As she would be.
The giant fire was a heap of pale, ember-studded ash, firstlight little more than a promise toward Amna, when Aryl gathered her feet under her body and rose without a sound. Enris half lay against his pack. His head was bent at a painful-seeming angle, his mouth open, his arms spread wide. She had to step over his long legs to get by. The Tuana consumed the space of two normal Om’ray, even asleep.
They’d spent the rest of truenight talking about silly things, laughing at each other’s stories. Climb and seek in the light-kissed canopy. Pushing a cartful of giggling cousins in a race. Sweetpies and dresel cake.
Brothers lost.
Homes left.
Why not to polish your father’s hammer. Where not to store a fresh, wet hide.
Rain that filled the world. Dust that did the same.
Somewhere during a lengthy discussion of Tuana boots—more precisely the clear superiority of Yena footwear—Aryl had received a snore instead of answer.
She’d stayed awake, to watch over him as long as she could bear.
To watch him wake up, see him realize he had to go, try to say good-bye?
She’d keep her memory of this truenight instead.
“Find joy, Enris Mendolar,” Aryl whispered, this time meaning it, and walked away.
She didn’t look back.
Interlude
“FIND JOY, ENRIS MENDOLAR.”
Enris kept his eyes closed. If Aryl wanted to leave like this, he’d make it easier for her.
Easier for whom?
He couldn’t hear footsteps. No surprise; she walked like air.
Was she gone?
His head rolled to face the glow of Sona’s Om’ray. Her inner warmth would be part of it, indistinguishable unless he reached to find her. If he did, if he touched her thoughts once more, if he felt her brilliance, her passion and strength again…he’d stay.
“Find joy, Enris Mendolar.” Had it been her voice or a sigh of wind across the barren stone?
He should stay. Vyna and the Om’ray artifact were impossible hopes, even if Aryl believed. Sona needed him; he needed them. No Om’ray should live alone.
Aryl Sarc’s time of Choice would come.
He could stay. Be there when she was ready. She believed him whole, even if he had doubts. To Join with her?
His breath caught.
No Om’ray could live alone.
He closed the fingers of his right hand around sharp, frozen stones. That was the reality. A future with no Sona. No Aryl. No Om’ray at all. Unless impossible hopes could be true.
And he could find them.
Pushing a loaded cart up the ramp, walking away from home, leaving Sona. One step at a time. If Enris made them long steps—careless, driven, hurried steps that splashed through rivulets and skidded over stone—there was no one to comment on his flatlander clumsiness.
When he fell, only his gloves saving the skin of his hands, only his outthrust hands saving his nose, he broke out in helpless, bitter laughter.
“Fool,” he gasped, climbing to his feet. “Break a leg here and you’ll be supper.”
Though there didn’t seem to be anything interested. Or anything alive at all. His shadow, the only thing taller than a boot, stretched over a numbing sameness of gray pebbles, drifted dirt, and isolated tufts of dead vegetation. The wind, a constant now, tugged at his hair and lifted the ends of his coat. The sun hung in a faded arch of sky, flattening the distance from one side of the valley to the other. He thought he should be halfway by now, but the far wall seemed no closer.
Maybe he’d wind up as a mystery among the pebbles. Tatters of cloth, a pack, a few longer-than-most bones. A token that lied.
“I should keep walking,” he told himself, not yet ready to be bones.
Enris had no particular reason for striking out across the valley, other than it was the most direct route to Vyna. And flat. He was fond of flat, and this place rivaled the plains of the Oud for level terrain. The Oud. They hadn’t reshaped here. Why?
“Oof.” He stumbled and caught himself. Flat except for the little ditches. They were everywhere. Traps, more like it. Being filled with smaller pebbles, they blended with the ground and were just deep enough to catch his foot every single time.
Another of Aryl Sarc’s ideas: that the Sona Om’ray had used the ditches to spread the water of the river to where they wanted it.
He’d walked through it: a river remembered in sand and rock. Where the tiny mountain streams trickled down its crumbling banks, their flow ended in mats of bent reeds, dead and brown now, but perhaps they would grow again in warm weather. Unless the warmer weather dried the mountain streams. Tough place to be a plant.
Tougher place to be an Om’ray, let alone be Yena, used to such frantic abundance of growing things.
The problem with Aryl was that an idea wasn’t enough. She saw a sky and wanted wings. She saw an empty river and parched land, and wanted water and growth. She saw a homeless group of exiles, most too old or too young, and wanted a Clan.
Given any chance at all, she’d do it, too.
Enris tugged his water sac from its loop—an idea of his own. If she could do the impossible, he could. No slip of a Yena was going to best a Tuana!
For no particular reason, he found himself humming through his teeth as he walked.
The mountain loomed taller but no closer by late afternoon, as if it toyed with him. Enris had expected to reach its feet by firstnight, to drink fresh cold water from one of its streams and camp where outcroppings of rock would shelter a fire. At this rate, he’d be lucky to reach it by tomorrow’s sunset.
Sona had faded with every step. Rayna’s glow was now the brightest and warmest. He ignored the urgent pull of both as best he could. Vyna lay ahead. On the other side of the mountain.
The mountain that wasn’t getting any closer.
“Patience,” he told himself.
Expectation meant nothing. Perseverance was what mattered. Pay attention to the details. Do your best at each moment. Nothing worth the making could be rushed.
His father, Jorg, was fond of such sayings. He’d look up from his bench when Enris muttered with frustration—a frequent occurrence during the year when rapid growth undid all he’d learned and made him doubt his awkward fingers would ever do what he wanted again—and send calm encouragement with the words. A young, proud Enris had been less than grateful. He blushed to remember how quickly he’d slam tight his shields and stomp from the shop, how he’d roam the fields like a storm cloud until an empty stomach brought him home. Ridersel would feed him. Jorg would pretend not to notice he’d ever been gone. Kiric, his older brother, would laugh and ruffle his hair, a loud, warm laugh that somehow took away the day’s sting.
From what Aryl had told him of her brother, Costa, maybe the two had been friends for the time Kiric lived with Yena. The peace of that thought startled him. His brother’s loss had been an open wound for three Harvests; he’d shared Kiric’s despair as well as his death agony.
What had changed? He’d seen Yena for himself. He’d felt a Chooser’s Call. Perhaps, Enris thought with a wry twist of his mouth, he’d needed to grow up himself to forgive Kiric’s leaving him.
Those on Passage had their reasons. His happened to be a little different. He snugged up his Grona scarf. He’d be happy to find shelter from the wind tonight. Even happier to find a way around the appalling mountain that wouldn’t mean forcing his way through the landscape torn by the Oud. After that?
One detail at a time, he told himself.
At last the footing improved. Fewer ditches. In fact, now that he noticed, there were no lines of pale pebbles ahead. The ground beneath his boots was still stony, but these were larger, flat stones, embedded in hard, cracked soil. As good as a road. Enris shrugged his pack from one shoulder and pulled out the blade he’d found. Time for a good look by daylight, now that his feet could look after themselves.