THE SKY above her suspended stars from its dome, glittering purer than Carin had ever seen. She lay on her back, the dampness of knobbly gravel cooling her, turning the perspiration cold against her skin. Ryd and Lyah sat back to back, both cradling an arm to their chests. Carin could see them out of the corner of her eye, could watch the still-heavy rise and fall of their breathing.

She made herself get up. Lyah started to rise as well, but Carin held out a hand to stay her. “You both wait here. I’ll be back.”

She gathered their water skins and stepped around them, following the lighter spattering of water she heard to her left, the rushing of the Bemin on her right. Not ten yards up the glen was the first waterfall, barely more than a rivulet—but it would do. Carin put her face directly under the stream for a moment, her body jolting at the cold shock. The water itself was icy and sweet with the slightest mineral hint from falling hundreds of feet over the sheer face of the glen’s wall. When she had drunk her fill, she held each skin under the stream until they bulged in her palm.

There would be no fire to last the night; this part of the glen was too rocky and narrow for trees to grow, but at least there was water to be had. The moons had not yet risen above the crest of the glen, and only starlight lit its darkness.

Carin returned to Ryd and Lyah, handing each of them a bottle. “Drink,” she said. “I’ll fill them again once you’ve finished.”

They drank in silence, each holding their water skins gingerly as if holding it in their uninjured hands could somehow add to their hurts.

“I wish I could see it,” Ryd said after wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “It’s too dark.”

“It still burns,” Lyah said. She held her arm away from her body, trying to straighten her elbow in vain. She winced and drew it back in. “It feels like I did the day I swam naked in the Bemin as a child all day just after High Lights. When it blistered after, but worse. Much worse.”

“What was that?” Ryd asked. “I’ve never heard of any such thing.”

Even if he had tried to keep the fear from his voice, Carin would have felt it. She shook her head, unsure if they could see the gesture. “I wish I knew.”

They spent an uncomfortable night at the mouth of the glen. Carin thought she would surely sleep, but instead sat watching the mist swirl just beyond the gate. Its tendrils still sought entry into Haver’s Glen, as if driven by some sentient being. They tested each edge, each crumble of rock, each corner. Thus, she passed the night, discomfited by the steady, too-quick beating of her heart and the fear that the mist would find a way through.

Grey dawn came late, the sun taking too long to peek its face above the ridge. By unspoken agreement, they waited to begin their trek, instead using what few small sticks they had brought to simmer the saiga neck in one of Ryd’s cook pots to make a weak stew just before the fire died. Carin found feverfew growing in the clefts of the glen’s rock faces and dropped a handful into the stew. The herb would help dull their pain.

They examined their wounds in the growing light. Webs of white overlaid the bronze skin on both Ryd and Lyah’s arms, rimmed by angry red. Both looked as though the webs had grown outward from a spiral shape around their arms as if a large snake had wound its way from hand to shoulder.

“Does it feel any better today?” Carin asked.

Lyah gave an uncertain nod, followed by Ryd a moment later, but neither allowed their eyes to meet Carin’s. She instead wet the scrap of towel she had brought in the Bemin and packed it with more crushed feverfew, wrapping it around Ryd’s arm. “Lyah next,” she said.

When the sun finally shone bars of light into the glen, the rocks around them seemed to burst into millions of tiny sparkles. Ryd gasped at the sight, sloshing his stew over the edge of his wooden bowl.

For a moment, Carin imagined Haver’s Glen as it may once have been: grey-white stones covered in the deep blue water of the Bemin, filled to the high crest above their heads and hundreds of feet deep. Perhaps the Jewel truly had been so large, a huge blue eye in the land.

The wonder filled her only seconds longer until the miles of water she imagined suddenly weighed down upon her where she stood at the would-be bottom of a sea. A chill filled her that had nothing to do with the early morning coolness.

“It’s back,” Lyah said, eyes trained on the sky. One hand held Carin’s towel wrapped around her arm, and her bowl of stew sat steaming on a rock.

The hawk had returned, resuming its circling above their heads. “At least the mist is gone.” Carin didn’t want to step outside the Haver’s Gate to prove herself right, but she had watched those burning tendrils recede as the sky grew lighter. She hoped never to see something so horrifying again.

In spite of her injury, Lyah insisted on spearing several more fish before they departed. Though it took her longer and sweat beaded her brow, she returned with a string of six fish. “The glen will keep them cool enough until we stop for the midday meal,” was all she said.

As they walked, Carin repeated their path directions in her head. She brought up the rear, allowing Ryd and Lyah before her, and each time one of them shifted a shoulder or winced visibly from the pain in their arms, Carin couldn’t help but fear the road ahead, knowing they’d only just begun. She looked up at the hawk once, staring at the circling raptor as if she could force its secrets from it with her will alone.