The weather barely improved as they traveled away from Silent Hall. They camped under the spitting sky and awoke to an overcast morning, drizzling and gray. And yet, traveling felt very different this time. The others deferred to Hunter now, as the one who had studied Psander’s maps most closely. Leading his companions across the countryside, he felt for the first time as if they looked to him for more than just his skill in battle. It was a good feeling.
Phaedra had lapsed into moody silence. Hunter hoped she wasn’t torturing herself, thinking about her crippled leg. In many ways, her situation was much like his. She had had a bright future back in Tarphae. Now she was being forced to rethink her life.
He had to cheer her up somehow, but he didn’t know how to begin. What could he say that could possibly distract her from her troubles?
“Can you tell me more about the Gods?” he said.
Phaedra blinked at him. “I don’t… I don’t know. I have more questions than answers right now.”
Hunter pressed on. “What kind of questions?”
“Well, who weakened the mesh during the War of the Heavens? How? Did the Gods create the mesh, or is it primordial? Is there another mesh between the fairy world and the world of the Gods?”
Hunter nodded. He wished he could think of something to say, but he was out of his depth. Luckily, Phaedra had not run out of questions.
“Is the fairy world the ‘first world’ I read about in that annotated Second Cycle? If so, what really happened to make the Gods decide to create another world?”
“I don’t know,” said Narky, “but I’m starting to think they shouldn’t have. This world is ugly.”
“Only because there are no more dragons,” Criton said. “If there are no more dragons. I don’t believe they were all killed.”
“Why not?” asked Narky. “Everybody says they’re gone, even Psander. Besides, how could any dragon have survived the war with the Gods?”
“I don’t know,” said Criton. “I just feel it.”
The pitying look Phaedra gave Criton made it clear what she thought of his intuition. Still, Hunter thought, it was good for Phaedra to pity someone other than herself.
“What I don’t see,” said Narky, “is how the Gods could go and kill all the dragons, and then fail to kill God Most High. Weren’t those dragons the equivalent of all His fingers? I mean, compared to the dragons, the Dragon Touched couldn’t have been more than a pinky’s worth. If the dragons’ God really is dormant the way Psander said He might be, why did the other Gods let Him live?”
“Because God Most High isn’t just any God,” said Criton, with heartfelt certainty. “He’s more powerful than all the others; otherwise, He wouldn’t really be God Most High. If losing the dragons could put Him in real danger, He would have fought for them. I think the dragons angered Him somehow, so He let them get themselves killed in a war without even worrying about the danger to Himself. He must be vastly more powerful than the other Gods.”
Phaedra’s pitying expression had never left her face. “Or,” she said gently, “Psander’s mentor could have been wrong. Psander did say that his was a minority opinion.”
Criton shook his head. “No. God Most High is alive. He just needs to see that His worshippers are still faithful to Him. Then He’ll awaken, and the other Gods will be in trouble.”
Phaedra shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, trying to be kind.
Hunter led them southward across the plains, veering west at one point to avoid the forest before drifting back eastward. They stopped to eat every time Bandu became hungry or nauseous, which was often. Hunger and nausea seemed to go hand in hand for Bandu. The worst part was when she insisted that the smell of salted meat made her sick, and that Criton would have to find her something fresh to eat.
“We haven’t passed a town in days!” Criton complained. “Where am I supposed to get you fresh meat?”
“Hunt,” she told him. “I eat sheep or goat or cow or bird or rat or anything, but not old and salty!”
Criton came back almost two hours later with a single charred rabbit, blackened on the outside and raw on the inside. “I’m sorry,” he said, as he presented it. “I’ve never hunted before.”
Bandu ignored him completely until she had gnawed every last piece of meat off the rabbit’s bones, and her hands and face were smeared with blood. “Ooh,” she said, burping and sitting down on the ground. “Next time I wait for you to cook.”
A few days later they came to a place where the plains ended and a forest of tall broad-leafed trees stretched all the way to the mountains. Here Hunter turned them eastward. They would travel this way for a day or two, he decided, before journeying south again. On second thought, considering how long it had taken them to go this far, perhaps two days of eastward travel would not be enough. Should they go east for a third day, or a fourth? He wished he could have brought the map with him.
