Page 43 of All the Wandering Light

Lusha was doubting herself.

It was rare, but I’d witnessed it before—when Father fell ill three winters ago; when torrential rains hit Azmiri, drowning most of the crops. Each time, she had confined herself to the observatory, barely speaking to anyone, trying to glean the way forward from the stars.

Still, her obsessiveness now went beyond anything I recognized. Despite our grueling journey, Lusha insisted on staying up late into the night, poring over the charts and maps, checking and rechecking her calculations. The shadows under her eyes were so dark they looked like bruises. If anyone interrupted her with a question, she bit their head off—particularly if the interrupter was me. Her iciness toward me had not thawed—if anything, it had deepened.

I hunched into my chuba, frustrated. We needed to find the star soon—every hour we delayed was an hour that brought the witches closer to finding it themselves. Tem seemed occupied with thoughts of his own, absently running his thumb over the kinnika. I looked instinctively for Ragtooth, but he had vanished. I didn’t normally worry about Ragtooth’s whereabouts, but given the weather, it made me uneasy.

It was a bleak night. Despite my exhaustion, I could only doze, starting awake during the loudest gusts. My dreams were flashes haunted by fiangul. Judging by the absence of Tem’s snores, he was having the same difficulties I was. I distracted myself by examining the wear on my boots, running my hands over them in the darkness. In a place like this, even the smallest thing could make the difference between survival and death. The left heel was loosening, which would affect my balance in a minute but potentially dangerous way. I focused my thoughts, summoning Azar-at’s power, and the flaw vanished.

I let out a quiet gasp. The pain this time had felt like a paper cut—sharp and stinging. I felt a wave of unease—it had never felt like that.

About an hour before dawn, the winds died. I rose and left the tent.

Even with the cold stinging my face, I felt calmer outside—more at home among the elements than I had in the relative comfort of the tent. The sky was clear, the stars blazing. I lit a fire in a crevice in the rock, using only a few small pieces of wood. Tem had mastered a spell to make wood burn more slowly—the fire licked at it just as hungrily, but each piece took hours to turn to ash. I settled on the snow. We were partly protected here, tucked into an amphitheater in the mountainside.

Mingma sat across from me, making me jump a foot in the air. He had a habit of doing that, merely appearing in your field of view with none of the customary warnings, such as footsteps or rustling clothes. “Sorry,” he said.

I tried to calm my breathing. “Where do you go, when you disappear like that?”

“Somewhere . . . else,” he said. “I can’t always be with you. It’s too tiring. But I try not to stay away for long.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t realized that the expedition had been difficult for Mingma too. He hadn’t spoken one word of complaint.

“This was always my favorite time,” he said. “The moment before dawn.”

I gazed at the eastern horizon. A star clung to it, twinkling defiantly against the gathering light. “I always preferred the opposite. Just after sunset, when everything is violet and black, and the stars are just starting to show.”

He smiled. He was handsome when he smiled—it lightened the brooding set of his eyebrows and gave his eyes a teasing light. “That’s not surprising.”

“Why?”

“Night is when wild animals prowl the shadows,” he said. “When criminals go about their work, and dark creatures stir. Night is danger. That suits you.”

I shivered. I heard the Elder of Jangsa’s voice in my mind again—he had said something similar. It felt like a very long time ago now—a different time. Or had I been different? I added another scrap of wood to the fire, wondering absently if Mingma could feel its warmth.

“I don’t think it does,” I said. “I’m just as frightened as anyone else. If we can’t find the star before the witches do, my village could be destroyed. I don’t relish the thought of the people I love being in danger.”

“I’m not saying you do. But it does seem that, wherever danger happens to be, you’re always there with it.” He turned back to the horizon. “I led three expeditions to these lands. The twilight mountains, they’re called. I call them a great bother. Never could work out a way through. That’s the most frustrating thing an explorer can encounter.”

“What?”

He looked at me. “Walls.”

I tugged absently at a pebble poking up through the snow. “I used to think that. I used to think that if I could just get away from Azmiri, if the emperor would hire me as an explorer, I would be happy. That it would be all I needed. But I don’t believe that anymore.”

“Why?”

I swallowed. I saw Aimo’s face. Norbu’s. Dargye’s. I felt the pain of River’s betrayal. I had helped the witches achieve their goal, and Azmiri could be destroyed because of it.

“Because it’s all gone wrong,” I said. “All I’ve found out here is death.”

“Well, death is a given,” Mingma said in a conversational tone. “It’s everywhere, in so many varieties. My mother was killed on a hunting expedition—a friend put an arrow in her back while aiming for a pheasant. Unfortunate business. My father used to say that if she had stayed home that day, she would still be alive. But my mother loved hunting. Choosing to lock yourself up in a life that doesn’t suit you is its own sort of death, wouldn’t you say?”

I tossed the pebble away. “But what if the choices you make hurt others?”

Mingma shook his head. He stretched his hands out to the flames, answering my earlier, unspoken question. “I asked myself the same thing. Up on that mountain. I led fourteen men and women to Raksha, didn’t I?”

I gazed at him. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like, trapped in a forsaken place like that, along with all those he’d led to their deaths. It was too ghastly to consider—and yet it had been Mingma’s lot for fifty years.