Lark

The North Burr is not like the South Burr.

I’ve seen it before, but farther downstream, toward Pasul, where it’s the same kind of muddy, shallow river as the drainage below Three Lines. But here it’s a foaming, rocky current, with white-frothed rapids and sudden pools so clear it looks like there’s no water inside at all. I stand at the edge of the bank, staring at the bright golden-green riverbed under the rushing, glassy surface.

Veran sits back on his heels, his chin wet from his drink. The horses are watering a little way downstream, their sides dark with sweat. We abandoned the mud coach just before dawn, leaving it slouched tiredly behind a rocky outcrop. We unhitched the team and fitted them with the halters under the driver’s box and guided them off the road. We walked until the sun rose, took a short rest under a stand of pinyon pine, and then mounted and continued northwest, toward the towering blue line of the Moquovik Mountains.

I shift, rubbing my backside. There were no saddles in the coach, only blankets, and my sit bones are aching like they’ve been beaten with a pike. Still, the minister had a fancy leather canteen and half a bottle of berry-red wine in his carriage, plus packets of ginger cookies and tender jerky and three scones with honest-to-goodness lemon in them. I’m still getting over the shock of that light, tangy taste on my tongue, along with the decadence of something baked with flour instead of cornmeal and sweet butter instead of lard, so that now, at the edge of the crystalline North Burr, I’m very close to being overwhelmed.

Veran wipes his mouth. “That’s good water. Are you going to drink?”

I crouch down and dip my fingers in the water. It’s shockingly cold. I cup my hand under the surface and bring a scoop to my mouth. It’s sweet and bright and makes my teeth ache.

“So the good news is, I think we’re pretty far north,” Veran says, shading his eyes against the midmorning sun. “I expect it’s nearly a straight shot west to Giantess at this point. The bad news is, we have to go over the ridge, of course, and I don’t know if there’s a track.”

I let the last handful of water seep through my fingers. Down near the stones are tiny rock-colored fish, beating their little tails to stay in one place in the current. Imagine that—fighting every second of your life just to stay right where you are.

“Lark?” Veran looks down at me. “You’re being awfully quiet. Are you all right?”

I stand up, reach to adjust my hat, and remember I don’t have it anymore. For lack of anything else to do with them, I shove my hands in my pockets. “Yeah. West, you think?”

“I don’t know how far we’ll make it without a track,” he says, still watching me. “The understory gets pretty thick once you cross the rainshadow, and the loose slopes can be tricky up near the summits. Maybe we ford and follow the river a little while to see if we find anything promising?”

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” I repeat.

I don’t know what he expects me to say. We’re well outside my range, miles and miles away from anything I could call familiar. I don’t know why, but the North Burr feels like a boundary. On this side of the river is all the stuff I ever was—slave, runaway, rustler, outlaw. The Sunshield Bandit. I’ve left a trail of all the bits of myself—hat, eyeblack, sword, buckler. Jema—blazes, I wonder if I’ll ever find Jema again. My eyes travel to Rat—with a sickening swoop I remember how close I came to losing him, too.

The space between my shoulder blades prickles, as if I can feel the eyes of the distant Ferinno watching me hesitate. Back there, back behind me, is everything I ever was. I look across to the far shore.

Over there is nothing.

“All right, well.” Veran runs his fingers through his hair. “I guess we should get going. Unless you want to eat something?”

“Nah.” The instinct to save what few provisions we have kicks in, despite the rising hills thick with promising greenery. I turn for the horses. Without any more words between us, we mount and urge the horses across the broad, stony ford, Rat splashing along behind.

It soon becomes clear that my urge to conserve our supplies is wasted—the riverbank is thick with late-summer berries. Veran exclaims over each new thicket—“Oh, whortleberries! Look, a hackberry”—like it’s the greatest damn delight of his life. We dismount and adopt a leisurely pace to eat what we find.

We also find bears—two of them, to be exact, gorging themselves on the same berries we’re plucking. They’re black bears, thankfully, not grizzlies, but I pull up short at the sight of them sitting on their haunches, delicately slurping berries off the branches with their lips. Coyotes and cats I know how to deal with, but there are no bears around Three Lines. Rat stops and growls, his hackles rising, but Veran barely blinks, merely lifting his arms over his head and giving a sharp, “Ha!” that sends them lumbering into the brush.

