“Guy, the Naga can swim,” Kest said gently.
Guyrin seemed thoroughly stumped by this information. “Do snakes leave tracks on water?”
Gamarron, who looked to have finally mastered himself, put his hand on Kest’s shoulder. “My friend. I didn’t travel all the way to Pacari to find someone good at reading trail sign. I could have found that on the Mainland, or one of my own people, for that matter.” He looked him in the eye. “You have other gifts. Use them.”
Kest quailed inside. The tracking he’d been doing so far was the sort any six-year-old from Pacari could do, but he’d avoided seeking out any animals’ help. He took a deep breath and found himself holding it, feeling the pressure mount inside his head. There was no lying with animals, no hiding of the self. He was foul, tainted, broken. He feared that the simple, brutally honest animals of the wild would sense the perversion of his body and reject him. Attack him. He was scared.
The others watched without speaking. Gamarron stood at the forefront, demanding, implacable. Being the chief. Kest unfolded his lips and let the air leak out slowly. He felt deflated, wrung out. Have to stop running sometime, coward. He nodded jerkily to the old monk. “I’m not sure… I’ll try. Give me some space, please. Back in the trees. Animals try to avoid humans. Don’t move, no matter what.”
The others did as he asked. Nira gave him a worried glance as she went. Kest chewed his lip, thinking hard. If he wanted any hope of finding the retreating Naga, he needed a wider field of vision. The great trampled battlefield came to mind, and an idea came to him. He’d have to recruit help. Will they come? That icy spike of fear he felt at the thought of opening himself to the beasts returned stronger than ever, and he suddenly knew that it would grow larger each time he let that fear master him. If he waited much longer, he’d never reach for the beast-kin again. It’s time. He grabbed ahold of his terror and forced it down. His heart was thudding in his chest like a hammer.
He lay face down with arms outstretched in the matted greenery, the sweet, calming scent of grass filling his nose. He couldn’t seem to unclench his muscles. Everything was tight, as if the fibers of his body strained to keep his senses in against his will. His fingertips twitched involuntarily against the earth.
“What are you doing?” Nira asked, trotting back to crouch beside him. “Are you going to slither around like the Naga? Somehow I don’t think getting into a snake frame of mind will help.” She tried to make a joke of it, but he thought he heard real concern in her voice.
He turned his head to face her, but she was on his blind side. With the eye patch on, he mostly just saw a blob of heat. It was a nicely-shaped blob. “This must look strange, but I know what I’m doing… I think. Please, go stay with the others.”
She hesitated. “Are you all right?”
I’m terrified. I’m going to fail. He couldn’t very well say that – not to her. “I’m fine. This is very relaxing.”
She snorted. “I knew it. Taking your ease while the rest of us get eaten by bugs.” She retreated to the trees. He imagined her smiling as she went, and it calmed him.
The trick to communicating with animals was in being utterly present in the same way they were. Most humans were so caught up in either the past or the future that they could never reach beyond themselves. But Kest was raised with one eye firmly in the moment, and he’d been casting his thoughts and emotions onto nearby animals since before he could speak. It wasn’t a trick he had learned – it was simply a part of him. His tribe had seen it from the start. It was a large part of why he had been expected to be the next chief.
But now… the trauma of being cast out of the tribe, the endless jockeying for dominance against Gamarron that had cost him his eye, the weight of this insane quest, his horrible, unrecoverable idiocy in accepting Renna’s false eye – all of these things had smothered the ability to be present. It had cost him the easy rapport he had always enjoyed with the animals. Oh, he had reached out to a few creatures here and there in desperate need, but the only creatures that had endured his presence for long were the zephyrs – the most unpleasant, taciturn, and reclusive beasts he had ever encountered. All others saw him for what he was: a mundane man, too burdened with the weight of his humanity to be of any interest to the free things of the world.
Now he cleared his mind and struggled to shed his fears, his hopes, his desires. It wasn’t easy. Ridding the self of cares was not like taking off a heavy pack, he realized, but more like leaving that pack behind and tromping off unprepared into the jungle. We call them cares because we care about them. He tried to tell himself that the quest was not his, that the people around him were companions, not friends, and that he could leave it all behind… but it wasn’t true. He had a friend such as he’d never had before, a dark-skinned woman with a face so fair it pained him, and she was as just unlikely to live through all this as he was. He wanted to protect her. He couldn’t cast away that care, didn’t want to, even if she could hardly look him in the face now. He would not give up his own heart just to speak to the beasts.
And yet… a chief cared for his tribe. A man cared for his wife and
