away, back to the east.
“She is ignoring Mattias’s wishes,” said Cephas. “She is going back to fight with him.”
Corvus shouldered his pack and started walking away from the river. “She is going back to die with him.”
Shan scrambled after Corvus, but Ariella and Cephas stood for a moment, torn between listening to the sounds of battle behind them and trekking after the kenku.
“Is that what he told you on the rock?” Cephas called.
“No more words passed between us than what you heard,” Corvus replied. “Now come on. These are the banks of the old Volomir River, still short of the desert. But we can be there by dawn.”
Another blast, the loudest yet, sounded behind them. Cephas imagined he heard Trill’s battle cry in it.
They walked through the dark, the way clear beneath bright stars. For a long time, none of them spoke.
When Corvus broke the silence, it was clear to the others that they should not respond.
“Well, he was a fool, of course,” said the kenku. “He spent his whole life making the wrong decision every time he was presented with a choice.
“He might have been a scholar, if you can imagine that. For all that he was raised among woodsfolk who valued tracking more highly than reading, he had a sharp mind and his family valued it, at least enough to send him to schools in the Silver Marches towns during the winters. He always went back when the thaws came, though. Always back to the forests.
“So, he decided to become another anonymous ranger. The North is full of them. But it turned out-and I suppose this is something that might have proven valuable if he had actually followed through-it turned out that Mattias Farseer was destined to be the greatest archer the world has ever seen.
“You think you have seen him shoot? In Berdusk, they sing a song about the flight of a single arrow he loosed when he was nineteen years old.
“But he was a fool, as I said, and chose a lesser path.
“These northland rangers, you see, in the main they train as swordsmen or archers, but some among them set those ways aside in favor of the companionship of animals, can you believe it? Even Mattias wasn’t fool enough to hold such an intention, but, that shot out of legend? The one from the song? He felled a striking wyvern from a thousand paces away. The beast was feeding off a village’s sheep herd and they hired him to save their spring lambs.
“He took less gold than he deserved and headed home. On the way, he heard a cry in the forest. There was a nest, and a single fledgling wyvern. When she saw him, she attacked. No larger than a dog, but she was all claws and teeth. He could have shot her dead, of course, but remember this is a story about a fool. She ripped open his belly and shattered his hips, and he never even drew his dagger.
“And they both lived, somehow. He sewed up his own guts and survived the fire in the blood that comes with that kind of wound. He brought her a roebuck to feed on when he finally managed to take one down. His aim was off, because of the fever, I suppose, or the deer could hear him dragging himself through the woods.
“But they both lived. And after they could travel, they found that they had to move farther and farther south. Farther and farther away from civilized people who wanted nothing to do with a wyvern. Farther from woodlands that had no place for a crippled ranger.
“And do you know, that even after all that, he managed to do something even more foolish? Do you know what he did?
“He joined the circus.”
In her workroom, Munaa yr Oma el Jhotos, High Vizar of Almraiven, collapsed onto a couch. Drawing in the demon’s leash had proven far more difficult than she anticipated.
She held no illusions about her own powers. She might be counted among the mighty in a city famous for its mages, but the making of the leash was far beyond her. It had been very nearly outside her ability to hold it.
But the demon was once again imprisoned in the apostoleum beneath the plain. Her grandfather’s bindings were woven anew. She was confident they would hold.
She considered whether the risk had been worth the taking. The el Jhotos heir had escaped, along with her grandfather’s former assassin and one or two others.
Pouring the last of the wine she’d brought from the WeavePasha’s sanctum, she decided that, on balance, the night must be judged a success. She had not managed the death of the one her grandfather thought might one day be a threat, but she had managed the death of the one he feared.
Exhausted, she raised the glass to her lips, then spit out the wine.
It had gone bitter.
Chapter Thirteen
The efreet have flesh like a man,
and blood like a man.
But their minds are fire,
and they have no souls at all.
The desert had a voice, and it was both wind and earth.
Sometime in the last hours of the night, between Corvus’s unacknowledged eulogy of Mattias and the rising of the sun at their backs, the ground they trudged across changed in character, as spell-warped stone gave way to salt and sand.
The wind rose with the sun, and when he heard it, Cephas looked to Ariella, seeking confirmation that it carried a strangeness on it. But the woman did not raise her head. Like the others, she walked forward with a drawn face and an exhausted gait. If she heard anything unusual in the air, she did not speak of it.
They all heard the first cracks from the ground, though. As he had been since Trill left them, Corvus was at the front of their ragged line. He stumbled backward, falling into Shan when the sharp series of staccato blasts sounded from the ground before him. A sheet of sand flew up, marking the path of a fissure that appeared with the threatening noise.
The ground beneath them shifted, and Cephas caught Ariella’s hand, the two of them clinging to each other for balance. After a moment more of rumbling, the trembling in the ground subsided, followed by a hissing sound as fine white sand rushed down a slope into the crack that broke the exposed bedrock.
“An earthquake,” said Ariella. “They are common along the southern coasts of the Sea of Fallen Stars. The tectonic force of the earthsouled, but on a tremendous scale.”
Cephas took a water skin proffered by Shan and nodded thanks. “Natural then,” he said, passing the water to Ariella. “Elder Lin’s Old Mother waking to greet the day.”
Corvus waved Shan away when she brought the water to him. He had a kerchief of homespun cloth in one hand, and he knotted it into a headpiece that hooded his eyes.
“Not natural,” he croaked, taking up the slow pace once more. “Not here.”
Exhaustion and grief kept Cephas quiet throughout the endless morning. Time was hard to measure when the sun loomed so large, but it was high in the sky, and the last signs of the badlands had disappeared behind them, when he decided to remind Corvus of Mattias’s assurances to them.
“This is the morning Corvus Nightfeather finally tells the whole truth about something,” Cephas said, surprised by the bitter tone in his voice.
Corvus came to an immediate halt, and in that instant, Cephas realized the kenku frightened him like no other person or beast he had ever known.
“No, Shan,” said Corvus, without turning.
