by Claudia King
One night, as she watched the distant shapes of the canoes on the river behind them, she saw a flash of torchlight that suddenly went out, then a clamour of raised voices. She found one of the submerged branches with her foot and pulled herself upright, risking a peek through the canopy to get a better look. The shadows were a jumble beneath the dim moonlight reflecting on the water, but Netya's heart leaped as she heard the hard tones of a woman's voice. The words were inaudible, but she recognised their speaker immediately. Adel was with the Sun People. She was alive.
Her determination renewed, Netya managed to break free of the morose haze that had begun to take hold of her, and not a moment too soon. The following day she snatched another fish out of the water, giving her and Kale just enough strength to face the most gruelling stretch of the river yet. A sudden dip made Netya's stomach lurch as if they had just hit the crest of a waterfall, then the river rose again and she felt the tangle of branches pushing up beneath her.
“Climb up!” Kale said, roused from his doze by the disturbance. He offered Netya his hand and she struggled to use the branches as footholds as another bump jolted the tree all the way down its length. It felt like they had hit a rock.
As the pair of them straddled the trunk their tree began to twist in the current, its great weight finally succumbing to the angry water. Even with the nest of branches muffling the onslaught of the rapids the tree still bucked and dipped, sending up sprays of water that drenched Netya from both sides. Kale was in front of her, and he tried to call out rough patches of water when he saw them coming, but the current was so volatile and the canopy so thick that it was of little use. It seemed like the violent motion of the river would never end, and Netya thanked the spirits that their fallen tree was a big one, for without something so large to support them they would surely have been swallowed up and chewed apart by the current.
Sunset brought with it an end to the river rapids, and when Netya looked behind them she prayed for the first time that the canoes would still be there. They were, but some had gone missing. Was Adel still safe? It had been difficult to tell over the noise of the river, but she thought she had heard the Sun People yelling.
Dusk fell, and this time the darkness was thicker than any night prior. At some point the sides of the river had grown into great pale cliffs, and every splash of water began to echo off them. She realised they would have to be cautious about speaking, for their voices might carry back to the Sun People even more easily now.
“Netya,” Kale's fearful voice whispered after a while, “I think the sky is gone.”
She looked in his direction and realised she could no longer see him. She could see nothing save for the orange glow of the Sun People's torches somewhere behind them.
“Perhaps the clouds have finally come,” she said, startling herself with the eerie sound of her own voice. The space around them was empty and silent.
“There were no clouds earlier. I think we're in a cave.”
“But the river is still flowing.”
“A long cave. Maybe it goes all the way through the mountain.”
A new fear gripped Netya as she imagined black water being sucked down into the rocks around them. She recalled the rivers that poured into great holes in the earth at the site of the Moon People's gathering, and how it had always unnerved her to imagine where those holes might lead. They would not see any turns in the river here, not any falls that might pull them deeper underground. This seemed an ancient and disquieting place. Somewhere meant only for the spirits.
Yet as they drifted on the river remained calm, and the torches behind them did not dim. Wherever the path led, the Sun People had intended to go this way. In the darkness above them Netya heard the chitter of bats, and the sound comforted her. Bats were not spirits. They sometimes even shared the same caves as the Moon People. Still, it was nothing compared to the looming blackness ahead of them. That space seemed like the void of sleep made real, an infinite expanse that might be as narrow as the river or as wide as the sky. If they kept on going, might that darkness swallow them up forever?
Neither Netya nor Kale could sleep. Every time the tree shifted they tensed, clinging on to one another in anticipation of some terrible shift in the river's course. Netya even imagined shadowy spirits reaching for them beneath the water sometimes, though she did not share those fears with Kale. When the night—if indeed it still was night—stretched on for time beyond reckoning, Netya feared her mind was starting to unravel. She had never known endless dark like this, so uncertain and so unfathomable. The flickering shadows cast by the torches behind them were her only comfort, shedding an orange light that revealed shades of white and grey on the stone walls around them.
Without the warmth of the sun the river grew cold, and Netya started to shiver. She clung to Kale tight, their faces inches apart, and the pair of them started to whisper stories to one another to fend off the maddening pressure of the darkness.
“The Dawn King came to our village once,” Kale said, his voice shaky and breathless, unable to carry the inviting tone of a storyteller. “Just once. It was only a few summers ago. He'd come before, in my father's time, but it was the first I'd seen of him. We had a young shaman, Eral. He was too cunning, the masters said. Too good at making friends. He made a lot of friends, and some of them were other men's wives. A few people wanted to fight him, but they couldn't strike a shaman, and he didn't want to hurt them over it. It made the whole village confused. No one knew what to do, so my father went to the temple to ask the high priests for guidance.”
Netya did not know what a temple was, nor was she of the right mind to ask, but she focused on the soothing sound of the Sun People's language, letting it remind her of warmer days.
