Page 49 of All the Wandering Light

I was sure that I didn’t want to worry about Tem while climbing up the icy rock. “Yes. You can keep an eye on us from down here.”

“My calculations are correct,” Lusha said, but she was already tethering us together. “I’ve gone over them a hundred times.”

“Then you must be dying to prove me wrong.” Without waiting for a reply, I turned to the crag and began to climb.

I set an easy pace, making sure to keep enough slack in the rope for comfort. The mountainside wasn’t perfectly sheer but leaned into a series of terraces, each set farther back from the next.

Lusha climbed well, though more slowly than me—she was overly methodical, in my opinion, thinking through every step three times before making it. And her late-night obsessiveness had left her even more tired than Tem, though she hid it well. I paused on the first shelf until she caught up with me, rising to her feet in one smooth motion, not even a hair out of place. She had ignored the hand I offered her.

“Go slow,” she said. “We don’t want to frighten it.”

“Can a star be frightened?” I kept my tone light, though I felt a shiver. When I had faced River at the summit of Raksha, I had been alone. There had been something appealingly simple about that. Now, with Lusha climbing behind me, and Tem waiting below, there were more variables.

I’ve never had much use for variables. River’s words came back to me, his voice pitched low for the intimate space of the cave. It was as if he was speaking in my ear.

I froze, terrified that the memory would herald another descent into River’s mind. But I remained myself.

As I climbed, I tried not to think of what had happened early that morning, after I returned to the tent. Tem and I had fallen onto our blankets, intending to rest only a few moments before planning our route to the star. Something had altered in me since discovering it—I felt tired and faint, as if whatever barrier had been holding me back from sleep before was gone. I slept without meaning to, deeply, waking an hour later with a start, a dream lingering. In it, I had been searching for Azar-at, intending to offer the rest of my soul in exchange for the star. But he was nowhere to be found, no matter where I searched, and I was frustrated and frightened. Somewhere between sleep and waking, I looked up and found a girl leaning over me.

A scream strangled in my throat. The girl was stout and not overly tall, though with the suggestion of strength in the set of her shoulders. Her long hair was loose, framing large eyes and high cheekbones. On her face was a look of confusion, and she reached toward my face with familiar hands—frighteningly familiar. I met her eyes.

The girl was me. I started fully awake, surging upright, convinced someone was truly there. But the tent was empty and still, save for Lusha’s quiet breathing.

“How does this work?” I said as Lusha and I came to the second ledge. “Will it try to attack us?”

Lusha paused. She was breathing heavily now, her face red. Lusha didn’t redden in blotches as I did—her cheeks flushed a rosy pink that emphasized the luminous dark of her eyes. “Of course not,” she said coldly, as if it was obvious. As if anything about what we were doing was obvious. “We have to catch it. Once caught, the star will bend to our will.”

“And how will we do that?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, after a slight pause. Her tone was stiff, as it always was when she felt backed into a corner.

“Seers are so helpful,” I muttered.

Lusha shot me a look, then turned back to the climb. Her hands, I noticed, trembled ever so slightly. Despite her calm demeanor, Lusha was nervous. I should have recognized the signs before—the slight tension in her shoulders, the inward-focused gaze. Lusha disliked situations she couldn’t control, things that couldn’t be planned or foreseen, and this went beyond that. Yet, in spite of this, she turned her steely gaze back to the rock face, put one hand in front of the other, and kept going.

I thought about Lusha setting out for Raksha to stop River from finding the witches’ talisman. She and Mara had snuck away during the night, gathering what they needed for a long journey and attempting to sabotage River’s own expedition all within a few short hours. That too had been a journey into the unknown, fraught with danger and the likelihood of failure. Few people, I knew, would have taken it upon themselves to attempt what Lusha had attempted. Yet Lusha hadn’t balked, hadn’t assumed that the Royal Explorer’s dark plans were someone else’s responsibility, though she was merely the Elder-in-waiting of a small village with little contact with the royal court. She had seen danger written in the stars, decided that something needed to be done, and then she had done it. Was that an admirable display of courage, or astonishing arrogance?

I gazed at the back of her head as she climbed steadily up the mountain, neither hurrying nor delaying. Her determination had an inexorable quality that put me in mind of a force of nature. I shook my head, shoving away the grudging admiration that stirred inside me. Perhaps for some people, words like “courage” and “arrogance” simply didn’t make sense—any more than trying to assign a color to the wind.

We reached the ledge some minutes later, both red-faced and out of breath. Lusha sat for a moment, her legs dangling over the cliff we had just scaled, her head bent over her knees. I forced myself to my feet.

The ledge was narrow—perhaps half a dozen paces at its widest point—and roughly triangular, nestled between two perpendicular planes of the mountainside. I stood slowly, testing the grip of my boots.

“Look,” I said, grasping Lusha’s arm so firmly she made a small noise of protest.

Behind us, the snow and rock split apart like a sword slash, little furrows on either side. And beyond that was a dark stain.

Lusha moved forward, shaking off my arm. The stain was roughly circular, and revealed itself, on closer inspection, to be a gash in the mountainside. Bits of rubble were strewn about, stark against the snow. Judging by their position, the mountain hadn’t merely crumbled here—it had exploded.

I knelt next to Lusha, who seemed to be hesitating. This was no time for caution, in my opinion, so I set my jaw and reached into the gash. I dug out several broken shards of the mountain, which Lusha examined closely, as if they held vital information. I reached inside again, and my fingers closed on something rounded and smooth. But when I drew it out, it was only a gray rock.

I expected Lusha to toss this aside too, but she didn’t. She rose to her feet, staring at the bit of rubble as if lost in thought.

“Nothing.” I brushed my hands against my chuba. “But this is where the star landed.”

“So it seems.” Her voice was strange.

I looked at the gash in the mountainside, where there was certainly no glittering star, or even a fragment of it. “We must be too late. I don’t understand—it was here only a few hours ago.” I turned to Lusha, expecting to see my own disappointment magnified in her expression. But her face was pale, blank.