Twilight had little hold on this place. Day came suddenly, without the intervening solace of dawn. Liath woke when light brushed her face, and she watched as the old sorcerer’s expression passed from trance to waking in a transition so smooth that it was imperceptible. He rose and stretched the stiffness out of his limbs as she sat up, checking to see that her bow was ready and arrows laid out. Her sword lay within easy reach, and she always slept with her knife tucked in its sheath at her belt.
“Go to the stream,” he said. “Follow the flower trail to the watchtower. Do not come out unless you hear me call to you, nor should you wander, lest others come upon you. Remember to take care, and do nothing to cut yourself or let any blood fall.” He began to walk away, paused, and called to her over his shoulder. “Make good use of the time! You have not yet mastered the tasks I set you.”
That these tasks were tedious beyond measure was evidently part of the training. She belted on her sword and fastened her quiver over her shoulders. She had become accustomed to fasting for a good while after she woke; it helped stave off hunger. She took the water jug with her, slung over her shoulder by a rope tied to its handles.
As she walked down the path, she noted as always how parched the ground was. The needles on the pine trees were dry, and perhaps a quarter were turning brown, dying. Few other trees were hardy enough to survive here: white oak, olive, and, increasingly, silver pine. Where dead trees had fallen, carob grew up, shadowing buckthorn, clematis, and spiny grass. She never saw any rodents. Despite the isolation of their living circumstances, she had seen no deer, aurochs, wolves, or bears—none of the great beasts that roamed plentifully through the ancient forests of Earth. Only rarely did she hear birds or see their fluttering flight in the withered branches.
The land was dying.
“I am dying,” she whispered into the silence.
How else could she explain the calm, the sense of relief, she’d fallen into since she had arrived in the country of the Aoi? Maybe it was only numbness. It was easier not to feel than to confront all the events that had led her to this place. Was her heart as stony as Anne’s, who had said: “We cannot let affection cloud our judgment”?
With these words, Anne had justified the murder of her husband. No faceless enemy had summoned and commanded the spirit of air that had killed Bernard. His own wife, the mother of his child, had done so.
Anne had betrayed Da, and she had betrayed Liath not just by killing Da without a scrap of remorse but by making it clear that she expected Liath to behave in exactly the same way.
And hadn’t Liath abandoned her own husband and child? She had not crossed through the burning stone of her own volition, but once here, in the land of the Aoi, she had had a choice: to stay and learn with the old sorcerer, or to return to Sanglant and Blessing.
Hadn’t she also let judgment override affection? Hadn’t she chosen knowledge over love? Hadn’t it been easy to do so?
“I’m no use to Sanglant or to anyone until I master my own power,” she muttered. “I can’t avenge Da until I know what I am.”
Her words fled on the silent air and vanished like ghosts into the eerie silence of the drought-stricken land. Even the rage she’d nurtured toward Anne since the moment she’d discovered the truth about Da’s death felt cold and lifeless now, like a clay statue clumsily formed.
With a sigh, she walked on.
The stream had once been a small river. She picked her way over river rocks coated with a white rime of dried scum, until she reached the narrow channel that was all that remained of the watercourse. Water trickled over rocks, sluicing down from highlands glimpsed beyond the sparse forest cover. She knelt to fill the pot, stoppered it carefully. In this land, water was more precious than gold.
Holding the full vessel hard against one hip, she leaped from stone to stone over the stream to its other side. Algae lay exposed in intricate patterns like green paint flaking off the river stones. Grass had invaded the old riverbed, but even it was turning brown. Climbing the steep bank, she found herself at a fork in the path. To the right the path cut through a thicket of chestnut that hugged the shore before, beyond the chestnut grove, beginning a precipitous climb to higher ground. To the left lay a remarkable trail through a low-lying meadow lush with the most astoundingly beautiful flowers: lavender, yellow rue, blood-red poppies, delicate gillyvor, fat peonies, pale dog roses, vivid marigolds, banks of irises like earthbound rainbows, all intermixed with a scattering of urgently blue cornflowers.
This flowery trail wound up away from the river like a dream, unheralded, unexpected, and unspeakably splendid in a land so faded to browns and leached-out golds. It was difficult not to linger in this oasis of color, and she did for a while, but eventually she had to move on.