Page 119 of Earthbound

‘What now?’ Yeeran asked.

‘We wait,’ Jay said.

Seconds felt like hours, and minutes felt like days. Sometimes Furi’s breath would rasp in her throat and Yeeran would look up, half hopeful, half fearful. Was this a seizure that could end her life? Or was she coming round?

But then she would settle back to stillness. Two hours after she had been given the cure Yeeran thought that her limbs looked less blue than they had, the colour in her cheeks less sallow.

Or am I imagining things?

You are not, she has improved; she smells less sick than she did, Pila said. She lay with her back against Amnan, giving him comfort.

An hour later, Furi began to mumble.

‘I’m here,’ Yeeran said, leaning close.

The queen still couldn’t open her eyes, but her lips could form the faintest of words. ‘Our love will never be ash,’ she whispered.

Then Furi’s voice rang out clearer: ‘Our fire is endless. It is a star, burning in the sky.’

For the first time that day, Yeeran sobbed.

Furi was going to live.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Furi

‘Put me down, Yeeran,’ Furi whispered. She tried to put strength into her voice, but it still came out a wisp.

Yeeran only gripped her harder. ‘I’ll put you down when we get into the woodland.’

Furi let her head loll back with a sigh. Yeeran was being insufferable. It had been three weeks since she had taken the cure and still Yeeran refused to allow Amnan to carry her. ‘In case you fall from his back,’ she said, and so Yeeran had cradled Furi against her chest all the way through the city.

‘We’re nearly there, can you see the top of the palace spire?’

Furi didn’t reward Yeeran’s patronising tone with an answer. She may be being carried like a babe, but a child she was not.

They entered the woodland and Furi breathed in the scent of the sweet magnolia blossoms. It masked the smell of the knellsheen mushrooms that Rayan had grown all over the city to kill the locusts. Their spores left a tangy coating on her tongue and she was glad to be rid of it temporarily. She looked up to the bough above, the blushing flowers a beautiful sight to behold.

‘The flowers have bloomed since I was gone,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Yeeran said, her voice strangely neutral.

It was then that Furi dropped her gaze.

She choked on her breath.

Nearly all of the Royal Woodland was gone.

The locusts had stripped most of the trees of their leaves. Ferns, shrubs, grasses, had all been eaten to the root. Yeeran noticed the look on her face.

‘Rayan has prioritised the fields; he spends every day out there healing as much of the land as he can.’

‘Put me down, Yeeran.’ She fortified her voice with as much command as possible.

Yeeran hesitated only briefly before setting Furi down.

As soon as her feet touched the soil, she sank to the ground–a controlled fall. Her legs still wouldn’t do what she told them to. But for what she had in mind, she didn’t need them.