Joyn had been impressed enough, particularly when he spotted flocks of flitters below, wheeling through the air. He’d wanted to send a fich flying after them, unaware how the open air tricked the eye with distance.
Aryl found herself enjoying his enthusiasm. At least, during those brief moments when Joyn kept it inside his own head and not hammering against her shields like the pending afternoon rain.
He was, she sighed, trying his best. She felt an unexpected sympathy for her own mother.
“Now?”
“Let me test the wind.” The M’hir had finished, but there was a perceptible breeze flowing over the canopy. Aryl turned her face until the sweat on her forehead began to cool. “That way,” she pointed, then added quickly, catching at his arm. “When I say and not before.”
The sky wasn’t the brilliant blue of her memories, but a more sullen hue, as if it harbored a grudge against the clouds already building toward Amna Clan. Those were tall and white. Joyn noticed her attention. “Buildings! Sky buildings!”
“Clouds,” she corrected absently. “Where rain comes from.” The child fell outwardly silent. Inwardly, his mind was a frenzy of questions. Who lives there? He also wondered what they ate . . . was it air? . . . how did it TASTE? . . . and how often they went to—
“Joyn,” Aryl interrupted, before too many details developed. “It’s time to launch the first one. Just like we practiced with the twigs.”
They both cocked their arms back, then threw them forward, releasing the little models at the extent of their reach. Aryl’s throw was longer and more powerful, but Joyn’s achieved a better angle as he let go. The two fiches floated off through the air.
“Look!!! Look at them!!!”
Aryl did, her heart in her mouth. The tiny craft caught the breeze and actually rose higher. At the same time, they traveled away, their easy flight mocking the full day’s journey along bridge and branch that lay between them and the Sarc grove—
She shook off the wonder of it and began paying closer attention, noting the tilt and self-correction of Joyn’s fich, how hers, a slightly different design, shuddered as it moved.
If they descended, it was imperceptible at this range. Soon, they were specks, eventually disappearing against the dark green of the grove.
With the power of the M’hir, she thought, they could fly across the world.
Joyn’s small hand slipped into hers and Aryl gazed down at him in surprise. “Can we throw another one?” he pleaded.
She smiled. “That’s why we’re here.”
They went through her bagful of fiches, all but one flight cheered as a resounding success—that one involving a too tight grip by very small fingers. He’d been so painfully sorry to break it SO SORRY, Aryl had to tease the child back to cheer or be unable to think a coherent thought the rest of the day.
She was crouched over her bag, digging out the last—having promised Joyn he could fly it—when she felt his sudden excitement.
“What is it?” Fich in hand, Aryl swiveled on her knees to look.
He pointed to the sky. “My fich! My fich is coming back, Cousin! It’s one of mine. I’m sure it is. Look! I threw it, so it comes back!”
MINE! LOOK! MINE! LOOK!
HUSH! she threw against the joyful babble in her head. Joyn’s mindvoice disappeared; he whimpered. Aryl gestured apology, but didn’t lose her concentration. She tried to make sense of what she saw moving through the air. The child was right, it was coming in their direction. “There are sky hunters,” she began to explain, then paused. “But that’s too fast—”
Light slipped over a curved surface . . .
The fich dropped from her numb fingers. Aryl swept up Joyn and ran the wide branch back to the trunk. The child took hold without question, wrapping his arms and legs around her body to free her hands and arms. She kept moving, jumping to the branch below, then the next, and next, following the natural spiral of the nekis to put the massive trunk between them and what flew as quickly as possible. They crashed through leaves and vines, were whipped by twigs.
Finally, Aryl stopped, her back to the solid comfort of the trunk, and took shallow, silent breaths.
Safe? a whisper in her mind.
No. She stayed waiting and still. Joyn did the same, holding tight. This was the earliest training, to freeze at danger and trust the adult. Aryl brushed greenery from the hair sticking from his hood, wishing she felt like one.
Or was the calm assurance of her elders nothing more than this? she wondered suddenly. An outer shield, as effective as the inner at hiding fear and self-doubt.
Somehow, that wasn’t a comfort.
Biters found them. One of her leaps must have planted her right leg in the midst of a thickle, judging by the needle-stings coursing up and down her calf.
After a few long moments of nothing more threatening, Aryl became restless. And curious. What was it doing?
“Stay here,” she told Joyn, who obediently climbed down and took her place against the trunk. His eyes were dilated but calm. “I won’t leave you,” she added, startled by the intensity of her own promise.
To see it at such distance, she told herself, it must be larger than the device that had exploded during Harvest . . . much larger . . . but that glimpse? She’d swear it was the same design.
After pulling her hood’s gauze over her face, Aryl bent to strip off her boots. They were protection and grip on flat branches, but for this, she needed her strong toes. She pressed her body to the trunk, reaching out to explore the ridged bark, finding and avoiding areas soft with moisture and rot that would crumble under her fingers. Once her hands had found a solid grip, her feet did the same.
In this way, slow and careful, she climbed around and up the trunk. She kept to the shadows and, when she reached the branch below the one where they’d stood to launch the fiches, she laid herself on it. Pacing each move with a pause, keeping those moves random, she crawled forward. Biters feasted on her feet and ankles. At least, she thought wryly as she crushed a familiar plant beneath her, she’d already fired this thickle’s stock of weapons.
The shadow’s edge, where the sunlight first reached this branch and prompted a cluster of bud-tipped twigs, was her destination. From there, she should have a view of the sky, without being exposed herself. Aryl eased her hand forward.
The shadow grew.
Instantly, Aryl flattened against the wood. Her hand crept to the hilt of the longknife at her side and she tensed.
Instead of the fierce cry of a hunter, she heard something else.
Voices.
Chapter 16
VOICES? ARYL SLOWLY TURNED her head to look up, straining to see past the obstructing branch and the plants growing along its sides.
Two voices. One low and steady, that reminded her of Cetto’s deep tone. The other was lower still. Every so often there’d be another sound, as if pieces of metal clicked together.
Something was wrong with those speaking. The cadence of sound, its complexity, suggested words. But the result was gibberish, as if flitters tried to repeat odd syllables of overheard speech.
The Tikitik communicated something to one another with incomprehensible hisses, she thought, entranced. Were these almost-but-not familiar sounds words of another kind?
The Tikitik—Aryl’s whirling thoughts kept coming back to them, the only non-Om’ray she’d met. Their Speaker had claimed the device belonged to strangers from another world.
What other world?