After two days of further travel, Hunter decided that three would not do. They were stopping too often, mostly to satisfy Bandu’s heightened need for both food and rest. Narky muttered in irritation at the girl’s frequent demands, but Hunter did not mind Bandu’s presence. She was better than he at finding good, sweet water here in the forest. Considering the length of their journey, he doubted they would have been able to manage it without her help. By his estimation, their travels would last well over a month, and there were simply not enough towns in their path for the islanders to avoid foraging.
After the fourth day they turned southward again, and their pace slowed even further. The trees and undergrowth grew thicker the farther south they went, and the rain escalated from drizzle to downpour. Far from providing protection, the leafy boughs above only served to convert all rain into oversized drops, which splashed startlingly on the islanders’ heads at every third step.
Bandu’s magic began to govern their movements. When she was hungry or tired, the trees and bushes conspired to block their path. Her hunger radiated from her little body and spooked every animal within miles, so the islanders took to hunting only in those few moments when Bandu was not hungry. At last, after nearly two months of travel, Hunter deemed that Gateway must be near. The trees here were taller and broader than before, with enormous leaves that seemed designed to catch the rain. Bandu grew even more unsettled, but that struck Hunter as a good sign.
“We’re in the right area,” he told the others. “Now all we have to do is find the ruins themselves.”
“And that ought to be easy!” Narky said sarcastically.
Criton sniffed the air. “Bandu, do you smell something? You’re better at this than I am.”
Bandu shook her head emphatically, tears suddenly pouring from her eyes. “I only smell mushrooms!” she wailed.
“Are you hungry again?”
She nodded sadly. “A little.”
“Well then,” sighed Criton, “I guess I’ll have to learn how to follow the magic myself.”
He took a deep breath, and pointed. “This way,” he said.
After three days of following Criton’s nose, even Hunter had to admit that he had doubts about his friend’s tracking abilities. Then, to his surprise, Phaedra stopped them short.
“It’s here,” she said.
“I don’t know,” said Criton. “I don’t feel anything different here.”
“It’s here,” Phaedra repeated. “The trees here are younger, and the only older ones I see, there and there, have burn marks on them.”
Hunter followed her gaze. “You’re right,” he said. “What should we do? Dig?”
“Let’s see,” said Narky, and he began crashing through the undergrowth toward one of the burned trees. He tripped and fell partway there. “There’s a stone here!” he shouted.
Criton and Bandu followed him, inspecting the grounds while Hunter helped Phaedra down from her horse.
“This is really strange,” Phaedra said. “I expected far more ruins. These stones look like they must be part of the foundation.”
“This one’s a corner stone,” Narky called, standing some way ahead.
“If this is the foundation,” said Criton, “what happened to the rest of the tower?”
Phaedra shook her head. “I don’t know.”
A sudden fear struck Hunter. “How do we know these are really the ruins of Gateway? This could be anything.”
“Bad here,” said Bandu. “Very bad here.”
“I think that means we’re in the right place,” said Narky. “Let’s dig a little and see if anything useful got buried.”
They had brought no shovel, but did their best with their hands, tearing away at the moss and trying to break through the tree roots using shards of broken rock.
“Nothing,” Bandu kept repeating. “Nothing here. This is a wicked place.”
Phaedra looked at her curiously. “What are you feeling? Is it the God magic that destroyed the tower, or the wizard and fairy magic that used to be here?”
But Bandu just shook her head and insisted that this place was wicked.
The rain, thankfully, had stopped for now. They excavated some more, but found little besides rocks, bugs, and tree roots. “There’s something useful around here somewhere,” said Phaedra. “I can feel it.”
“I sure hope so,” Narky replied. “Because if this is it, we’ll never learn anything besides what Psander wants to tell us. Can you imagine if we’d risked our lives going to that dragon tower Criton wanted us to go to, and all we found was this?”