“The Dawn King himself must have heard,” Kale continued. “He came back with my father and two of his high priests. They had warriors with them, too, ones who wore armour and blades like that shaman carried. Some people were afraid, but the Dawn King was kind and he brought gifts of wool and food for the village. He didn't want us to go hungry while we fed him and his men. They stayed with us for several days, I think, and the Dawn King talked with Eral a lot. When he left he said Eral would be coming with him. He embodied the spirit of the Daughter, he said, and a shaman with those gifts should become a priest of the temple. A lot of people were sad to see Eral go, but most were relieved. It made things calm in the village again.”
“Who is the Daughter?” Netya whispered through chattering teeth.
“She's the spirit of joy and friendship. One of the six guardians. I think my people worshipped other spirits before the Dawn King's time, but now we are only supposed to follow the six.” Kale grew quiet for a moment. “I have not known whether to pray to them or to mother Syr these past few days.”
“Syr is my guiding moonlight. She'll not abandon us, not even in this dark.” Netya drew strength from her words, remembering the moon mother's shining face, telling herself that she would see it again soon. “She watched us even before we were Moon People. Perhaps this is the path she always meant for us to take.”
“Why don't you know the six guardian spirits if you were born of the Sun People like me?”
“I came from the forest. We knew nothing of your Dawn King. We did not even have metal until the travellers—they must have come from your homeland—brought it to us.”
“So you had no great spirits at all?”
“We had the forest spirits. I never truly understood them. All the elders seemed to think of them differently. Perhaps if there had been a shaman in our village we might have been able to hear their voices.” Netya went on to take her turn telling stories, filling as much of the silence as she dared with her whispers. It did not dispel the fear of the darkness, but it helped to hold it still for while. She told the same tales her father had passed down about his battles with the Moon People. She explained how his spear had become her staff. After she began telling the tale of the night she and her friend Layon had first seen th
e Moon People, she found herself unable to stop. Netya's story absorbed their time in the darkness beneath the mountains, and she found both relief and reflection in her words as she recounted her year as Alpha Khelt's concubine, her rivalry with Vaya, her hate-turned-love for Adel, and her romance with Caspian. The only part of her story she did not tell was the loss of her child, and the death of Alpha Miral that had presaged it. Some things were unwise to revisit in this predatory blackness.
After that Kale told her of his pilgrimage along the coast of the great water—the sea, so the Sun People called it—and the way his band had wandered lost after the death of their shaman. They relived their first meeting when Netya had tended him and nursed him back to health, recognising the signs that he was not dying of his wounds, but becoming a sun wolf the same way she had. He spoke of his subsequent disquiet, his flight from the great gathering, and his meeting with a man named Ilen Ra. It was a long tale, almost as long as Netya's, and it filled her with fresh sympathy for the things Kiren and Vaya had endured on their journey north. Most of all it made her heart go out to Kale. Unlike her he had not been a romantic soul swept up in some grand adventure. He'd not had as long to become accustomed to his new life, nor the same nest of friends, teachers, and lovers to welcome him into it. His heart was still torn between two peoples. The decision had been an easy one for Netya, painful though it was. The Sun People rejected her, and the Moon People took her in. She'd had little choice in the matter, and that had allowed her to focus on letting go of the old and embracing the new. Kale still had a family who might welcome him home if he returned to them.
Eventually they began to doze in and out of consciousness, though the storytelling continued in bits and pieces, sometimes coherent, sometimes jumbled recollections of distant memory. They had been in the tunnel for what seemed like an eternity. More than a day, of that much Netya was sure, though the passage of time became lost in the dark just like everything else.
Finally, when the tales had been repeated several times over and Netya and Kale's whispers had become hoarse, the sound of trickling water interrupted them. Rivulets of moisture ran down the tunnel walls and began to quicken the current. One sliver at a time, pale light began to spill through the darkness overhead. Netya's cold fingers gripped the tree tight, and she stared upward until her neck hurt. Then she saw it. Mother Syr, thin and crescent, slipped over the rim of the mountains high above.
She was so relieved that she almost laughed.
—10—
A Taste of Home
The tunnel closed back up a few times as they drifted through the foothills on the far side of the mountains, but never with the same cloying darkness as before. By the time dawn broke that day the river was once again flowing swiftly across an endless expanse of grassy plains.
Netya looked back at the mountains behind them, staggered to think that they had slipped through some ancient crack in those towering peaks and come out unscathed. It was a bitter relief, for as she realised where they were she understood that there would be no going back now. The river provided a one-way journey through the mountains. If they were on the eastern side now then these plains had to be the same ones Alpha Khelt called home. As she squinted through the thinning canopy of the tree Netya thought she recognised the terrain from her journey north with Adel. Back then they must have crossed this river somewhere in the foothills where it disappeared underground.
If they found their way ashore now they would either need to cross a mountain pass—something Netya did not trust herself to do alone—or take the long journey around to the north. Then there was Adel, too. Netya did not want to abandon her mentor to the Sun People, but did she and Kale stand any real chance of rescuing her? She was not much of a fighter herself, and Kale was more proficient with a bow than his wolf's claws. Yet the canoes would have to come ashore eventually. Perhaps if they were cunning they could find some way to free Adel without having to fight.
