Page 40 of All the Wandering Light

“No, I—” I sagged forward as the pain overwhelmed me, a sharp spear. It was the second time I had felt it in as many moments—the first through River’s eyes; the second through my own. For a moment, I could almost see the invisible thread connecting us—a thread made of fire and pain.

There is much more, Azar-at said. Would you like to see? I could show you River’s time as Royal Explorer, his triumphs and failures.

There was a different note in the creature’s voice, an eagerness I had never heard before. It reminded me of how Azar-at had spoken of River before. As if it regretted his leaving. Almost as if it missed him.

“Azar-at,” I said slowly, “do you—do you wish you were still with River?”

Its tail stopped wagging. There was an odd sort of pause.

River was different from the others, it said finally. He did not wither and fade as they did. Eventually, they came to curse me. Then they forgot who I was.

I was shivering. “And River never did.”

River left, Azar-at said.

The creature’s eyes burned, as unreadable as ever. It was madness, I told myself, to imagine that there was anything like sorrow there. To see Azar-at as some sort of dog abandoned by its owner. It might look like a wolf, but it was anything but. It was ancient, its power vast as the darkness beyond a campfire. The creature’s tail was wagging again.

Ragtooth sinuously interposed himself between me and Azar-at, who was still too close. He snapped at Azar-at’s leg. To my astonishment, the fire demon fell back a step. Ragtooth gave a satisfied growl and placed a paw upon my knee.

I can show you more, Kamzin, the fire demon said.

“That isn’t what I want,” I said. “And you know it.” My anger flared and then faded, leaving behind that eerie, cold feeling. My thoughts were full of what I had just seen—it was too much. River’s family, the Nightwood. How his mother had looked at him, as if in that moment she had been unable to recognize her youngest son. With her height and uncanny grace, she would have been a fearsome person to encounter, in another state of mind. As it was, there had been something childlike about her. Childlike and broken.

River had said she had died a year ago. He would have been at the emperor’s court, or roaming the wilderness far from the Nightwood. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose someone like that. When my mother had died, I had been with her, along with Lusha and Father. To have been far away, unable to say good-bye—

But why was I wondering about any of this? It didn’t matter what River felt, then or now. What mattered was learning his plans.

Azar-at had vanished. I looked in all directions, but saw not even a hint of its glowing eyes.

I thought of River perched at the edge of the stream. He might have had regrets about what he was doing, but he hadn’t let those regrets interfere with his plans.

I rose. I would load our supplies onto the yak and go over the maps again with Mingma. We had to reach the star first—the Empire would fall if we didn’t. But that thought, over the last few days, had grown increasingly tangled up with something else: a desire to beat River, as if we were back in the Aryas, playing a game of Shadow. I didn’t fully understand it—this wasn’t about me and River. Yet part of me couldn’t stop thinking about how satisfying it would be to reach the star first, and be gone before he even knew I was there.

Motioning to Ragtooth, I turned my back on the water and hurried back to camp.

Thirteen

Mara

FINDING HIS WAY to Jangsa required neither map nor compass. He simply followed the smoke.

The plume towered before him. Sometimes he was breathing it, depending on the direction of the wind, and his throat burned. Witch fire had a peculiar scent—or perhaps it was not the fire itself, but the materials it burned. Things that had no business burning—soil and rock and waterlogged wood. Mara moved quickly, stopping for only a few hours each night to sleep. As he neared the foothills of Mount Zerza, the single black plume became three, then a dozen. More. Mara clambered to the top of a frost-rimed hill, sweating in the midday sun. There he had his first view of the village.

What remained of it.

He had come to survey the damage and offer assistance on his way to the emperor’s court, but Mara guessed there were few left to assist. Before him was a landscape of ash and smoke. He would not have thought there had been a village here, but traces of it lay like a skeleton halfway unearthed. The buildings that dotted the lower slopes of snowcapped Zerza were scorched and roofless. Where once there had been green—grass or crops or the stunted poplars that grew at this altitude—now there was only burned earth. The fires were out, but still the village wept black into the blue purity of the sky.

Mara had never visited Jangsa. Kamzin had described it in almost fantastical terms—a village of old stone huts slowly sinking into the green hillside, where spirits were worshipped obsessively by furtive-eyed villagers. For his part, Mara thought it must have been a lowly place, judging by its size, and no wonder—there could be little industry in an isolated village like this. His father, who had made his fortune in the dye trade, would have thought it a place not even worth marking on a trading route.

The towers of black smoke rising off the ruined village made for such an unearthly sight that Mara’s fingers itched for his charcoal and parchment. He paused to jot down a few observations, along with a cursory sketch he would tidy later.

“You there,” he said to the first villager he saw, a stocky man with an ash-smeared face dragging a cart of blankets. “I’ve come on an expedition from the Three Cities. The emperor will want a full report of this attack. I wish to speak with your elder—does he live?”

The man stared at him. He seemed to put his full effort into the action, lowering the cart to the ground and facing Mara.

“I’m sorry for your losses,” Mara said, “but I have little time.”

The man continued to stare. After a long, uncomfortable moment, he ducked into one of the scorched dwellings. Two voices murmured within.