“You can come back after we pass through,” he calls after them, then catches me staring. “What?”

“Don’t tell them that,” I say incredulously.

“Oh, sorry.” He cups his hand to his mouth and calls, “Give us a few minutes, and then you can come back.”

I shake my head, wanting to tell him off for making fun of me—but I’m not sure he is.

We go on.

Around noontime, we come to an old ramshackle hut by a bend in the river. Several tanning frames stand out in the sun, where beaver pelts are stretched to dry. A stooped man comes to the door of the hut with a crossbow and a wary glint in his eye, but Veran talks politely to him in Moquoian, and after a moment, the man points up the river a little way. From their conversation I gather we’re approaching a footpath that leads up the mountain slopes. Veran thanks him and offers the last of the minister’s rich wine in return for the promise that the man will deny seeing us if anyone comes inquiring. We come to the path just a few minutes later, marked with a stone cairn, and we turn our horses’ noses west, toward the soaring Moquoviks.

We climb.

The canyons around Three Lines are steep and rocky, but they conveniently slope off right around the time you get really tired. These mountains soar up and up, turning the distances blue and blurry. The scraggly trail switchbacks this way and that, passing through dense copses of fir and pine, breaking apart to reveal sudden rock fields that ring with the squeaks of an animal Veran calls a pika.

It gets cooler. The track joins the course of a noisy stream, and soon its chatter fills our ears as it rushes down the mountainside. Two days ago, we were nearly dead of dehydration in the water scrape, and now there’s a torrent of cool, clear water splashing right by our feet. It feels indulgent, selfish, wasteful—a luxury I haven’t earned. Veran, Rat, and the horses take full advantage, stopping to drink whenever the fancy takes them, but I can’t make myself do the same. I think of the couple hundred folk being separated out of Tellman’s Ditch, and the ones farther south in Redalo, all the ones with Port Iskon in their records—like me. Soon they’ll be marching inland with the dust in their eyes and throats, and then loaded on ships, parched by the salty breeze. I keep the minister’s canteen full, but I only sip when my throat prickles. Stored in the canteen, the water is lukewarm and leathery.

There are birds, and bugs, and pikas, marmots, martens, and three more bears. I do have the crossbow from the minister’s coach, and I suppose if I was feeling up to it, I could attempt to shoot something. The fat, golden marmots are especially bold, watching us from atop rocks so close I expect I could reach out and grab one with my bare hands. But I don’t—I feel like an intruder here, and it feels too much like breaking into someone’s pantry and making off with their canned goods.

Which, upon reflection, I have done in the past, so I don’t understand why I should be so bothered now.

Late in the afternoon, when the mountains are throwing long purple shadows behind us, we reach a small, flat grove of spicy-smelling fir. We’re walking at this point, resting the horses and our butts. For no particular reason I turn and look behind us.

“Blazes,” I say—the first word I’ve spoken in hours.

The land ripples away from us, first the falling blue-green of the mountain slopes, and then the dull brown of the water scrape, and beyond it, barely more than a golden smudge on the horizon—the Ferinno. It flashes like a line of fire, ignited by the sinking sun.

Veran comes to stand at my elbow, letting his horse nose in some grass. “We’ve come a long way,” he says.

“A lot of it was in the coach,” I say.

He gives me a funny look. “We still came a long way.”

I shrug. “I guess.”

He keeps watching me for a moment, like he did down by the river, and then he looks around us. “What do you say we camp here? We’ll lose the light in an hour or so, and it’s only going to get colder the farther up we get.”

“Okay.”

We don’t have much camp to set up—just fluffing around in the fir needles to find a soft place to lie down. Veran blankets the horses and collects some of the downed branches for firewood, and I occupy myself for a good twenty minutes with hollowing out a fire ring and coaxing a spark from my knife and flint. Once the blaze has caught, I hold the rock in my palm—a tiny chunk of the mesa behind Three Lines. It’s completely unremarkable—when I picked it up it was only because it had a good surface for striking. If I had realized it would ultimately be the only thing I’d have left from the Ferinno . . .

