Page 47 of All the Wandering Light

Tem was watching me. We were close, our heads together. For a moment, he seemed about to lean toward me—but then he drew away, flushing.

“We don’t have to talk about this now.” He seemed to force a smile. “What did you see?”

I shook my head. Tem didn’t need to ask what I meant—my expression said it clearly enough. Nothing.

Something nagged at me. “Where’s the dragon?”

Tem gave a start. “She was asleep on my shoulder when I fell.”

In unison, we scrambled to the edge. Far below and to the west, a light gleamed against the slope of the mountain.

No. Not one light—two.

I squinted. One of the lights was pale blue and seemed to be hovering in midair, fluttering back and forth. The other was a tiny gleam. I would have mistaken it for the moon glinting off the snow, but the quality of this light was different. It had an almost yellowish tone that put me in mind of an animal’s eyes glowing in the dark. It seemed to rest on a narrow terrace of ice.

“Do you see that?” I said.

“I think so.” He stopped. “Wait—could that—”

We stared at each other.

My heart pounded frantically against my ribs. The light pulsed slightly, so faint that it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to see if the brighter light of the dragon hadn’t drawn my attention to that precise spot. I watched it for a moment, then turned my attention to the surrounding terrain, mapping every rock and feature in my mind in order to commit them to memory. It was a trick I knew well—if bad weather struck, and I had to navigate my way back through limited visibility, I wouldn’t get lost.

I whistled. The dragon, who had been fluttering around the light as if fascinated, began to move toward us.

“We have to tell Lusha,” I said, standing so quickly I almost pitched over the side. “We can’t reach it from here. We’ll have to rappel down the ridge, then climb back up—”

Tem’s grip on my arm pulled me back down. “Are you forgetting something?”

“What?”

“Well, if that’s the star . . .” Tem swallowed. “Then where’s River? I thought he might have found it already.”

A chill ran through me. I pictured River leaping from the precipice—how far away had he been? The Ashes stretched over many miles.

I thought back. River had told me once that he had no use for astronomy—that meant that, unlike us, he wouldn’t know where to look, even if he was capable of traveling more quickly.

“Lusha led us right to it,” I said. I felt triumph stir. River would come to this place and find it empty. All his searching would be for nothing. We would take the star to the Three Cities, and there the emperor’s shamans would bind his powers once again.

The dragon reached us. I stuffed her into the hood of Tem’s chuba, smothering the light. Suddenly it was much too bright.

“From now on, we keep the dragons covered,” I said. “We get the star, and we leave. I don’t want River to even know we were here.”

Fifteen

Mara

HE CLAMBERED OFF his sweating horse, wincing as his muscles protested. He hated horses. But when the Elder of Jangsa had offered him one of their few surviving beasts, it had been impossible to refuse. The animal had been of little use to him east of the Aryas, but once he made it through Winding Pass, the terrain opened up, glacial boulders and frost-painted pebbles giving way to grassy meadows. He had traveled straight through Bengarek Forest, finding the old trail created decades ago by the emperor, which was now little maintained but still preferable to scrabbling around in the underbrush. He had ridden hard, pushing his horse to the breaking point. He had no time to waste.

He gazed up at Mount Karranak, its broad summit capped by three massive glaciers. He was well south of Azmiri now, and only a few days’ ride from the Three Cities. The soldiers who had greeted him at the outskirts of Lhotang village had been skittish, one nearly running him through with an obsidian dagger when he appeared in their midst. Mara, unaccustomed to disrespect from common soldiers, had given him a verbal thrashing. Their captain had apologized, though Mara was still in an ill humor over the incident. He had not traveled all this way, defying peril these soldiers could barely comprehend, to die in a clumsy accident.

In fact, Mara’s journey had been astonishingly uneventful. He had braced himself for an attack in Winding Pass—had even prepared for it, composing a lengthy farewell letter and leaving it in his pack so that if any traveler happened upon his abandoned supplies, they would know his fate. But the weather had remained fair. No storms threatened, supernatural or otherwise. He wondered if the Tem’s spell had driven the fiangul into hiding, at least temporarily.

The soldiers were impressed by him, though he gave them only hints of what he had been through, wanting to save the full story for the emperor and his court. One of them followed at a respectful distance as they entered the village, sweating a little under Mara’s pack. The man kept eyeing Mara’s tahrskin chuba, which wasn’t surprising. The emperor’s explorers were venerated by the common people, and welcomed into every village they visited. Mara nodded to two villagers who bowed low upon sighting him. After the unsettling reception he had received at Jangsa, such signs of normalcy were heartening.

Mara’s gaze swept the village. Lhotang was a picturesque place, straddling the banks of a roiling river, its stone bridges like stitches crisscrossing the misty rapids. Whitewashed houses and well-maintained spirit shrines dotted the rocky terrain. There were no roads—they were unnecessary; carts and yaks easily traversed the smooth rock. The river’s source was a waterfall that thundered down Mount Karranak, looming over the village—sheer, icicled falls alternating with vivid blue pools. But Mara recognized a change in the place that had nothing to do with the presence of so many soldiers. There was an uneasiness in the faces of the usually jovial villagers. Several of the shops Mara passed were shuttered.

“Mara,” the General of the Fourth Army said in greeting, bowing his head slightly. He stood at the edge of the village square, conferring with one of his soldiers. Mara bent his neck the same amount. Mara, as one of the emperor’s explorers, was equal in rank to any general save the woman who led the First Army.