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She tried to meet one pillar’s gaze. Half hypnotized by it, she searched for the flash of intelligence that she knew was there. Numair and Jelly, far up the trail before they realized she wasn’t behind them, returned for her. “I feel it, too,” the man said quietly, drawing her away from the stone. “I don’t know if this place is dangerous, but I will be happy to get out of here all the same.”
For the next two miles the path followed a narrow slot between deep rock cliffs. Numair’s crystal blazed with light, creating shadows within shadows, turning long hollows into mouths that screamed. The sense of eyes on her was almost unbearable. The hairs at the nape of her neck stood on end.
“Can you—put the staff out?” she asked. “I—I think it makes things worse.”
He nodded. The crystal went dark. She took the lead, making bat ears and cat eyes for herself. Numair saw well in the dark; he also had the moon and the rippling battle flares to light the path.
A fresh breeze hit their faces, air from an open place being funneled into a narrow one. Looking up, Daine could see the edges of rock formations. It was nearly dawn. Just ahead, a stone pedestal rose into the air. On top of it, a massive boulder had been cut by the elements into the shape of a question mark.
“Well, that’s fitting,” Numair remarked.
Daine grinned, her mood lightening. Behind the question rock lay open air and, she hoped, an end to those frozen screams.
To their right, at the edge of a cliff, lay a drop; to their left, stone heights reared. They were on the side of a mountain. Sage clung to the pale soil of the shelf; junipers thrust twisted limbs into the sky from rock clefts above their heads. Across the path, in a swath too wide for them to jump, a Chaos vent had overflowed, its shifting yellow, green, and gray liquid a yard from the cliff’s edge. To get around it and back onto the path, they would have to walk that narrow strip of bare earth between rim and air, then pass a massive clump of odd gray stones.
“Now that’s curious.” Numair frowned. “The indigenous stone is lava rock of the brown variety. These are different. They could be granite.” He walked closer, eyebrows knit, halting a few yards from the spill.
Daine strung her bow and put an arrow to the string, then trailed him. “Indi—what?”
“Indigenous,” he replied quietly. “Local.”
“Why you couldn’t just say local . . .?”
He chuckled as the black, sparkling fire of his Gift flowed out of his hand to wind around the gray rocks. “I’m sorry. I’d meant to do better than my university friends, and not upset people by talking in that abstruse fashion. Then my father complained. He asked how did he know that I even went to those expensive teachers when I spoke just as I always had?”
Daine grinned. “You never told me that. I s’pose once you get used to doing it at home, you forget the rest of the time.”
His magical Gift returned to him. “Those rocks seem all right.”
Impulsively, she cast her magic over the stones. A chasm tore through her magical self, just as it had done with the Skinners. At the edges of her perceptions, the world shifted and rolled; she was drowned in odors and sounds like nothing that could, or should, exist in the natural world. She tried to cry out, but dripping hands closed her mouth.
A sharp pain lanced through her ear. The magical assault ended. It was her own hands that had closed her mouth. Tears ran down her cheeks.
“What happened?” Numair had one arm around her as he fumbled for his handkerchief. She took it with gratitude. “You’re white, you’re—”
“They’re touched with chaos, those stones,” she replied, wiping her eyes. “If I try to use my wild magic to look at something like that, it—it pulls me in.”
“You shouldn’t generalize from one experience—”
“But it wasn’t just one. This made me remember the last time!” She finished wiping her face—particularly her mouth, where she’d felt oozing fingers—and told him what had taken place with the Skinners.
“Then how did you break free this time?” Numair demanded.
“Leaf, you bit me, didn’t you?” she asked, raising a hand to her right ear. Tiny spots of blood came off on her fingers.
“Sorry,” the leaf-wearing blot replied, hanging its head.
“Don’t apologize,” she told it. “Do that whenever you think it’s needful. You just saved me from maybe walking off a cliff.” The darking rubbed its head on her finger.
“For now, we shall delay the question of where it got teeth,” Numair remarked. “Let’s get away from here. Can you walk by those rocks, Daine?”
“Chaos mostly gets me through my magic. I just won’t use it. And it’s not like they’re alive, after all.” She looked at the way around the Chaos vent and rocks, and gulped. Three feet was a small margin between her and the long drop. “You go—I’ll come after.”
Resettling his pack, Numair took the lead as confidently as if he had ten yards, not one, in which to move. Once he cleared the vent’s spill, before he passed out of sight behind the rocks, Daine followed. Watching her feet, she skirted the vent, backing away an inch or two as the shifting-colored substance threw a tentacle in her direction.
Numair cried out. She looked up: A gray stone arm was wrapped around him, lifting him off his feet. Rocky, grinding sounds filled the air as the other stones began to move. Fumbling to get her bow up, Daine stepped back to get a cleaner shot.
The rim of the canyon broke under her weight. With a shriek, she dropped, bow tumbling out of her grip.
SEVEN
FALLING
The first tree didn’t even slow Daine down. Branches, gnarled by the fight to get their share of sun in the narrow canyon below, snapped easily when she hit them. She pulled Leaf from her shoulder and tucked it into her middle, curling into a ball around the darking. Panic swamped her; she could think of nothing but the rush of air and the sickening drop.
The second and third trees that she struck held her a bit longer as they raked her back and legs. The quiver caught on something, nearly dislocating her shoulder. She screamed, and hauled her arm out of the strap. The fourth tree was full of thorns. It kept
her for almost a full breath, and ripped her skin.
She clutched at the branches of the fifth tree, thorns or no, missed her grip, and fell into deep, ice-cold water. Down she and Leaf plummeted, dragged by the pack. Yanked along by a heavy current, she dumped her belongings and shot to the surface, choking.
White water swept her along. Battered against the stony riverbed, she fought to reach the shore. At last she was swept into a calm pool, out of the undertow. Gasping and cursing, she dragged herself and Leaf into the shallows, and looked up.
The sky was a distant blue strip. Earth and rock soared on either side of the canyon. Nowhere in those forbidding walls did she see the trail of broken trees that would mark where she’d come down.
“Not a problem,” she told Leaf, slogging for the rocky shore. “I’ll just take hawk shape and find him—once I catch my breath. Are you all right?”
The darking’s leaf hat was soaked; Leaf itself trembled as devoutly as Jelly had. “No,” it told her flatly.
“Me neither. At least we’re alive.” Daine waded onto dry land.
Had she been herself, she would have seen the odd, regular pattern under scattered dirt and stone. Instead, the trap closed on her the moment that she stepped into it.
Heavy, sticky ropes clamped around her. One strand fell over her eyes; when she opened her mouth to cry out, two more dropped over her lips and nose. Suffocating, she tried to claw at them, only to find that her hands and legs were bound. She tossed her head, fighting to breathe.
Whatever covered her nose peeled back. She sucked in air, ordering her lungs to be happy with what came through her nostrils alone. Her instinct was to feel the gag in her mouth and panic. Sweating, she forced herself to calm down, and breathe slowly.
