RYD’S BREATH came sharp and shallow as he shook Carin. She’d fallen sideways, almost landing in the fire, and he’d been hard-pressed to move her before her hair caught flame. A few black strands had singed, curling in on themselves in kinked spirals.

She was breathing; that much was good. Her eyeballs seemed to flit back and forth beneath her lids, and the sight unnerved him as much as the mere fact that she had collapsed in front of him. The fish he’d caught still sizzled in their pan where he’d dropped it on the ground.

Carin’s lips showed a white line around them, harsh against the brown of her skin. Ryd patted her cheek, panic rising within his chest like a flock of birds taking off from his parents’ fields. One moment she had been talking to him, the next she had dropped like a stone into a pond. Ryd didn’t know what to do.

“Carin!” He shouted her name at her, then choked on it as he remembered that it wasn’t her true name, that he’d never heard her true name spoken. He felt for a moment as if the two of them had frozen in time somewhere, continued on a path they weren’t meant for.

Her eyelids fluttered, then opened, exposing her irises, deep blue and unseeing.

Ryd reached out and patted her cheek again, and her hand snapped up, closing tight around his wrist. Her breath hissed out, and her chest went so still that for a moment Ryd wondered if she had died, and his entire body tightened like a snake in a striking coil.

But then she sucked a deep breath in, raising her free hand in front of her face, her fingers seeming to trace something there that Ryd could not see.

Her fingers dug deep into the flesh of his wrist. For several long moments they sat like that, until Ryd’s arm began to ache and his fingers went numb from the pressure of hers restricting his blood.

Ryd carefully pried her hand open to release his wrist, and she let him, her arm falling to her side. She made no other move to change position, her right hand still moving in the air and her eyes fixed on something he couldn’t guess at.

He tried to get her to move, but after several attempts he left her there, face up on the ground, soil and leaves clinging to her hair.

Ryd ate one of the fish and wandered the camp in a circuit, always keeping Carin in sight. He didn’t know what to do. He’d never seen anyone in this type of state, and watching her watch nothing made his mind spin. Instead of sitting next to her, he walked the perimeter of her camp, finding her snares. One had a rabbit in it, and the animal had strangled itself on the snare.

Ryd hadn’t cleaned a rabbit in cycles, but he found the memory of how to go about it returned quickly enough. He somewhat clumsily scraped the pelt—bits of flesh clung in some places and his knife blade cut through in others—but he succeeded as much as he hoped to. The rabbit meat he cut into strips and set up to smoke over the fire. As he watched it steam and then sizzle, he tried to keep the knot of panic from jostling his ribcage. His mind wove to and fro through worries. What if Carin never recovered? Where were they supposed to go even if she did? How was he supposed to know what to do?

For over an hour, Ryd sat, until the heat of the fire made perspiration bead on his upper lip and his eyelids stuck when he blinked, then began to water. He made a few circles through the camp, looking out at the bushes around them for any berries or edible plants he could gather. He didn’t find much nearby; a few sparkleaf bushes yielded a double handful of citrusy foliage they could eat, but Ryd couldn’t bring himself to venture farther out of the camp. When dried and boiled or smoked, the sparkleaf would also dull pain and cleanse wounds, but there wasn’t enough to spare for the drying of it.

The sun continued its arc to the sky’s zenith, then began its descent as Ryd tended the fire, turned the strips of rabbit, and kept a close eye on Carin. Three more times he attempted to rouse her, but she didn’t respond to his shaking of her shoulder or his yells right beside her face. When the grove went silent around him after one loud yell, Ryd stopped trying that way to wake her.

For the first time in his life he felt completely and totally alone. Vulnerability he had felt; his childhood of being smaller than everyone else had given him that. He had never been this physically alone, however, and the slow-returning sounds of chirping and buzzing reminded him that he had no concept in his mind of what to expect outside of the boundaries of the village he had voluntarily left behind.

Ryd thought of his parents, thought of the village that would be celebrating Lyah’s entry into full villager status. Her name. He and Carin would never know what that name was. His own came unbidden to his mind. Ryhad.

In the Hidden Vale, with the return journey to Haveranth still ahead of them, his name had fallen into his core with the same resonance of two strings plucked in harmony. Now it felt jangled and wrong, as if he had no right to it. He had chosen to forever be Ryd. His clothes were loose upon his body, and yet everything felt too tight. He fought back the rising wind of panic.

A few feet away, Carin stirred, her right arm finally falling to her side, where her fingers still twitched slightly, pale from the lack of blood flow. Her eyes, so wide and unblinking for so long, closed for three breaths. Ryd hurried to her side, taking her right hand in his and rubbing it to return circulation.

Carin opened her eyes. Red blood vessels showed through the whites, making the blue of her pupils stand out vividly like the first ripe Early Bird apple on the tree.

“Carin?” Ryd said her name gently, still massaging the palm of her hand. He didn’t expect a response.

He counted her breaths as time passed. Sixty. One hundred. Two hundred. She blinked occasionally now, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes and running down her cheeks to wet her hair. She closed her eyes again.

Another hundred breaths passed before anything changed. Finally, Carin’s eyes opened and focused on Ryd’s.

“Ryd?” She said his name almost as a whisper.

“What happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

Carin didn’t answer, but she squeezed her eyes shut, her throat convulsing and her hand tightening against his. Perhaps it was shock, like the way they had all reacted after Jenin’s death. How could someone change everything they ever knew so quickly?

After a moment, Carin dropped his hand and sat up, blinking to clear the tears from her eyes and looking around the campsite. Carin pushed herself to her knees, and though Ryd clearly saw the shaking of her right arm as she used it to brace herself against the ground to stand, she ignored the quivering limb as she rose to her feet. She straightened her shoulders, rolling each backward, one after the other. Her gaze scanned the campsite, then took in the river beyond, the position of the sun and shadows. She swallowed once and let her hands fall to her side.

Ryd watched her, a stone sinking into his stomach. She wasn’t going to talk to him. He could almost see her body closing its shutters.

Sure enough, when she spoke, Ryd knew whatever happened was her experience alone.

Carin gave the air an experimental sniff. “Is there food?”