What fell from the sky looked and sounded the same. It was the little river that had changed. The width of a stride a moment ago, it had swollen to three times that, in many places spilling over its rocky banks. Tendrils seeped along cracks and filled depressions.
Soon they were all splashing through puddles, a harmless nuisance to already wet feet, except when the puddle formed over ice. At least the ice was melting, adding its drips to the rain and rotting softly underfoot. Sheets of it slid from the rock walls in random smashes they quickly learned to ignore.
Harmless for how long? Aryl wondered, glancing back up the gorge. Its origin within the mountain ridge was masked by rain and mist. Fed by cloudbursts, the waters of the Lay Swamp could rise with terrible speed. And the Lay had all the groves to hold its flood, unlike this narrow, steep-walled gorge.
She wasn’t the only one concerned. Veca had already set a quicker, more dangerous pace. Aryl moved even faster, making her way up the line heedless of risk. The older Om’ray gave her a harried look once they were side by side. “What is it?”
“Haxel and the others must be waiting for us to join them. What if they’re on the other side of the river we couldn’t cross?” Aryl gestured to the puddles spreading across the gorge floor. “What if it’s flooding, too? We’ll be cut off.”
Veca shrugged. “There’ll be a bridge.”
Aryl raised her eyebrows. “A bridge?”
“Grona build them.” As if this settled it.
“What makes you think this is part of Grona?”
Another shrug. “Could be Rayna, for all I know. Can you tell?”
Aryl paused while they used a pair of boulders to cross a more ambitious tendril of escaping river. She hadn’t noticed any transition from Yena to Grona, not inwardly. She’d simply known they were in another Clan’s domain. How?
Proximity to the village? It couldn’t be that…not only that, she corrected herself. What defined a Clan’s influence? The location of Om’ray minds, their glow—that was what she sensed. But with no Om’ray nearby but the exiles—and Enris—what made this bit of Cersi feel like Grona and not Yena?
Besides the fact that no Yena would want this lifeless heave of stone?
Though now that she considered the question—Aryl waited to let Veca consider the best route around a wider-than-most puddle—she realized this place didn’t feel like Grona or Rayna or any other Clan. Not to her.
Were they nearing the edge of the world?
She felt no compulsion to stop, no dread of traveling too far from her kind despite being farther than she’d ever imagined. Yet from all accounts, the edge of the world revealed itself in that way—it was the limit of Om’ray existence, and Om’ray existence, after all, defined the world.
What of the world—the worlds—of the strangers? What of the world where Marcus Bowman had stood as a young Human, perhaps wondering such things, too?
Not, she reminded herself, that Humans were real in the way Om’ray were.
“We should wait for him.”
Preoccupied, Aryl almost had to puzzle which “him” Veca meant. “Enris?” She reached. He wasn’t far from them now. “He’ll be glad. We took most of the food.”
“He can help carry Chaun.”
Her fellow exiles had a distressing tendency to value the Tuana’s strength over any other of his virtues. Aryl hid a sympathetic wince.
The gorge opened without warning, its rocky walls plunged into the soil of the valley like longknives, its now-exuberant little river absorbed by a deeper, wider channel half choked with the stalks of some tall thin vegetation. Those stalks bent with the current, taming it, silencing it. On the shore, to either side, similar stalks lay broken and flattened to the ground by, Aryl assumed, falling lumps of ice. Why had she thought the valley would be spared?
The storm itself rumbled in the distance. Not done, but not immediate. The rocks and pebbles of the mountain ridge, like the river, disappeared beneath dirt, showing as scattered mounds in what was otherwise flat terrain. Flat terrain covered, away from the water, by a messy carpet of dead leaves and smaller stalks, none over knee height. The Grona spoke of winter as a time when their plants slept beneath the ground; spring as a time of regrowth.
She hoped they were right. It all looked dead to her.
Ziba left Seru to skip through the sodden leaves. The improvement in footing cheered them all. For once, Aryl admitted, she could appreciate what Enris saw in walking on flat, boring ground. Not that she’d tell him.
Thinking of the Tuana, she started to reach for his location, only to realize it was unnecessary. Instead, she let the others go ahead, to a slight rise Veca had indicated as a place to stop, and waited expectantly.
Enris appeared around the wall of the gorge a moment later, a distant figure her inner sense recognized. She thought he raised a hand in salute, as if he’d seen her, too.
We’ll wait for you, she sent.
Don’t. I’ll catch up. Despite the heavy pack she knew he carried, Enris was indeed approaching at a steady, distance-eating lope. We can’t be caught in the open, not with injuries. Who was hurt? How badly?
Aryl wondered how he’d known; she hadn’t thought Chaun’s flash of pain that strong. Myris. Morla. Chaun’s still unconscious.
And you? You don’t feel right.
Offended, she tightened her shields to be sure whatever the Tuana felt was what she intended to share and nothing more. There’s nothing wrong with me but having to walk on your dirt.
Knew you’d see sense one day. Beneath the amusement, real concern. Keep them moving, Aryl. The storm’s not done.
Thunder rolled down the valley, as if on cue.
No one argued, though the exiles delayed to let Veca and Rorn rig a sling for Chaun from ropes and a blanket. Gijs stretched out on his back while they worked, eyes closed. Like several of the others, Aryl forced herself to chew methodically on the Grona bread. Her aunt, who sat beside her, did not.
Aryl snapped off a piece, offering it to Myris. “Trust me. It tastes better now.”
“I couldn’t.” Myris tried to smile. She fussed with her prized Grona scarf, its bright blue and yellow—dyes being one of that Clan’s skills—now liberally stained with blood. The rain had washed most of it from her face, exposing a deep gash above her right brow. The eyelid below was horribly swollen and black. She was too pale, the darks of both eyes too large. Nothing they could help here, Aryl thought anxiously, refusing to believe it might be nothing they could help at all. “Stop worrying,” her aunt ordered, nothing wrong with her perception. “You’re as bad as Ael.”
She considered her aunt, struck by an idea. “He’s with Haxel. How much can you sense from him?”
Chosen were Joined. That permanent connection didn’t make them more able to send words to one another across distance, since sending was related to individual Power. But Costa had assured her—many times—that the link gave each a special insight into the state of the other regardless of distance. Her brother had claimed to know when his beloved Leri was lonely or sad or happy. Aryl remembered being convinced this was only so Costa had a ready excuse to leave her for his Chosen.
Then she’d found her way into the other place, where connection mattered more than distance. She believed now, after Costa was dead and Leri one of the mindless Lost. Aryl’s fingers sketched apology in her lap.
“You know perfectly well I can’t hear him,” Myris protested. “I’m not like you or—or Taisal.”
“Yes, but can you tell me how he feels—right now?” She felt the other’s puzzlement.