"It will be your temporary pass," Mor said, "although the mark itself will not be temporary. You may still fail us, Prince Dariel, but I've been told to give you the time and freedom to be among us. It's a chance not to fail." After a pause, she added, "I hope you don't."
Dariel nodded. Never a skilled liar, it was the best he could do to express his resolve. In truth, he had accepted the mission Mor offered him for reasons of his own. Yes, he would be part of a small team sent to steal a Lothan Aklun boat, a soul vessel. One had been found tied up at the southern end of the warehouse district. The league had not yet noticed it, probably because a series of skerries-small, rocky islands-blocked the area from the open ocean. Dariel would prove he was the raider he claimed to have been. He would captain the vessel. He would pilot it south to a marsh area called Sumerled, where they would ground the boat and set fire to it, thereby denying it to the league and-even more important-freeing the souls that had been bound to power it.
Dariel had agreed to all of this readily enough. To himself, he swore that if he got the chance, he would flee in the cutter. He had no idea if he could really make the Lothan Aklun ship work, and he realized the People themselves knew so little about the sea that they assumed things about his knowledge that they shouldn't have. But so be it. He would try. He would pilot across the Gray Slopes in it if he had to or follow the coastline north and pick his way through the Ice Fields. He would work out the details later, but this might be his best chance at getting home. He had to grasp it if he could.
"What totem would you take?" Mor asked, sorting through the instruments on a small table.
"I will take what you feel I deserve," he said.
"I don't know what you deserve."
"If it was my choice I would wear the face of the Shivith. Spots, like yours."
"You jest," she said, glancing up at him.
"No." Dariel said. He knew it sounded strange, and he knew people would stare at him back in the Known World, but this he could answer truthfully. "I find the effect quite pleasing. I'm not ready for whiskers just yet, thanks. Some spots, though-if they look similar to yours-might be interesting. But, as I said, if that offends you, choose another totem. Or… someone else could do this."
Instead of looking at him, Mor closed her eyes and absorbed his choice within herself. "As you wish. And, no, I'll do it." She lifted the tattooing needle like a stylus in one hand and turned to face him, a tiny bowl of black ash ink pinched in the fingers of her other hand. "This will hurt, but pain is transitory. Only our legacy endures. Come, sit here before me. This will take a while."
Dariel did as she asked. She was right, of course. It did hurt. And it did take a long time. But every painful moment of it was tempered by the nearness of Mor's body, by the scent of her and the fleeting moments when her elbow or wrist, hip or breast brushed against him. He tried to remember Wren, but it was hard. When he pictured Wren's face, he saw it overlaid with tattoos, indistinguishable from Mor's. They were both from northern Candovia, after all. By the Giver, he could not tell them apart anymore.
"I'm sorry," he whispered as she worked, "about… the People not being able to have children. I didn't know. We should have asked. I'm so sorry we didn't. If we had, I swear to you things would have been different."
By the way she paused it was clear to Dariel that Mor was considering what he said. Her only answer, though, was to continue piercing his flesh.
"There," she eventually said. She picked up the bloodstained towel she had used throughout the procedure, wet it in some liquid, and used it to clean his face. Despite himself, Dariel flinched at each touch: the liquid stung. She stepped back from him, setting down the needle of torture and contemplating her work. She smiled.
"So you're amused?" he asked.
She laughed into the back of her hand, trying to squelch it. Holding up a mirror, she said, "Perhaps you should see yourself. See how you look, now and forever."
Dariel reached out and accepted the mirror. He turned it toward his face. He expected to see a stranger staring back at him. A beast, perhaps. Something strange and perhaps frightening. He expected-despite the curious anticipation he felt-to be frightened by what he saw and sickened by the permanence of it. He was not. In fact…
"What are you thinking, Akaran?" Mor asked.
"That I make a fine Shivith," he said, speaking his thought aloud.
Mor made a sound low in her throat. "We'll see."
Late the next afternoon, he moved as one of a group of ten. Unbound completely now, he followed Skylene's slim form through the maze of subterranean passageways that had been his home for weeks. This time he was not being shifted to another cell. This time they came to a door, opened it, and stepped outside.
At first his eyes shot across the field beside them. It had been a long time since he had taken in the open world from ground level. The sky hung ominously huge above them. Rows of strange vegetables-bushes about a man's height that bristled with long arms, each ending in a fist-sized bud of some sort-seemed to be marching toward him in military lines. Blinking, it took him a moment to confirm that they were, in fact, stationary, but a moment after that he detected movement coming from another quadrant.
The wall above him was alive with a sickening, slithering, unnatural motion. The first sight of it made Dariel's skin crawl. He stopped and stared up at-Well, it was hard for him to say at what. The entirety of the long, high structure seethed with limbs. They were thorny tentacles, many ten or fifteen feet long, looking like the underbellies of a thousand giant octopuses, reaching out with arms lit greenish orange by the dying day's light. For a breathless moment Dariel thought them creatures that might rush down toward him, snatch him up, and tear him to pieces.
"What are those?" Dariel asked.
Tunnel followed his eyes and took in the wall, unimpressed. "Plants," he said. "You don't have plants over there?"
"Not like those," Dariel said.
"Don't worry." Tunnel nudged him on the shoulder. "They won't eat you. Plants in the inland… they may eat you, but not these ones. Come."
They moved on along the wall, undisturbed by the writhing limbs. Dariel stayed close, trying to match the other's composure. Failing at it.
They cut around buildings and ran through fields and climbed, for a time, over rooftops. Dariel had to keep his focus on his progress, on the placement of his feet and hands and on keeping up with the others, but he took in the panorama that was Avina in quick glimpses. Enormous. Never ending, it seemed. Buildings jutting up into the distance.
Tunnel had sworn to him that Ushen Brae was a land of mountains that rose up straight out of great lakes, of jungles that stretched from horizon to horizon, with insects the size of antoks and flightless birds that hunted the Free People in packs like wolves, of arctic regions thronging with snow lions and white bears. There were creatures out there so fierce that the Auldek feared them, beasts with massive jaws or stinging parts that could drain life after life out of them. These animals, he claimed, were the reason that the Auldek built coastal cities even though they turned their back to the sea. Tunnel admitted he had never seen any of these wonders or horrors himself, but he hoped to one day.