“Truthseer.” Acknowledgment.
Lila’s threw up his head. “Soon, we will have names to remember!” A different breeze, hot and eager.
“Names!” from his.
Ancestors Witness, they were like recruits before their first battle.
“Bannan,” his sister cautioned, hearing that as well.
These were kruar and fire was in their blood, he reminded himself. Jenn had challenged them, had shown them a path to glory.
Had crossed alone into the Verge, to give Werfol this chance.
Bannan leaned forward. Seeing him, Lila did the same. “To Marrowdell!” he cried, uncaring who heard, and dug in his heels.
For the turn-born had asked the kruar one question.
Can you outrun death?
Time they proved it.
Where were they?
Goodness, this was a pickle. Jenn decided to sit and think a moment. It didn’t help matters that she felt more than a little light-headed.
And alone, she sighed. Though she had her guardian, and the yling, presently in her hair. Much as she prized both, it wasn’t at all the same as having Bannan with her.
Which she didn’t and wouldn’t. There was, as Aunt Sybb would surely say, nothing to be gained by sighing about what wasn’t right with the world. She’d usually add that extra chores were the best cure, having an infallible list of those at the ready.
“We’ve a chore of our own,” Jenn told the toad. “Finding the way home.” She might have guessed a crossing contained in a drop might be blown or move or simply not be where it should; another question for Mistress Sand.
Still, she’d expected—for no good reason, it seemed now—to simply “know” the way, much like a spring duck.
She got to her feet. Feet covered by new boots. Boots she couldn’t wait to show Peggs, bringing on an entire wave of longing. “Yes, home it is.” But which way?
She looked down at the toad. “Which way looks best to you, little cousin?”
It shrank into a distressed and pale ball, eyes bulging.
Oh. “Sorry. Well . . .” Jenn popped a finger in her mouth, then held it out to detect any breezes.
None.
About to decide based on where she could see the most blue, it seeming a trustworthy color, she felt a patpatpat. “What is it? Do you know?”
Out flew the yling, to hover before her eyes and his six hands waved with distinct urgency. Alas, no two in the same direction.
“What’s it saying?” she asked the toad, disappointed.
~To run, elder sister!~
The bloody beasts. You could love them, Bannan decided in a rare moment of clarity, but it’d be the same fondness you felt for the lightning that struck your enemy’s camp and missed yours. There but for chance was my death.
These kruar must have ambled through the Verge. Scourge at his wickedest, heart-stopping best must have trotted, likely bored.
This?
They’d leapt through Channen on rooftops. Leapt across the Straight, bouncing from barge to barge too quickly for any to do more than glance up and wonder.
Beyond the city, once their hooves touched soil, it was as if the kruar moved the world.
Forget passing other riders on a road. He’d glimpse flashes of light and guess those to be towns and villages, lamps lit against the dark.
Dark mattered nothing to the kruar. That he’d already known.
Did their riders? Ancestors Witness, if the saddle hadn’t held him tight, he’d have been left, on his rump, in Channen. The grip of his hands, his arms’ strength had failed long since. He’d tried to gain his mount’s attention, worried for Lila, afraid, frankly, for himself. As easily talk to the wind.
Manic, this race, and magic. That too.
For Werfol, he told himself, and buried his face against a hot neck.
A drop of blood, bitten from a cheek . . . a chewed sleeve, threads once touched by other skin and warm . . .
And the dream unfolds . . .
What is this?
Soft, white. A blanket?
For it covers. Soothes.
Chills.
SMOTHERS!
CAN’T GET OUT! CAN’T GET OUT! CAN’T—
The dream splinters . . .
Running in the Verge was a peculiar thing. Jenn had picked up the toad and, to be sure, the yling did fly ahead, hands beckoning, so she ran as quickly as she could in its wake.
But sometimes she ran up and sometimes sideways and several times, most disconcertingly, she was upside down. It helped profoundly, she discovered, to focus on the yling.
Flying being a more straightforward business.
She didn’t run out of breath, which was a comfort. Though troubling, if she thought about it, so she did her best not, other than to remember to breathe.
That being important, since she took Mistress Sand’s warnings about the risky nature of flesh seriously indeed, and ran as turn-born.
While thinking, always, of what else she was and intended to be.
After a while, which might have been an afternoon or hour, Jenn began to think about something else. “Little cousin, why are we still running?”
~This is not a good part of the Verge, elder sister.~ In much the same tone as she’d warned Bannan about Palma’s inn.
“So there are good parts.”
She felt it swell under her arm. ~Yes, elder sister! Wonderful parts. Where our—~ It stopped mid-rapture.
Jenn slowed to a jog. “‘Where our—’ what? Is there a part where little cousins live?” Bannan’s toad had been pleased when she’d offered, she recalled with a twinge of guilt, to look for other toads. “Is it far?” If on the way home, surely she could accomplish at least that much.
~We are not yet worthy, elder sister.~ Sorrowfully.
Meaning there was such a place, she decided, but what could be more worthy than the stalwart toads of Marrowdell? If they needed an advocate—
A shadow scented with cinnamon crossed her path, and Jenn looked up—
—down. Below flew a dragon, larger than Wisp. She stopped in her tracks, trying to puzzle out what wasn’t right about it. The emerald green was a bit gaudy, but she’d once seen dragons in great numbers, and they came in colors like the sky of the Verge.