I’d probably have scoffed at myself for being sentimental.

I close my fingers over it.

Veran, meanwhile, opens the jerky pouch, tosses a strip to Rat, and then hands me the bag.

“So,” he says, chewing on his own strip. “Another day or so over the mountains, then we get our bearings and make for Giantess. If Iano and Tamsin are there, we tell them about Kobok and try to make a plan.”

“Yeah.” I take a piece of jerky but don’t eat it.

“Lark, are you okay?”

“Yeah, are you?”

“I’m fine. My stomach hurts—I’m not sure if it’s from all the berries or all the bad water we drank out in the scrape,” he says, rubbing his middle. I know how he feels—I’ve been cramping too. “But I’m feeling a lot better since crossing the Burr.” He nods at the jerky in my hand. “We might as well eat everything we have left—we don’t have a way to hang our food up high, and chances are good some critter will chew through the bag during the night.”

I take a bite of jerky. We eat in silence for a moment, watching the light fade. The eastern sky over the distant Ferinno turns dusty blue, speckled with stars. At one point, Veran cranes his head, as if to see past a few of the branches.

“What?” I ask.

“Oh, just looking. We have a summer star called Suitor Firefly—he’s higher than I thought. I lost track of the stars in Tolukum Palace.” He finishes off his jerky. “Do you know any star stories?”

“No.” The rustlers only ever used the stars to navigate.

“The Alcorans have a blue-zillion of them—it’s where they see the Light. But my folk call them fireflies, because they’re what first coaxed my folk out of the ground. So every summer, instead of dying, the fireflies go up to take their place in the sky. We have a sending-up ceremony in September.”

“What’s a firefly?” I ask.

He throws back his head and laughs—but it’s a laugh at himself, not me, evidenced by the palm he smacks to his forehead. “Oh, earth and sky, I’m sorry. They’re a beetle that lights up. That pin you stole from me—blazes, that feels like years ago, doesn’t it? That pin was a firefly. This is, too.” He holds out his hand, where his seal ring sits, imprinted with a bug with spread wings and an oval abdomen. “It’s a sacred symbol to my folk—one of the places we see the Light.”

I remember him calling it a firefly, but I thought it was a fancy name for the jewel itself. “What’s the other place you see the Light?”

“Foxfire—glowing mushrooms.” He looks around. “Those aren’t limited to just the Silverwood Mountains—we might see some after crossing the rainshadow.”

“When you say . . . ,” I begin, and then stop, considering my words. “When you say it’s where you see the Light . . . I know a lot of people who swear by the Light, and I know the Alcorans have that holiday with the shooting stars, but I never really . . .”

“Ah. Okay. I’ll tell you what my folk think, but you have to remember that every culture understands the Light differently—even people within the same country.” He bends his knees and wraps his arms around them, looking out at the dark horizon, where the belt of stars is materializing in the darkness. “The Light is a—a force, I guess, that guides. It pulls plants up and turns the seasons. It tells animals when to forage or shed or hibernate. When my folk began, under the ground, we were called up to the surface by the sky Light, and given the courage to stay there by earth Light—the fireflies, the foxfire. The Light reminds us that we’re small, but strong—the two sides of our nature, and that means that we should be humble, but brave. Does any of that make sense?”

I think of the light out in the Ferinno—like fresh water, it was frequently all or nothing. Burning sun, or cold, empty darkness.

“I guess,” I say.

“Now, the Alcorans, like I said, see the Light in the stars. They think of the Light more in a tangible sense—that it can actually give messages and visions, sometimes prophecies. The Moquoians have sort of a distant view of things—the Light is out there, but doesn’t do much to impact daily life. They see it in the rainbow, colored light—sort of like decoration. It’s nice and pretty, but the things it does are mostly inconsequential.”

I nod, even though both of those seem foreign to me—there have never been any colorful decorations in my life, and I’ve always associated visions with hunger or eating the wrong plant.

