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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."
Akashia gave him a sharp-edged glower. "He was sitting here, in the ruins, waiting for Grandmother when she arrived. He confessed everything. He'd talked to the elves; he knew everything we knew. He was afraid you'd persuade us to take the zarneeka to Urik, or steal it yourself, if you couldn't. He decided to take matters into his own hands. He hates you, Pavek. Hates you with a passion that blinds him to everything else. He thought he was the only one who could stop you."
"But he stopped you instead," Pavek snorted with irony and earned himself another bitter look.
"We're right, Pavek, and you're wrong. You're all wrong: both of you and Ruari, as well."
"The guardian disagrees."
"This was Ruari's doing: his hate, his blindness."
"Where is he? This time I do want to talk to him."
"I don't know." Akashia flinched toward Telhami as she turned away.
Pavek had learned the language of guilt and anxiety before he left the orphanage. It was an early, essential part of a templar's education. Instructors made certain their students learned to read the truth on the faces around them, and-if they were wise or clever-to hide their own emotions behind an enigmatic, intimidating sneer. Pavek wore a templar sneer when he cast a shadow over Telhami and called her name.
The instructors had never claimed he was wise or clever. They'd repeatedly said he was a fool who didn't know when to keep his big mouth shut.
"Where'd you send Ruari?" he demanded.
