No, worse than watched. Hated. Feared.
Around her, the ex-Semoian spirits were filling the trees. The feeling wasn’t coming from them. She tried to pinpoint the source ofwrongnessthat pervaded the air. Around her, the spirits chattered and chittered and chirped as they burrowed into the ground, grew new branches onto the trees, and dusted the leaves with frost.
Then it dawned on her. What she felt was the spirits of Aratay pouring toward them. Agitated. Angry.
“We can’t stay here,” Naelin said, louder.
Ven stopped.
Her spirits noticed the Aratayian spirits surrounding them. She felt her spirits press closer to her, felt their anger shift outward, and felt them begin to sink into the land beneath them. Quickly, Ven unhooked the hammocks and tossed the supplies onto the nearest spirit that could fly—a black serpent with iridescent dragonfly wings. Naelin climbed onto a water spirit shaped like a swan.
Keep moving, Naelin ordered the spirits.
The spirits resisted—they liked this land, they wanted to stay, reshape the earth, grow the trees, play in the breeze.Not yours, she told them firmly.We can’t stay.
It was worse than dragging reluctant children on a walk, because the spirits itched to fight. She felt them snap quickly from exhaustion to rage, and they wanted to tear, rip, rend, destroy.No. Come. Fly, run, crawl.
Follow me.
She felt the haze of all the memories burn away, like fog in the sun, and she focused on the single command, guiding her spirit up higher and higher above the canopy.
Naelin drove them across Aratay as the spirits of the forest pursued them. When one of her spirits stopped to snap at a tree spirit, she wrapped her mind around it and propelled it forward. She felt sweat dampen her back and her hands as she clutched the feathers in her spirit’s neck. It bucked beneath her—it too wanted to spin around andfight, fight, fight.
Come, she told it. And while it obeyed, the command seemed to drain her. She was pushing the spirits—and herself—too hard. Already, lights began dancing in front of her eyes...
“We won’t make it!” Ven shouted. His spirit was weakening beneath him. She felt it as it struggled to keep pumping its wings. She tried to will it to stay aloft, but even if she weren’t completely wiped, she couldn’t make a spirit suddenly find strength it didn’t have. “It’s too far to the untamed lands! Naelin, we’ll have to stop!”
But if they stopped, the spirits would fight, and she couldn’t let them tear apart Aratay. Shewouldn’t. Which meant they needed someplace safe to stop. Somewhere the spirits wouldn’t attack those of Aratay. Somewhere they could rest. Somewhere...
And then she remembered the whole reason these spirits followed her in the first place: the barren patches. Her little army could rest safely within one of the dead zones.
She reached with her mind and, instead of looking for spirits, looked for theabsenceof spirits. She felt one, not far, a small circle of emptiness within the trees.
There, she told the spirits.
They streamed toward it.
She felt the spirits funnel into the barren circle, and she guided her swan in, diving through a swarm of spirits. She saw the dark forest ringing them, hazy through the bodies of so many spirits. She felt them continue to pour into the tiny space.
The swan landed on the ground, and she slid off it. Her knees buckled and she sank to the ground. Her palms touched the earth. The soil felt strange, dry and dead, and the air too tasted almost metallic. Her wild earth spirits burrowed happily into the earth, and her sense of it began to change as they filled it, bringing it back to life, bonding with it—
No, it is not yours,she cut them off sharply.
Confused, they halted.
The spirits couldn’t bond to this land—she’d never be able to bring them out of Renthia into the untamed lands if they did. And besides, there were too many of them for such a constricted space.
Only tonight, she told them.Not ours.
“Can we stay here?” Ven asked.
“I don’t know,” Naelin said. “Yes. But we can’t stay long. The spirits... they want...” She lost track of the rest of the sentence as the thoughts of the spirits pulled her into their minds again.
They wanted to stay.
They wanted land.
They wanted sky.