That was all getting ahead of herself, however. First they needed to get themselves out of the river. To Netya's dismay the current began to quicken again as streams from the mountains joined the main watercourse, and another day passed without any hope of them reaching the shore. To make their situation worse the canoes were close behind them again. The sun-wilted grass of the open plains would provide no cover from bows and javelins even if they managed to escape the river.
More days of drifting followed, hungry and wearisome. Netya had become so accustomed to the motion of the river, she realised, that it no longer frightened her the way it once had. She was even managing to nap more easily, though her body had become so stiff she did not know whether it would ever feel truly comfortable again. Hunger was the most maddening affliction that plagued her now. A single raw fish a day was all she and Kale could manage if they were lucky, and they did not know enough about the scraps of plant life drifting down the river to risk eating them. Kale began to fear that they might starve, but Netya knew from her seer's training that hunger was a slow killer. A full moon might pass before they succumbed entirely, and if they had not found their way ashore by then they would be so far from home that the journey back might be as likely to kill them as hunger.
Perhaps they could find refuge with Khelt and wait out the winter before attempting to cross the mountains again, but Netya did not even know where her old alpha made his den these days. The last she heard he had been in a perpetual stalemate with Adel's father, both of them trying to assert dominance over the southern part of the plains without resorting to another bloody feud. Adel's old pack had dwelt somewhere to the south of Khelt's outcrop, she knew, but would Alpha Ulric be as welcoming if they stumbled upon his clan instead of Khelt's?
If there was one thing Netya was thankful for it was the coolness of the river and the shade of the tree branches. She did not know how the Sun People managed to endure the baking summer heat in their canoes, especially now that they were out in the open all day long. This stretch of the plains was so barren it was hard to believe that a lifegiving river flowed through the centre of it all. Barely a tree or bush stood out amidst the parched landscape.
The lack of greenery lasted for several days before a familiar sight hove into view. Tall, thick trees appeared in the northwest, forming a border that soon stretched across a third of the horizon. It was the forest Netya had once called home.
“If there's a way out of this river, it'll be there,” Kale said. “Forests always slow up canoes.”
“And we can slip away into the trees before the Sun People see us,” Netya replied. She resisted the urge to doze any more after that, tingling with anticipation as the forest drew nearer. They would need to keep their eyes open for the perfect opportunity, preferably a bend in the river that dragged their tree near the shore and obscured them from the Sun People's view for a few moments.
Sunset was turning the plains gold by the time they reached the forest. Netya wished she could tug the branches aside to relive the beauty of the landscape one more time before the trees swallowed them up, but she knew that now was not the time for such romantic musings. Still, it was hard to ignore the powerful wave of nostalgia that gripped her as the forest canopy closed in overhead, showering her with the natural scent of bark and loam and the sweet-smelling summer flowers she had collected as a child. This was not the same part of the forest she had been born in, she knew, yet it carried all the same sounds and scents. She wondered what it would be like to explore this undergrowth for the first time in the shape of her wolf.
Just as Kale had expected, the river began to slow as it moved deeper into the forest. Fallen trees and woodland detritus forced splits in the watercourse, creating streams that sapped the river's momentum. The pull of the current began to slacken, and each time the river turned Netya noticed their tree drifting closer and closer to the bank before it was dragged back into the centre. It had grown dark enough that the Sun People were lighting torches behind them, and the speed of their canoes slowed until they were far out of earsho
t.
“The next time we drift near the shore we should try to swim,” Netya whispered.
“Do you have the strength for it?”
“I think so. I can't feel the current pulling very hard any more.”
“Me neither. At the next turn, then. And if one of us can't make it, we swim back to the tree.”
Netya nodded without realising that Kale could probably not see her beneath the shadows of the branches. She pushed herself out toward the edge of the tree's canopy, going as far as she dared before the branches began to bend. The water that had grown so natural to her over the past few days now sounded loud and angry again, though in reality it was calmer than ever. As the river turned the weight of their tree sent it drifting out to one side, the current releasing its grip for a moment as they floated toward the shallows. Netya took a deep breath, waiting until the tree had almost stopped moving before she threw herself into the open water. Twigs whipped her face, then she was free of the snagging branches. She swam as hard as her stiff body would allow, wishing she had cast off her gown as its folds began to tangle around her kicking legs like pond weed. Great splashes of water leaped up around her plunging arms, loud enough that the Sun People might have heard, but that would not matter soon. The river bank was getting closer. With the last of her energy she pushed herself as hard as she could, kicking against the water until she could kick no longer. Throwing back her soaked hair with a gasp, she put her legs down and felt firm ground. She stumbled, unused to the sensation after having become so accustomed to the bobbing tree. Kale staggered forward in a similarly drunken state beside her, water pouring off the pair of them. She reached for his hand, and with an unsteady lope they waded through the shallows together and clambered up the riverbank. They were not safe yet. Netya braced her palm against a tree and looked behind them, seeing the lights of the torches coming around the riverbend. One of the figures in the lead canoe was standing upright, as if surveying the river for the source of the splashing. But the shadows were deep and the undergrowth thick, and it took only a few moments for the two sun wolves to disappear into the forest.