Emerald green not being one.
Oh, but she’d seen eyes of this color, hadn’t she? Glimpsed a head of that shape, before all had become a moth, then been gone. And this dragon didn’t fly, for its wings didn’t move, so what held it in the air was another strangeness. She grew quite dizzy, looking down and up and at it, but not afraid.
For this wasn’t, Jenn realized, a dragon at all, but a sei.
“I wouldn’t listen to it, Lovely Jenn,” said a hatefully familiar voice.
Crumlin!
The world stopped moving. Or they had. Bannan was fuzzy on the details. What he did know was Lila’d fallen off.
Fall off a horse? His sister?
It did strain credulity, but he found himself dropping to the ground, able to stagger, if not walk, to where she lay curled in a ball.
A groan.
“Ancestors Blessed,” Bannan said then, startled—awake by his own voice? Had he been sleeping?
No. Riding. As he went to check Lila for broken bones, he glanced up.
The kruar stood, heads lowered. Their sides worked like bellows and sweat darkened their hides, where it didn’t cling in streaks of white froth. Spent, they looked, as he’d never seen Scourge.
Feeling his gaze, heads lifted, lips curled. Ready when you are, that was.
Lila first. “Dear Heart,” he urged. “Are you hurt?”
Her head lolled back against his arm, eyes open but upturned, staring at nothing. No, he thought in horror. She truedreamed. “Wake up!” He shook her, gently
then hard enough to rattle teeth, though what he hoped to accomplish the fall from the kruar hadn’t done—“Lila!!”
“Heart’s Blood—Bannan. Stop!”
He snatched her to him, despite a protest involving most of their ancestors and a suggestion regarding his progeny, should he live so long, letting her go only when she boxed his ear. “Ow!”
His sister glared. “Exactly!” She stretched, rubbing the back of her head. “What happened?” Then looked around. “Where are we?”
Being the better question. Bannan stood, turning in a slow circle. The sun was up, but barely. They stood in the midst of flat land, dusted with snow. On every side, hedges marked neat fields of—“Those are grapes. We’re in Lower Rhoth. I remember—” his turn to rub his head. “We crossed the Kotor in the night, I swear it.”
Lila got to her feet. “Halfway.” She looked at the kruar. “Ancestors Wild and Wondrous. From Channen to the heart of Rhoth in a night.” Then her face changed. “Bannan. I ’dreamed Werfol. He’s no better. Might be worse. We can’t stop now.”
“We have, so let’s use it. Food and drink,” he ordered bluntly. “And your promise not to ’dream in the saddle—unless you want to be tied to it.”
Her lips twisted. “No more dreams. I’m not helping him,” Lila admitted. She nodded to the kruar. “They are.”
“Then a short break and, our brave mounts willing, we go on.” He kept a straight face. “Unless you wish a rest?” he asked the kruar.
Snarls were his answer.
Bannan shook his head and smiled. Halfway.
With the Northward Road closed by snow? With who knew what storms ahead?
Halfway, he told himself.
Home.
Alone had been better.
Keeping her eyes on the yling, still fluttering ahead, Jenn did her best to ignore her unwanted company. If she didn’t look, it wasn’t hard to pretend the sei-dragon had left her in peace.
Crumlin was another matter. How had he found her? Possibilities abounded, none pleasant. Had he followed the crossing drop and laid in wait? Did he share her gift for finding? Set traps?
The toad had swallowed something of his magic. Had that betrayed them?
It could be all of those, or something worse.
“Why are you going this way, Lovely Jenn?”
She gritted her teeth. The bodiless voice would fall behind and grow faint, each time giving her hope she’d left it—him—behind, only to start again from ahead or the side as if he’d found a swifter path and outpaced her. All the while, Crumlin chatted as if they were friends out for a stroll. If she answered, she knew she’d never be rid of him. It was, in a way, like dealing with Roche in one of his moods.
Except that Roche was a person and, however annoying, could be fun and even reasonable.
Unlike what pestered her now.
“There’s nothing nice that way, Lovely Jenn. You should go to the right.”
Where gloom filled the space beneath tall stalks of something, and little red eyes blinked?
She was not going there.
But when Jenn passed it, her head high, Crumlin laughed, a soft and happy laugh, as if she’d done what he wanted after all.
Roche, she’d thrown into the sows’ pond.
She walked and walked, the sei-dragon staying with her and Crumlin keeping up, though neither of them were walking that she could tell, which was rather unfair.
As well as alarming.
Still, walking was progress, Jenn told herself. She moved away from them, or tried to, and moved toward home, or somewhere that wasn’t here.
Tried to. A peculiar thought, suited to the Verge.
Yet was the yling leading her somewhere?
Or for something.
Perturbed, Jenn stopped, lifting the toad so she could look into one of its eyes. “Where are we going?” she whispered. “Is this the right way?”
