There’s a city somewhere ahead,” said Peter, trying to change the subject. “I can hear it.” It wasn’t surprising. He had Shifted himself a pair of ears which stood out like batwings on either side of his head. Probably hadn’t even realized he was doing it. I turned away to hide the expression on my face—he did look silly—only to see Queynt touching his tongue to the crystal the dead man had had around his neck.
Even though Queynt had told us over and over he was immune, seeing him do that made me shudder. I was going to find out about that alleged immunity sooner or later, but so far he hadn’t explained it. Now he saw me shiver and shook his head at me.
“We have to know, girl!” Well, he was right. We did have to know. Those louts outside Zog had had crystals hanging around their necks, too. Reddish ones. Queynt hadn’t had a chance to taste one of those, but then he hadn’t needed to. It was evident what dreams of violence and rapine they were breeding in the brats. Along with everything else, they had been chanting a litany to Storm Grower while they tried to kill us. We’d been hunting Storm Grower for some seasons now, and hearing the name in this context made the hunt seem even more ominous than we’d already decided it was.
Queynt nodded at me about this yellow crystal, telling me it was like the others we’d found beside the dead bodies along the road. Anyone touching it to his tongue would be utterly at peace, in a place of perfect contentment with no hunger, no thirst, no desires.
Someone sucking a crystal like that wouldn’t hear a baby crying or the sound of their own stomach screaming for food. Someone sucking on that dream would lie there and die. And there were hundreds along the road who had done just that—families, singletons, even whole mounted troops, dead on the ground with the horses still saddled and wandering. We’d found one pile of small furry things which Queynt believed were Shadowpeople, though the carrion birds had left little enough to identify. All with yellow crystals in their mouths, their hands, or on thongs around their necks.
We hadn’t found a single one on anyone still living.
When the grave was filled in, I pulled myself up on the wagon seat again. Queynt nodded sympathetically as we started off into the gray light of early dawn.
“Someone’s getting rid of excess population,” he mumbled. “Dribs and drabs of it.”
“What I can’t figure out is how and why certain ones are so all of a sudden excess! We’ve found dead Gamesmen and dead pawns, young and old, male and female. All with these same damn yellow things. The crystals are all alike, same color, same size. Someone has to be making them!”
“You’ve mentioned that before, Jinian. Several times, as I recall.” He sighed, yawned, scratched himself. “You know, girl,” he drawled, going into one of his ponderous perorations, “though we may conjecture until we have worn imagination to shreds, theorize until our brains are numb with it, baffle our knowledge with mystery and our logic with the futility of it all, until we find out where they’re coming from, anything we guess is only hot air and worth about as much.” He fell into a brooding silence as we rattled on with the krylobos talking nonsense to one another and Peter and Chance riding just ahead. So we had ridden, league on league, hundreds and hundreds of them, ever since leaving the lands of the True Game. Some days it seemed we’d been riding like this forever.
I could see Peter’s animated profile from time to time as he turned to speak to Chance. His face was bronze from the sun. He’d grown up, too, in the last few seasons. The bones in his cheeks and jaw were bold, no longer child-like, and there was a strong breadth to his forehead. It was his mouth that got to me, though, the way his upper lip curved down in the center, a funny little dip, as though someone had pinched it. Every time I saw that, I wanted to touch it with my tongue. Like a sweet. No. Not like a sweet.
Well, I needed comforting, and seeing him there within reach, within touching distance, made me want to yell or run or go hide in the wagon.
Sometimes I wished that the way I felt about Peter was an illness. If it were an illness, a Healer could cure it.
As it was, it went on all the time with no hope of a cure.
Every morning when the early light made sensuous wraiths of the mists, every evening when the dusk ghosts crept into erotic tangles around the foliage (see, even my language was getting lubricious), I found myself thinking unhelpful thoughts that made me blush and breathe as though I’d been running. I furnished every grove with likely spots for dalliance, and lately I’d taken to crossing off every day that passed, counting the ones that remained until the season my oath of celibacy would be done.
Queynt had been watching me; I caught his kindly stare and blushed. “Troubled about your oath?” he asked me sympathetically.
He caught me unaware. One of the things that bothered me about Queynt was his habit of knowing what I was thinking. He wasn’t a Demon. He had no business just knowing that way. “Yes.” I turned red again. It wasn’t any of his business, and yet. “By the Hundred Devils and all their pointy ears, Queynt, I can’t understand the sense of it. They said it was to let me study the art without distractions, but I’m not studying the art! I’m traveling. Trying to keep my skin whole. Trying to locate Dream Miner and Storm Grower and find out why they want me dead. Praying Peter keeps on being fond of me at least until the oath
