Page 4 of All the Wandering Light

Lusha. Tem. The stars seemed to blaze even brighter, echoing my determination. I would find them, and then—somehow—I would find a way to stop what I had helped River unleash. I settled Ragtooth around my shoulders and lowered myself over the edge.

Two

River

HE SOARED ABOVE the earth, an owl silhouetted against the stars as they arched and burned. He tried to race them, and when he tired of that he flew to the ground, owl dissolving into leopard. He tried on a dozen different animals in quick succession—hawk, dragon, tahr—reveling in the magic. The binding spell had been cast long before he was born, and his powers were new—everything felt new. He tried transforming into shadow, folding himself into the darkness as witches were said to do in stories, but either the stories were exaggerated or it was a skill that required practice. He eventually gave up the effort.

As the night deepened, River assumed his familiar, human form at the edge of a stream shining with ice and crowded with glacial boulders. He threw himself onto the ground, exhausted but jubilant. The emperor’s spell was broken, and he had the powers that should have been his from birth. He no longer had to rely on secondhand magic from Azar-at. As he gazed into the sky, he felt that even it was too small to contain him.

As if echoing his mood, shooting stars painted the night with fire. The sky was so bright it could have been lit by three moons. No doubt there was some mystical reason for it—something dull and prophetic, as those things often were.

He had descended the tallest mountain in the world, then covered fifty miles of ground in a single day. The Arya Mountains were still visible to the west, their sharp, snowy peaks faded to dusky gray. Raksha loomed over the rest like a dark threat. As he traveled, he had the sense that the mountain was watching with an odd combination of menace and regret. He shrugged off the feeling.

While witches could assume the shape of almost any animal they chose, the stories said that most used only one regularly: their secondskin. Changing shape was tiring, particularly when it involved taking the form of an animal you felt no affinity with. Yet he didn’t feel tired, and all the shapes he tried felt easy and natural, though he perhaps preferred the leopard he had first chosen, with its sleek grace and deathly silent paws.

The land before him was familiar, though the trees were sparse, nothing like the heart of the Nightwood, the witches’ forest. A hint of smoke hung in the air, another taste of home. At his current pace, he would be there within a day.

He held out a hand and let the shadows play over the water, creating ripples and waves. For more than three years, home had been a patch of grass in the wilderness, the oilcloth of a tent flapping in the wind, the howl of wolves. Or it had been the ridiculous spectacle of the emperor’s court, where even the spoons were inlaid with jade and you could die of boredom were it not such a commonplace sensation that one grew inoculated. There had been no River Shara—he had invented him. But there was something appealing in that—in becoming a person he had created, rather than one constrained by things he had never chosen.

Now that their powers were restored, he supposed that the witches would attack the Empire. Or would Esha, his brother, wait for a more opportune moment, perhaps when the emperor was distracted by a barbarian invasion?

It doesn’t matter.

River didn’t care about the Empire. He didn’t care about revenge, which had always struck him as a wasteful concept. His years as an explorer had taught him how fine the line was between life and death, for the powerful and powerless alike, and he had no intention of wasting time constructing elaborate plots to wreck the Empire. His thoughts had been occupied by one thing: breaking the spell. Now it was done, he would not stay in the Nightwood for long—he would not stay in any place for long. He would leave the Empire behind, and go wherever he liked.

He had always wondered what strange lands lay east of the Nightwood. Or perhaps he would travel south, all the way to the great lake that the stories said was made of liquid salt and stretched to the edge of the world.

The shadows had begun to drift. He lifted his hand, and they darted back to him. It was surprising how easily the darkness responded to his command. He focused, and the shadows swirled together, spinning like a dancer over the water. Shapes rose from the darkness. A fish. A rhododendron bloom. A palace on a hilltop. His eldest brother, Sky, his grim face caught in one of his rare smiles.

The shadows spun faster. Sky, Esha, and Thorn—each of his older brothers was ruthlessness personified, a knife edge in the night. He had only missed one—Sky, the eldest, quieter and more deliberate than the others. To most, that deliberation only added to his fearsomeness, for he had been a large, imposing man, given to deadly flashes of temper. There had only been one person who was spared that temper, and that was his youngest brother. But Sky was dead—he had taken his own life soon after their mother had.

River pictured his brother’s brow furrowing as he recounted the story of his years at the emperor’s court, Sky balancing his chin on his hand as he did when lost in thought. River would have told him about the banquets, the impossible luxury juxtaposed with the harrowing expeditions to distant lands. His mood darkened.

He glanced over his shoulder. “What do you think . . .”

No fire demon gazed back at him. The place where Azar-at would have sat, tongue lolling and coal eyes glittering, was empty. He had left Azar-at behind, as he had left Kamzin and the rest of his expedition.

He was suddenly very aware of the expanse of land around him, the whisper of the icy stream. River dashed his hand through the shadow, shattering the shapes he had summoned. He lay down, expecting sleep to find him quickly.

A steep, snowy slope, and the pull of the earth far below. His hand clenched on his ax as it bit into the mountain, his fingers aching with cold. Before him loomed the col that joined Raksha to its neighboring peak, sharp against the starry sky. He took a deep breath and raised the ax again—

He bolted upright.

He glanced down at his hands, half-convinced he would find his ax. But they were empty, and he had abandoned the ax, along with most of his other possessions, in the cave below the summit of Raksha.

He was uneasy. The dream had been strangely vivid—so vivid he could still feel the chill wind against his face. He had left Raksha behind. But Kamzin hadn’t. Was that why his thoughts had strayed there?

When he had reached the summit of Raksha, he could taste the magic in the air. He had known he was close to breaking the binding spell that had weighed on him like a chain of iron since the day of his birth.

He felt a stab of something like anger, but colder, more fundamental. Kamzin had nearly succeeded in stopping him. A human girl with no magic whatsoever, just an impossible stubbornness. He wouldn’t have harmed her, yet she had looked him in the eye, her gaze cold as an avenging spirit, and sent him to what should have been his death.

Through the anger came a strange pang of longing. He pushed Kamzin from his mind. Thinking of her brought about an uncomfortable tangle of emotion, and he didn’t have the patience to sort through it.

A flash of motion from the corner of his eye. A fox scuttled out from beneath a boulder and paused in the starlight. Green eyes gleamed as the creature turned to look at him, head cocked playfully.

River froze.

Every sense told him that the fox was Kamzin’s familiar. But it was impossible. There was no way it could have followed him from Raksha. He dashed the sleep from his eyes, and when he opened them, the fox was gone.