A leg lengthened, clawed toes stretched, then the toad settled peacefully in her hands. ~Trust in us, elder sister, as we trust in you.~
Because she did, Jenn kissed it, then tucked it safely back under her arm. She looked for the yling, sorry for her doubt.
There it hovered, waiting.
Jenn nodded to it, and began to walk again.
“What’s the hurry, Lovely Jenn?” Crumlin asked, falling behind. “Where are you going?”
To wherever those she trusted wished her to be.
Though part of her hoped that meant home and Peggs and—oh, Bannan and Lila with Werfol safe and Semyn happy—
—the rest and better part now understood.
The small ones had risked themselves in the Verge and Channen to help Bannan. To help her. They’d proven themselves not only worthy, but selfless and true friends.
Now it was her turn.
He’d crossed into the Verge. Flown to the turn-borns’ cursed fountain and back. Roared at the impudent and curious who’d come to see why.
When they scattered, the dragon thought the better of it and commanded their help. Not trusting his temper, they’d flown away even faster. Younglings.
He’d have been proud, if not for the inconvenience.
Kruar were no better help, refusing to leave their hiding places for a question. As if he’d trick them.
As if, the dragon smiled to himself, he hadn’t many times before.
He sought the girl, not the truthseer, knowing Bannan would be with Jenn or dead. Dead was of no use to Werfol.
After his second futile flight, Wisp realized searching was of no use either.
He considered approaching the turn-born, who knew the crossing to Channen, only to discard the notion. They’d been reluctant to see the girl cross. To suggest something had gone amiss would be like stirring up a nest of nyphrit.
Only worse and without the tasty result.
Leaving this.
The blue door stood open and waiting. The dragon ignored that invitation to stay on the path, crystal breaking in protest. He would remain here, and be found by the sei.
First? An interesting question. The dimming would soon begin and the hunt.
Wisp let his jaws hang open, dragonfire warm in his throat.
Let them come.
But what arrived first was neither sei-dragon nor hunter.
It was a moth.
SEVENTEEN
“WHERE ARE WE going, Lovely Jenn?”
Crumlin asked more and more often. Did he grow anxious? More likely, Jenn thought, he’d been one of those children who’d pestered adults with repetition.
She’d lost track of time long ago, having not the usual clues of sore feet or an empty stomach or even thirst. Mistress Sand had warned her not to forget herself, and what held her to flesh thinned, in some fashion, the more she walked as turn-born. Jenn felt lighter, might have become insubstantial.
But she remembered and refused and began to walk as woman. That meant feeling the weight of the toad, which she found herself shifting from arm to arm as each wearied in turn. A weight and weariness she treasured, for they reminded her of who she was, and meant to stay.
“You will lose your shape, Lovely Jenn.”
Something new at last, as if Crumlin heard her thoughts, which he couldn’t. Even so, she came close to protesting and had to catch herself.
“That’s the price, to stay here. They take your shape! That’s the price. The price! The price!” His voice, so long the same, became louder and more shrill.
Encumbered by the toad, Jenn couldn’t cover her ears. Just when she thought she’d have to respond if only to stop him, Crumlin fell silent. Then, almost a whisper, close as could be. “I could show you. I could prove it. I could save you, Lovely Jenn.”
She’d preferred it when he was annoying. To distract herself, she looked for the sei-dragon.
It was gone. When had it left? Having worried over its presence, Jenn felt abandoned.
“Let me save you, Lovely Jenn. One boon, the smallest of services, a nothing, and I would save you.”
Everything Crumlin said was a lie, she told herself, walking faster.
“You will lose your shape.”
Even what sounded all too true.
Winter met them at Weken, where smoke blew sideways from chimneys and not a soul stirred outside.
The sun crouched, distant and chill, above the road—or the expanse of unbroken white that had been the road. Once on the snow, the kruar slowed perceptibly, as if some of their strength now went to keeping aloft, but still ran faster than the fleetest horse. Bannan held on, knew Lila did the same; hope gave them strength. The Northward Road wasn’t closed, not to the mighty beasts they rode.
But even kruar had limits. The body beneath him was furnace hot, saving him from frostbite, but at what cost? Bannan could feel a change in the kruar’s once-effortless strides, a shortening. He shouted at his, tried to stop it.
Felt a snarl of denial through his legs.
They needed rest. Needed meat, he was certain. Bloody idiots, he told himself worriedly. They risked everything, risked leaving him and Lila to freeze. Why wouldn’t they stop?
Then Bannan stared ahead, at first bemused to see their way blocked by a range of massive white mountains, like those to the south near Vorkoun.
But they were clouds, not mountains, and beneath them was night.
Heart’s Blood. The kruar wouldn’t stop because they saw what was coming. A storm. Between them and Marrowdell.
The road was closed after all.
They’d die together, Bannan realized. This close, and they’d fail.
Why make it easy?
“Hyah!!!” he shouted, and leaned over as far as he could to slap the beast on the shoulder. “You want a name? Claim it!”
The kruar heard.
And began to hum.
The yling clung to a long silver thread by the hands of his feet, gossamer wings limp. The fragile-looking thread was one of many over Jenn’s head, extending from where she stood over a wide lake of pure mimrol, like the web of a too-daring garden spider across a garden path.
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