Page 64 of All the Wandering Light

I stared. At some point in recent days, this man had walked through blood—and not a small quantity of it.

“We come from the village of Azmiri,” Lusha said, her face impassive beneath the heavy weight of Jinsang’s gaze. “We seek a private audience with the emperor.”

The soldiers began to mutter. The captain fixed Lusha with a look of blank astonishment.

“The emperor does not give audiences to witches,” the general said. “You will answer my questions, and then I will determine your fate.”

I tried desperately to catch Lusha’s eye. We had to tell the general everything—River’s expedition, our journey to the Ashes. Perhaps if we showed the general the star, she would believe us. But Lusha, sensing my gaze, shook her head once, almost imperceptibly.

“We answer questions from the emperor alone,” she said.

It was madness. The general would not haul a group of suspected witches before the emperor. Again I tried to catch Lusha’s eye, and again I was ignored.

The general silenced the soldiers’ muttering with a flick of her hand. She turned back to Lusha, perplexity lessening the steel in her gaze. “What message would a witch have for the emperor?”

“We are not witches.” Lusha’s voice was like a lash.

“Yet you travel in the company of one.” She made a dismissive gesture. “Have it your way. You will come with us.” A soldier brought forward two mares, which huffed and stamped at the ground. They were still uneasy after the shadow-magic they had witnessed.

“Where?” Lusha demanded.

“The boy must be taken to the prison on the outskirts of the Three Cities for interrogation and execution,” Jinsang said, each word sending a shaft of ice through my heart. “The rest of you may meet the same fate, or you may not, depending on your answers.” The general turned and began snapping orders.

Prison. Execution. Tem. “Lusha—” I whispered.

“Be quiet, Kamzin,” she snapped. “I’m trying to keep us alive.”

Realization came in a blinding flash—Lusha didn’t answer the general’s questions because she knew doing so would be pointless. The general would take one look at the “star” she carried, and hear her allegations against the famed River Shara, and accuse her of lying and slander—perhaps even kill her then and there for wasting the army’s time. Our story was simply too strange to be accepted readily, and Lusha had sized up the cold, mercenary general and determined that our safest course was to stay silent. I recalled how her hand had trembled against my shoulder as she returned the general’s gaze. At least this way, we were still alive. For now.

“What have you gotten us into, Kamzin?” Lusha muttered.

I couldn’t reply. All I could think about was Tem.

What were we going to do?

I felt the captain’s attention on us, though he was busying himself with his horse’s saddle. For a moment, I thought I would pass out again. The lingering sensation of Azar-at’s spell was disorienting. I pressed my hand to my chest. Though the pain had gone, the memory hadn’t—it lingered like cold sweat.

If I used the fire demon’s magic again, would it help us? Or would it only throw us into a different peril? I knew even as the thought occurred to me that it didn’t matter.

I couldn’t use Azar-at’s magic again. I couldn’t trust it. And I couldn’t trust myself.

Lusha’s hand tightened on my arm. But then one of the soldiers brusquely helped me to my feet and indicated that I should follow her.

Twenty

NIGHT FELL BEFORE we stopped. We were close to the main trade road from the east, and the trees were thin, so the soldiers led us into a sheltered ravine to make camp.

I sank to my knees before the shallow stream that trickled down the hillside. It was choked with leaves, but I was too thirsty to care. I drank deeply, then cupped the cool water between my palms and splashed it over my face and neck. The warmth of the air was strange—I had grown used to the bone-deep cold of the north. The breeze played with the thin sleeves of my tunic.

My reflection gazed back at me, drawn and ragged. Tem’s absence was like a missing limb. We had been separated before, but not like this—not with a wall of swords and grim faces between us. Had they injured him? I had caught only an occasional glimpse of him all day—his head had been bent, and the soldiers had stripped him of his chuba and, undoubtedly, his talismans. His guards had hung back from the main troupe, no doubt to prevent us from communicating.

I pressed my face into my hands. I was tired and hungry, and I couldn’t think. My mind circled endlessly back to the Ashes, and to River. For some reason, my palm still tingled, off and on, from the memory of River’s magic. I had hoped to ignore the pain, to bury it deep and deal with it when I had space to sort out my feelings. But it had only worsened.

Lusha settled on a rock nearby. As usual, she seemed mostly unaffected by the day’s rough hiking, her hair sleek again, her chuba casually threaded through the straps of her pack. She calmly brushed a leaf from her boot.

Captain Elin’s manner throughout the day had been strange. He’d alternated between ignoring us entirely, striding along with his cool gaze turned inward, and attempting—with little success—to engage Lusha in casual conversation. After she had refused his offer of a horse, he seemed to have decided to travel on foot as well, often positioning himself at Lusha’s side. She paid little more attention to him than she did to the trees we passed—which, unfortunately, he seemed to take not as a rejection but a challenge. My face almost hurt from the effort of preventing myself from rolling my eyes. The captain was certainly harder to put off than most of Lusha’s suitors, but I had no doubt that his interest would wane after a few more icy comments. Or, I mused, with a sense of despair that grew ever nearer to hysteria, once we were all publicly executed.

“What I don’t understand,” the captain said now, kneeling on the other side of the stream, the moonlight sharpening the already sharp line of his cheekbone, “is how the boy was able to attack us. The witches’ powers have been bound for centuries, though there have recently been rumors to the contrary. How do you explain it?”