Criton did not look pleased at the suggestion. “There’s plenty to be found at the dragon tower. Nobody would place guards over a useless pile of rocks.”
“Oh,” said Narky, “well, at least that explains why there are no guards here.”
“Shut up, you two,” Phaedra snapped. “We’ve spent all this time getting here; we’re not going anywhere until we’ve looked under every last stone. There must be something around here that can teach us about Bandu’s magic, or the fairies, or something. As long as we have food and fresh water, we’re staying.”
“We’d better put up the tents while there’s still light out,” Hunter said.
They followed his suggestion, and soon all three tents were standing apart from each other among the ruins, wherever the islanders could find level ground. The new tents, which Narky had been wise enough to commission from Psander’s villagers during their stay at Silent Hall, were of greatly inferior quality. The villagers had made them out of oiled goats’ wool, and they stank. During their travels, the near-constant rain had been interrupted by a brief dry spell, and this had been enough to partially felt the wool such that the tents had shrunk considerably since Criton had bought them. They were also extremely heavy.
After a somewhat heated discussion, they left the old tent – the one that Narky had bought from the Gallant Ones – to Phaedra. Criton and Bandu shared one of the goat tents, as Bandu called them, and Hunter and Narky took the other.
“Hunter,” Narky asked that night, just as Hunter was about to fall mercifully asleep, “how are you so selfless all the time? Phaedra could easily have taken one of the smaller tents. You practically gave her the big one yourself. How do you stay so damn gallant?”
Hunter sighed and opened his eyes. “I’m a nobleman,” he reminded Narky. “That’s just how I was raised.”
“Oh, come on,” Narky said. “All noblemen act that way?”
Hunter turned to him. “My brother did. He was always generous, especially with girls.”
“All right, sure,” said Narky, “but wasn’t that just so that he could get them in bed?”
Hunter rolled over again, and tried to close his eyes. Why did Narky always think the worst of people? It was so ugly. Could he be right? Kataras had been so much more social than Hunter, and his friends were all older. Hunter didn’t really know what his brother did with his time. Sparring with swords was the only thing they had ever really done together, but Kataras had stopped doing even that once Hunter began beating him.
“I don’t know,” he said to Narky, and hated himself for it.
“I wish I could be like that,” Narky said. “I wish I could just do things for people naturally, without feeling like an idiot.”
“Why would you feel like an idiot if you were being good to people?” Hunter asked. Gods, how he wished he could just sleep.
“I don’t know,” said Narky. “It doesn’t come naturally to me. I feel like if I started acting all generous, people would wonder what I wanted out of them.”
Hunter simply shrugged, and hoped that the conversation would end there. Thankfully, it did.
Over the next few days, Hunter took on the task of hunting for food while the others excavated the ruins. There were a few nearby streams where he could fill their waterskins and watch for prey. Narky, Criton and Phaedra all seemed to find digging exciting, and Bandu generally watched them from a distance, muttering to the horses and trying to wrest back control of her magic. Judging by tonight’s new moon, she must be entering her fourth month of pregnancy by now. Hadn’t Psander said the fourth month was better?
If anything, Bandu was acting more anxious than ever. Hunter could hear her at night, agitatedly insisting that this place was wicked even as Criton tried to calm her down. Tonight, Hunter almost agreed with her. A cool mist was rising from the ground, and the stars seemed to shine more dimly without the moon. They were all a little hungry, because Bandu’s fear had scared away every animal but their horses, who would have fled too had they not been tied to a tree. Her magic was growing stronger. Even Hunter could feel it.
There was something insidious about this mist. Hunter could have sworn that it had been thicker around Bandu’s tent. The thought chilled him. Maybe he should go outside and check.
When Hunter stepped out, he had to blink a few times to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Bandu and Criton’s tent had completely disappeared at the center of a vortex of swirling mist.
“Narky!” he cried, ducking his head back into the tent. “Get your spear and get out here! Something’s happening!”
By the time Narky stumbled out, the vortex of mist had expanded even further. White tendrils spiraled out from the center, enveloping the tents, the ruins, the forest. Hunter shivered. The stars had faded away.