The master waved to Dart and Calla. “Perhaps a bit of modesty is in order.”
Calla shrugged and wandered a few steps away to where someone had spitted a rabbit over a flame. Dart also began to turn away, when a flash of light caught her eye.
She turned back to Tylar. He had raised to one elbow and was tugging free the loop of his sword belt. “Wait,” she said and stepped closer.
Tylar lifted his face toward her.
Dart leaned closer to the mark on his chest, bending at the waist. “I-I thought I saw something…”
Tylar glanced down at himself, his brow crinkling.
The well of dark water that was his mark swirled ever so slightly as she stared closely. She had noted the same back in Chrismferry, as if something had crested just under the surface, stirring the waters.
His naethryn.
But that was not what had drawn her eye.
Sheershym sighed with impatience. “I assure you, lass. Nothing is amiss.”
Rogger warded him back. “Best let her look. She’s got eyes a mite sharper than ours. Sees things others miss.” He said this last with a wink in her direction.
Dart kept her focus on the mark, only a hand’s breadth from Tylar’s chest. She waited. Maybe she was mistaken-
Then it flashed again.
Deep within the well, a trickling trace of green fire snaked across the mark and away again. Flames within a dark sea.
“Did you see that?” Dart asked, startled.
Sheershym glanced at her, shook his head, then returned to study the mark.
Tylar caught her eye. “What did you see, Dart?”
“Flames, stirring deep with your mark. Then away again.”
“Flames?” Rogger mumbled. “What did they look like?”
She frowned, picturing them, trying to capture how they made her feel. “Emerald but with a sickly cast. A feverish sheen to them.”
Tylar touched his mark and found only flesh. “Green fire…” His eyes narrowed.
“What?” Rogger asked, plainly sensing some recognition in the other’s voice.
Tylar kept his gaze fixed to Dart. “Like moonlight off pond scum.”
She slowly nodded.
“I’ve seen such a flame before,” Tylar said. “It shone from the blade Perryl struck me with. Or rather struck Meeryn’s naethryn with.”
“Who is this Perryl?” Sheershym asked.
“A black ghawl,” Rogger said. “A daemon wearing another’s skin.”
“His dark sword grazed the naethryn when it was last released. I felt the burn of the blade’s kiss.” Tylar touched the side of his chest. “Here.”
Sheershym inspected the bruised flesh. “Where your rib is broken now.”
Tylar nodded.
Off to the side, Brant stirred and mumbled. “She…she…we must…” Then he drifted away.
The master looked to the boy, then back to Tylar. “I fear young Brant might not be the only one poisoned here. That blade must have carried some corruption. It poisoned your naethyn-and as the two of you are bound together, you suffer for it, too.”
Silence settled over them.
“And if his naethryn dies…?” Rogger finally asked.
Sheershym shook his head. “I cannot say. But I suspect the wear and break of your body reflects the vitality of the naethryn inside you. As you grow more crippled of limb, it maps your naethryn’s slide toward death.”
“Is there some cure?” Rogger said. “Some powder to smoke the poison out, like you did with Brant?”
“Such matters are far beyond my skills,” Sheershym said. His face looked especially waxen with fear, something unspoken.
“What?” Tylar asked.
“Even if there were a cure,” the master said, “I fear its potency might never reach where it is most needed.”
“Why’s that?”
“There has been talk and speculation amongst the masters since you rose to your regency. Arguments and thoughts shared by raven’s wing. One consensus is that the naethryn inside you…isn’t truly inside you. How could it be? Instead most believe it to be tethered to you while trapped half in this world, half in the naether. For any hope to burn the poison from the creature, you must bring it fully here.”
“Which I failed to do before,” Tylar said.
“And while poisoned, you may never be able to do.”
Rogger shook his head. “A perfectly laid trap.”
But it wasn’t the only one.
Brant suddenly sat up on the neighboring litter, gasping out as if startled by the terror of a dream, “She… she…”
A shout caught his words and finished his thought, coming from the forest, in the direction of the cliff’s edge. “She comes! She comes!”
Dart straightened, along with everyone else.
Even Brant gained his legs, wobbly but supported by Lorr.
They all stared to the east, toward the burnt swath of the black river.
The Huntress was on the move.
“The river remains quiet,” Brant said. “Takaminara seems to show no interest in stopping the Huntress this time.”
“She may not be able to,” Rogger said. “It must have cost her greatly to split the land the first time.”
Their party gathered at a hunting lodge that overlooked the cliff’s edge. It had been turned into a watchtower by a pair of sentinels, boys barely past twelve. The lodge offered a wide view of the valley floor, once a green sea, now split by a black river.
Brant shifted the arm in his sling. The firebalm had sealed his wound, and Grace already knit the tissue with a burning itch. Between his eyes, a throbbing ache persisted, the dregs of his poisoning. His left leg also felt numb and thick. But the walk here had helped return sensation with a fiery prickling.
He was alive.
But for how long?
Harp stood at his shoulder. Brant could not believe how much his old friend had grown. Once shorter, he now stood half a head taller than Brant. But so much remained the same, too. The worried crinkle at the corners of his eyes, the way he tapped his chin when struggling with a puzzle, even the same crooked grin, offered when he’d first crossed to Brant back in the camp. Still, despite the warm and genuine greeting, there remained a darker look to his eye, something Brant had never seen before. Shadows that would forever haunt his friend.
Brant studied the land below. In just the short time it had taken to come here, the Huntress had led her war party halfway across the river. She did not shy from its burn and stink any longer. Brant had heard the story of Harp’s flight. The Huntress, angered by their escape, meant to end this now.
“They move swiftly,” Tylar said.
“And so must we if we’re to reach the cliffs and the hinterlands beyond,” Rogger said.
Brant had walked these lands as a boy. He knew them well. The Divide fell away into the hinter about two leagues away. A hard march, but one they should be able to make. They had already sent ahead the youngest and oldest, to await word at the cliff’s edge, in case Takaminara chose to protect them yet again. No one wanted to enter the deadly hinterlands unless there was no other choice.
Now they knew.
“We must go,” Brant said.
Harp had everything prepared. While camped here, he’d had ladders woven of vine and sinew. They waited at the Divide, coiled and ready to be unfurled down the cliff into the hinterlands. But Harp had planned further
