Page 33 of All the Wandering Light

A mountain pass, deeply shadowed under a dark sky—

I jerked my head up. Beside me, Tem murmured, “What is it?”

I crouched on the edge of a sheer promontory, rolling a handful of pebbles across my palm. Before me stretched a vast valley tucked between jagged mountains, blanketed with drifts of snow a hundred feet deep. A shooting star blazed across the night. I selected a single pebble—it was icy, coated with flecks of frost. Under my gaze, it began to smolder like coal, enveloped by fire that could burn any material, even solid stone.

Once the pebble grew bright enough, I casually tossed it over the cliff. It illuminated the valley as it descended. I ignited another pebble and launched it in the other direction.

Nothing.

I grimaced as I imagined Esha’s reaction when I came back empty-handed again. I stood and leaped off the cliff, my arms dissolving into owls’ wings—

“No.” I wrenched myself free of the vision.

Lusha and Mingma hadn’t noticed—their heads were bent over Lusha’s star charts. Tem’s grip was the only thing holding me upright. His face was bloodless. My hands tingled, as if River’s magic had coursed through them. The flame he had lit seemed to brush against my palm, feather soft.

“What did you see?” Tem said.

“They’ve reached the mountains. But they haven’t found it.” I swallowed against the nausea rising in my throat. “He—he’s still searching.”

Tem’s eyes narrowed. “How much time do we have?”

I shook my head. There had been a moment of freefall, before River transformed, and I felt that sensation now.

“Very little,” I said.

Eleven

River

THE LANDSCAPE GREW starker the farther they traveled. Trees gave way to snowy plains scoured by wind that stirred up an omnipresent, icy haze. Now they were in the foothills of the Ash Mountains, farther north than River had ever been as Royal Explorer.

It was not for nothing that the Ashes were called the twilight mountains. The stories of a land of perpetual night were exaggerated, but it was still a strange place. Dawn and dusk were longer here, and the stars never faded completely—River could see them now, faint behind the cerulean sky. It was as if the spirits that had once haunted the place had cast a net and drawn the stars closer.

The Ashes themselves were smaller than either the Aryas or the Drakkar Mountains to the west. But they were sharper, wilder, the winds having weathered them to dramatic points of snowy rock. They rose like the tines of a comb, their slopes close to sheer. In the foothills, subterranean springs melted the snow, creating pools of star-strewn water brushed with clouds of fog. It was a world of sky, above and below.

Though he would never admit it to Esha, River was enjoying himself. He sat atop one of the hills, examining the vertical terrain before him, which bristled with rock and ice. He felt the same stirring of excitement he always had when he visited a new place as Royal Explorer. It was a relief to be away from the Nightwood. River had forgotten how much he hated it.

He was going to find the star. He could feel it in his bones, a pulse of anticipation. He didn’t care much about the star’s mysterious powers—mostly, he just felt a juvenile urge to hold in his hands something that had eluded hundreds of explorers before him.

He held a bundle of string, twisted and stretched to form a pattern. He let the wind loosen several strands, and a new picture emerged.

“I don’t know why you bother with that,” came a voice behind him.

His concentration shattered. Without turning, he said, “What do you want, Thorn?”

“The same thing I wanted yesterday.” He sat beside River, carefully arranging his chuba. “We’re not going to find the star if you keep wasting time worrying about the weather.” He motioned to the divining strings.

“It’s more than that,” River said. “You should know. Sky used to read them.”

Thorn shrugged. Suppressing a sigh, River said, “They pick up disturbances in the atmosphere. Storms. Magic. Stars falling out of the sky.”

River pulled a small telescope from his pocket—a gift from the emperor, and one of the few things he had kept from his former life. He scanned the mountains. After a welcome moment of silence, Thorn gave a loud yawn.

“What does River Shara, Royal Explorer, need with divination?” His voice was lazy. “What about those celebrated instincts?”

River twisted the strings once more around his fingers. Thorn gave him a sweeping look, taking in his well-worn boots and tahrskin chuba, which, for reasons River didn’t fully understand, he was still wearing. The other witches, with the exception of Thorn, were barefoot and cloaked in rags. Thorn had made several barbed remarks about River’s human appearance, despite the fact that he was dressed in a similar manner. It didn’t trouble River, for he understood the source of Thorn’s antipathy, which was not disgust, but envy. He had long been fascinated by the pomp and finery of the emperor’s court, and was known to kidnap merchants from the Three Cities who strayed close to the Nightwood—not to torment them, though he no doubt enjoyed that as well, but to add their wares to his collection of trinkets.

There was a hardness in Thorn’s eyes, though he still smiled his languid smile as he stood. In his tall, polished boots and black chuba, he could have been a visiting aristocrat in the emperor’s court. “My lord dislikes being kept waiting. Why is this taking so long?”