As Gijs scrambled to his feet outside, Enris found himself bathed in sunlight.
There was no stone or wood overhead.
He grimaced. The pieces had to come down somewhere. Hopefully not on an Om’ray head. He reached anxiously.
No pain or alarm.
“Where did it go?” he wondered aloud.
“It’s gone—the entire roof. Gone.” Gijs stood in the doorway. His hand stroked one of its large stones, as if for reassurance. “You did that. I felt—I felt Power.” He stepped back inside, staring at the sky before gazing in wonder at Enris. “What did you do, Tuana?”
Not quite what he’d intended? Enris shrugged. “I pushed it away from us.” He stopped there.
Show me how. This with fierce determination. TEACH ME!
Stung and repulsed by the raw need of Gijs’ sending, Enris slammed down his inner shields to keep the other out.
Was this how Aryl felt?
“Now’s not the time,” he said aloud. “Unless you want those boots for supper.”
Gijs sketched a gracious apology through the air, but his blue eyes glittered like frost.
“What’s she done now?” Taen looked more harassed than worried. Dead leaves snarled her hairnet and one cheek was scratched.
Enris changed his mind. If Ziba wasn’t with her mother, no point—as his mother would say—stirring that pot. Instead, he put on his widest smile. “Nothing at all. Do you need help?”
“Think you can get in there?”
“There” was one of the gaps between ruined buildings, on this side bounded by a waist-high stone wall. Beyond the stone was another wall, this of vegetation grown—and died—into a dense mass of vines.
With thorns.
“Why,” Enris asked reasonably, “would I want to?”
“Aryl thinks these were fields, like the Grona’s. If they were, maybe there’s—” this with weary doubt, “—still something in the ground worth eating.”
Fields? Enris studied the gap with this in mind. Had it once been filled with rows of crops instead of this wild tangle? A couple of narrow beams crisscrossed overhead, both wrapped in brown stems. He’d wondered about those. The wood was too thin and flimsy to take weight. Most had snapped and fallen long ago. But they could, he realized, have supported vines. He’d seen plants thrive in midair for himself in the canopy, strange as it seemed.
If there was anything left to harvest, though, it would be buried. Enris scuffed his toe against the hard packed dust and stone underfoot. The Grona had nice, sturdy digging blades. Almost as good as Tuana’s. A shame neither he nor the exiles had seen fit to bring one of those awkward-to-carry tools along. He pulled his short knife from his belt and promised it a sharpening, then eyed the thorns. “I’ll give it a try. Where’s Aryl, anyway?”
“She’s gone looking for Seru. Our Chooser.” Taen’s delicate stress of the last word sent Enris crashing forward, thorns or no thorns.
He was more than aware the Yena Chosen waited for him to pay court to their one and only.
They could keep waiting.
Forearms up so his coat sleeves protected his face, he drove his legs into the mass, letting momentum gain territory. The thorns snagged on the fabric and in his hair. Their source was brittle and dry, stems that snapped as he pulled free. Four steps…another two and a forward stumble…he was through the thickest part. He stopped to look around, sneezing at the inevitable dust.
Fields, indeed. Away from the overgrown outer edge, order was still discernible. Stalks with stubby tendrils at their top made one line, clumps of leaves with wrinkled pods another, parallel to the first. Dead vines hung in rows, too, a once-living curtain that might have protected the plants beneath from the hot summer sun.
“We need Traud,” Enris muttered to himself. Traud Licor and his family tended Tuana’s vast fields, and knew every kind of plant.
He’d just have to dig and…
Something wasn’t right. Or too right.
The rows were straight. Straight and level. Ditches of small stones ran between each, themselves straight, level, and undisturbed. The destruction that had heaved roadways and buildings everywhere else had bypassed this place.
Not a good sign. Not good at all. A general reshaping was Oud negligence, a threat to be ranked with flood or storm, impersonal and relentless. But this? This could only happen if—Enris made himself think it—if the Oud had attacked Sona’s Om’ray.
The bones in the valley hadn’t been those of a fellow unChosen, leaving on Passage, but of someone desperately running from death.
Long ago. Enris brushed thorns from his hair and made himself focus. Long ago. Sona had broken the Agreement, for what reason he couldn’t imagine, and the Oud had reacted.
Those Om’ray were no longer real. What they’d done or not done no longer mattered. Only the living counted, and they were hungry.
Guessing that a plant with pods above ground wouldn’t have a tuber, Enris went to his knees beside the tendrilled stalks and lifted his knife.
The Oud were below.
Sweat stood out on his brow. He couldn’t bring the knife down.
Oud were below and all Om’ray stood on this shell of a world, pinned between sky and dirt, the only safety an Agreement older than them all, a promise not to change. But nothing stayed the same.
Which meant nothing was safe. Nothing.
Enris drove the knife into the hardened soil with all his might. It snapped below the handle.
A wave of concern. What’s wrong?
Ignoring Aryl, he stabbed the broken blade into the ground, over and over again. With each stab, he made a vow.
He would find a better way. Stab!
He would find a Clan who didn’t live in fear. Stab!
He would go to Vyna.
Chapter 5
“WHAT’S WRONG?”
Aryl ignored Juo’s question. She wouldn’t tell anyone else what Enris believed or what he’d decided. She wished she didn’t know, but his mind had been appallingly open to hers at that moment. She could still taste dirt, thrown up by his furious, futile cuts at the ground, feel the prickle of thorns. She understood, as never before, why Tuana feared what lay beneath their feet as Yena feared what hunted the dark.
Oud had attacked Om’ray.
His reactions were hers, too. Fear…disgust…rage… finally, resolve. Too strong, too passionate, too destructive. She trembled and wished them gone, unfelt.
She didn’t wish Enris gone.
But he wouldn’t stay. She understood that, too. He believed they weren’t safe, that no Om’ray was safe. He believed there was a Clan—somewhere—with technology of its own, free of the Agreement. That it was the key not to the future, but to their survival.
She wasn’t sure he was wrong.
“Seru went this way,” Juo said. “You coming?” She didn’t stop, though she kept to flatter ground. A concession to her changed balance.
Could the Oud hear their steps? Were they below, listening for trespassers? Aryl caught herself following in silence, as if stalking prey in the canopy, or avoiding becoming prey.
What difference would it make? Her next step was an angry thud that brought Juo’s head around.
“You walk like the Tuana.”
“Why would Seru come here?” Aryl countered, stepping over another dry ditch after Juo. By so doing, they left the village itself. Ahead was a series of dirt mounds, head-high, running parallel to the now-sheer cliff. Good thing they’d come down to the valley floor before this, she decided, looking up. The dark gray rock, shot through with specks of white, might have been polished to the smoothness of a fine table. They’d have needed more rope than all Yena possessed to descend here.