The words stopped flowing as suddenly as they had begun. His voice, which had risen to an impassioned bellow, went quiet His tongue lay lifeless on the floor of his mouth. There wasn't another mortal sound in the hut. All eyes were on him, even Akashia's. All mouths gaped silently open, even Telhami's.
And he realized, as his knees went liquid, that he was not alone. The guardian's essence had flowed through him, as it flowed through Akashia when she healed or Telhami when she flew invisibly from one part of Quraite to another. The guardian had shaped the words he, himself, had chosen to speak. The guardian had lent him an eloquence and power that could not be ignored.
He tried again to speak, to offer an explanation, an excuse for what had happened, but the guardian was finished with him. Its essence drained away, swirling down his legs like wind and water. Yohan's fist, still clamped over his shirt, was a necessary support.
"I'm-I'm not-I'm finished," he stammered before Yohan reeled him in.
"He speaks well for me," someone whose face Pavek couldn't see, whose voice he didn't recognize, announced to the others.
Murmured harmony rippled through the hut, around and behind him, but not in front of him, where neither Telhami nor Akashia appeared pleased.
"Zvain-" Pavek began haltingly, seeking words that would explain how ordinary the boy was in the brutal world of Urik, so different from Quraite.
"Is doomed," Telhami concluded, and it seemed, from the set of her spine and the bright intensity of her eyes, that the guardian flowed with her, now. "There's nothing anyone can do for him. We must think about those who will survive. They're the future. We will not burn our zarneeka bushes for their sakes. We will not cower here, hiding from enemies we have not measured for ourselves. We will return to Urik. We will study this poison, Laq, and this High Templar and his minions. And we will thwart his ambitions without-"
Suddenly, Telhami fell, clutching her gut and nearly tumbling from her platform. Akashia was right there, panic in her face and voice, but not in the commands she shouted, "Clear a path! Let the air in! Fetch water!" nor was it in her arms as she cradled the woman she revered as Grandmother.
Pavek retreated with the others, making room for the breezes and for the druid dashed for the well with a bowl in his hands. He crowded against Yohan, whose brawny arm shivered against his back. It seemed clear, if ominous, to a templar: Quraite's guardian did not approve of Telhami's plan and Quraite's guardian was more powerful than any living druid. Perhaps, as Yohan claimed, the guardian had ignored the community's prior disobedience, as Hamanu tolerated an occasional curse against his name and as slaveowners endured their living property's sullen insolence; but it wasn't ignoring disobedience this time.
Before the water arrived, a flickering light began to radiate across Telhami's body. Swiftly, the soft yellow light thickened until Akashia's arms could not be seen through the dazzle.
She's dying, Pavek thought. Quraite's claiming her, as it claimed the bones in her grove. For a heartbeat he wondered if the guardian's appetite would be sated with the old woman, or if it would feed on additional disobedience, Akashia's disobedience. Then the radiance collapsed, and coherent thought fled his mind.
Dazed and blinking, but otherwise unharmed, Akashia sat empty-handed in the dusty sunlight of an Athasian day.
"She's gone," someone whispered, a fanner by the look of her.
"Gone," echoed from the other side of the room, more frantic as the instant of disbelief yielded to grief and unbearable emptiness.
"Grandmother's gone!" erupted from several mouths, several hearts-bereavement no longer limited to the farmers.
The unimaginable had happened. The unthinkable demanded immediate attention. Akashia stood up, pale and shaken, but apparently aware of her responsibilities. Pavek felt himself grow calmer, felt his feet root themselves in the dirt again as she raised her hands to summon the guardian and read its essence. In the company of so many druids, in such extraordinary circumstances, he felt it, too, though he lacked the wisdom and experience to interpret the message, whipping through his body and his mind.
"Not gone," Akashia announced after a moment, emphasizing finality and rejecting it at the same time. "She's gone to the stowaway. The stowaway's attacked. The stowaway's breached! She seeks. She finds...."
With her voice trailing off into a sob, Akashia fled the hut. The rest followed, farmer and druid alike, her words having evidently had more meaning to them than they'd had to him. He guessed, but did not know.
He caught Yohan's arm. "What stowaway?" he asked as dwarf asked: "Who breached it?"
They glowered, each waiting for the other to answer first, and listening as alarm raced through the village. Quraiters who had not been included in the meeting ran past the open door, all headed for the southeast path: the path by which Pavek had entered Quraite and that he had not explored since, because the salt plain encroached closest there.
"Who?" Yohan demanded, breaking loose from Pavek's grip.
"No idea," Pavek insisted with a shrug.
He'd felt something, and that was more than Yohan had possibly done, but that was all, and that was completely gone now. He stood in the doorway. Only a few weanling children remained in the common, tended by a few adults whose southeasterly pointing faces proclaimed that they'd rather be somewhere else.
"What's the stowaway? If I knew that-maybe-"
Yohan pressed behind him in the doorway. "Where they store the zarneeka seeds to ripen and age under the ground." He shouldered past and started walking.
There was no one left to give him an order, so he fell in step a few paces behind. The shimmering white expanse of the salt wastes was visible from the far side of the tree ring around the village. A few clumps of rock and scraggly bushes dotted the wilderness. No druid could nurture a grove this close to the Sun's Fist. But Yohan kept going, following Quraiters strung out in a sparse line until they were indistinguishable from the wilderness itself.
They gathered in a place without trees or water, where the salt flats seemed a bit closer and the village behind them was reduced to a line of half-sized trees. Pavek, at the rear of the gathering, was as ignorant as he'd been at the hut. But the crowd parted for him-or it parted for Yohan-and he was able to flow to the center in the dwarfs wake.
Telhami sat on an unremarkable stone beside a shallow, round, and apparently empty hole. She sifted gritty dirt through the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other. Her neck was bent deeply: Pavek remembered that sunlight hurt her eyes, and remembered her broad-brimmed, veiled hat hanging in its place by the door. He wished he'd thought to bring it with him; a foolish, sentimental wish since, when he left the hut, he hadn't known where he was going.
A downcast Akashia approached them. "Ruari," she whispered to Yohan, loudly enough for Pavek to hear. The dwarf spat into the yellow-flecked ground.
"Can't be," he countered. "That doesn't square with Telhami collapsing right when she did. The moment was too perfect. You were going to take zarneeka to Urik; now you can't. Ruari couldn't be eavesdropping and undermining at the same time. Don't blame the half-wit scum just because your guardian got the upper hand."