hate-filled eyes. And then suddenly he walked over toward his horse and slid his bow out of its sling.
'What are you doing?' I asked him.
His jaws clamped together as he strung his bow and then slung on his quiver of arrows.
'Where are you going?' I asked.
He finally looked at me as his eyes took on the gleam of the black stone he held in his hand. And he growled out, 'I'm going hunting.'
He began moving toward the edge of the camp, and I rested my hand against his arm. I said, 'One alone in the woods will have no friends to stand with him.'
'That's true,' he said, looking at Atara as she, too, strung her bow. 'But one alone may go where others cannot.'
'Yes,' I said, 'all the way to the otherworld.'
'Ha – I'm setting out on no such journey!' he said. 'As with the Grays, I'll hunt whatever is hunting you.'
'Do you know what it is, then?'
'No – I only suspect.'
'You should have told me,' I said, staring at the shadows between the trees.
'And you should have told me,' he said, catching me up in the dark light of his eyes.
'You should have told me if it was this close.'
And with that, he carefully parted the brush surrounding our camp and stole off into the woods.
And so we waited. While Atara stood ready with an arrow nocked in her bowstring, Maram put aside his flrestone in favor of his more reliable sword. Alphanderry and Liljana drew their cutlasses, and I my kalama, and we joined Master Juwain in gazing out through the curtains of green all around us.
'Surely it won't come for us here,' Maram said. 'Surely it will wait until tomorrow when we're lost in the forest. And then pick us off one by one.'
Maram, I knew, was exhausted – as we all were. In such ground, fear most easily takes seed.
'We survived the Grays,' I told him. 'We can survive this, too.'
And then I thought, no, not survive. But to thrive, yes, always and only to live with the wildness that makes eagles soar and wolves to sing. I clapped Maram on the shoulder then and traded smiles with him, and after that he spoke no more words of defeat.
Liljana, after doubtfully running her thumb across the edge of her sword, came over to inspect mine. She touched my kalama without my leave, and then she touched my arm as if testing its strength. She said, 'Listen, my dear, if there's to be a battle, shouldn't you eat something first? Perhaps I could make a little -'
'Liljana,' I said, 'your devotion is even more sustaining than your meals.'
I touched her face, which broke into a wide smile, and her fear of dying unheralded seemed to melt away.
Next to me, Master Juwain looked down at the varistei he held in his hand. His mind, I thought, like a sharpening wheel spin-ning out sparks, was turniing around the same thoughts over and over. 'What is troubling you sir?' I asked him.
He held up his green crystal and said, 'This is a stone of healing, as we've all seen.
And yet I'm afraid it has no power over death.'
'No,' I said, 'its power is only in life.'
I smiled as I gripped his wiry forearm, and I felt his veins pressing against mine. His mind seemed to find a moment of peace even as his heart beat with a great surge of life.
Alphanderry, too, came closer as he stared out into the darkening woods. He said,
'A scryer once told me that I wouldn't die without finding the words to my song. Yet today, they seem as far away as the stars.'
'And what does that tell you?' I asked him.
'That scryers are usually wrong.'
This made Atara smile wryly, and I said to Alphanderry, 'Do you know what it tells me?'
'What, Val?'
'That this is not your day to die.'
Our eyes found each other then, and the light that came into his was almost as bright as the fire pouring out of Flick.
Atara stood staring out into the woods as if the whole world were a scryer's sphere.
I stepped up to her and said, 'You've seen something, haven't you?'
'Yes,' she said, 'so many people here. In the forest, where the oaks grow along a stream. They were slaughtered. They are being slaughtered, or will be – oh, Val, I don't know, I don't know!'
I cupped my hand around her shoulder as she rubbed her bloodshot eyes. Death clung to her like a thousand leeches; it was written across her face like the letters of Master Juwain's book.
'I don't know what to do,' she said, 'because nothing can be done. It can't be, don't you see?'
I squeezed her shoulder and said to her, 'What is it the scryers always say? That in the end, we choose our futures, yes?'
I touched my forehead against hers and felt the lightning scar there pressing against her third eye. I felt her breath against my face and mine falling against hers like fire.
When we pulled away from each other, her eyes were sparkling as if she had come alive again.
After that, we all stood watching the woods in silence. I was only dimly aware of the mosquitoes whining about and biting me; birds chirped and chittered from far off, but I was listening for other sounds. I gazed past the hanging leeches and the insect-eaten leaves, looking for something that was looking for me.
And then, out of the darkening woods, a terrible scream shook the trees. We all started at the anguish of it. I gripped my sword with sweating hands, as Maram, Liljana and Alphanderry theirs, while Atara drew her bow and sighted her arrow in the direction from which it had come. A second scream ripped through the air, followed by another, and then came the sound of something large crashing through the bracken around our camp.
'What is it?' Maram whispered to me.'Can you see -'
'Shhh!' I whispered back. 'Get ready!'
At that moment, a young woman broke from the cover of the trees running as fast as she could. Her long brown hair seemed torn, as was the homespun dress that barely covered her torn and bleeding body. She ran in a panic, now casting a quick look over her shoulder, now turning her head this way and that as if seeking an escape route through the woods. She stumbled past us barely fifty yards from our camp.
But so great was her terror to flee whatever was pursuing her that she seemed not to see us. 'What shall we do?' Maram whispered to me.
'Wait,' I said, feeling my fingers curl around the hilt of my kalama. Next to me, Atara aimed her arrow at the trees behind the woman. 'Wait a few moments more.'
But Maram, who was now trembling with anger, had suffered through too many days of waiting. He suddenly waved his sword above his head and shouted, 'Over here!
We're over here!'
At the sound of his huge voice, the woman stopped and turned toward us. The look of relief on her pretty face was that of a lost child who has found her mother. She ran straight for our camp, and we pulled aside the brush fence to let her in.
'Thank you,' she gasped from her bloody lips as we gathered around her. 'It… killed the others. It almost killed me.'
'What did?' I asked her.
But she was too spent and frightened to say much more. She stood near Maram trembling and weeping and gasping for air.
'Whatever it is,' Atara said, 'it likely won't show it face now.'
'No,' Alphanderry said, 'not until it grows dark.'
Maram, who was swelling with pity, opened his cloak to gather in the woman next to him. He wrapped it around her and asked, 'What is your name?' 'Melia,' the woman sobbed out. 'I'm Melia.'
Liljana sniffed at this bruised and beautiful woman as if jealous of Maram's gentleness toward her. And gentle. Maram was, but I could also feel his desire rising like hot sap in a tree. It surprised me to feel as well a fierce desire for him burning through Melia's bleeding body.