“Then the Cypri—I guess I should have told you about them first—the Cypri are different from almost everybody else. They see the Light as an internal force.” He touches his chest. “The Light is a spark inside everybody, something intimate and individual. Something that burns even when everything else seems dark. They see the Light in fire.” He nudges one of the burning logs in the ring, and a cloud of sparks goes up. “So the Light is a tool, as well—a means of creation and destruction, just like our own impulses.”

I like that a little better—the idea of a flame inside me, threatening to break loose and burn everything to the ground.

“And Lumen Lake?” I ask. “Where do they see the Light?”

“Water,” he says. “Well—sort of. Reflections. Their pearls are a big part of that—the way each one reflects light and color differently. The way the lake shifts and moves, the way the waterfalls change throughout the day, the way the sun filters on the lake bed. They see the Light as something so big and broad that we can only understand it by way of change—we can’t perceive it as a whole, but we can see when it shifts and guides the things around us. Kind of similar to my folk—makes sense, since we’re neighbors—but for us it’s small and physical, while for the Lakefolk it’s huge and intangible.”

I purse my lips. He had me at the first mention of water, but then he lost me. “That sounds . . . overwhelming.”

“Yeah, I think that’s why a lot of Lake folk believe in the tradition of the Light more than the actual nature of it,” he says. “Not everyone, of course—these are big generalizations. There are even differences from island to island.” He scratches his chin, dark with stubble, and then he gives a little laugh. “Actually, it’s kind of funny, if you think about it—you, the Sunshield Bandit, flashing that buckler around. Reflecting all that light. Kind of similar.”

I can’t tell if he means capital-letter Light or just plain old sunlight, but the thought makes me uneasy. I think of something watching over my shoulder, pushing and pulling me in different directions—why would it push somebody into slavery? Why would it separate a child from a family? For that matter, why would it separate hundreds, thousands of children from their families?

Suddenly, the Light doesn’t seem like such a peaceful, spiritual force. “I don’t know if I believe all that—about it guiding and stuff.”

He shrugs. “Not everybody does.” He pokes at the fire again and smothers a yawn. “Are you as beat as I am?”

“Yeah.”

He rummages in the small bundle of items from the minister’s coach. “There’s just the one cloak. What do you think—back-to-back?”

We first slept back-to-back out in the water scrape, both fuzzy and disoriented from dehydration, our shoulders and waists pressed together for warmth. For some reason it feels stranger tonight, when I’m fully lucid. But there’s no other option—we’ll freeze if we lie separately, and any other position . . .

“Back-to-back, yeah,” I say quickly.

“You want to face the fire?”

“No, you face it,” I say. “I’ll curl up with Rat.”

We tidy up camp, check on the horses once more, and then settle down. I wait until he’s situated himself where he wants by the fire and then lie down on his other side, pressing my back up against his. I pat the ground for Rat to come curl up beside me. He smells a little better after a day of romping in the crystalline water gushing down the Moquoviks. Veran shifts to spread the thick wool cloak over both of us.

“G’night,” he says.

“Night,” I reply.

He wriggles down and goes silent.

I wrap my arms around Rat and hug him close, burying my fingers in his fur.

I can tell when Veran falls asleep, the way the rise and fall of his back slows against mine. I listen to the crackle of the fire, the scurrying of a few nighttime animals. Twice Rat raises his head, ears forward and nose twitching, but each time he lowers it back down, assured of our safety.

I take a long time to fall asleep, which only unnerves me more, because normally I have no problem sleeping on any given patch of earth. But tonight I lie on my side, staring out at the stars slowly turning in the sky beyond the trees, thinking about the Light and culture and lines drawn in the sand. One country believes this, another believes that. What does it mean to be raised nowhere, with no strings tying you to a set of festivals or traditions? What do Veran’s books say about that span of rock and sun, the wild country that belongs to Alcoro only in name, that celebrates the shooting stars mainly for the chance to drink and holler around a campfire?

Vainly I try to reach inside, to that kind of spark Veran said belongs to one half of me—my father’s half. I don’t know what it feels like, though, or how to find it. In the desert I always felt like I was made of dust; out here it feels like nothing, like I’m just a tent of skin over bone, with nothing but empty space inside.

The night cools. Rat twitches. Veran presses a little closer in his sleep.

I finally sleep, but don’t dream.