THE STONE was right where Culy had said it would be, half-buried in a boggy hummock. Carin slid off Tahin’s back when she saw it, running toward the stone as fast as her unsteady feet would carry her. She felt a thrum of familiarity when she looked at it, a shock like coming around a bend in the river to see a person you knew. Reaching out a hand, Carin touched the stone with careful fingers.

The hum of magic filled her space, her body and the air around it. As her hand lay against it, the hum grew stronger, louder, brighter until Carin felt her skin begin to itch and she jerked her arm back. Even in a bog, she didn’t want to accidentally set something ablaze.

Sart tied Tahin to a vine-covered tree and came to join Carin by the stone.

“This is one of them, then?”

Carin nodded, as sure of this as she had ever been of anything. She traced her hands over the face of the stone, and they found deep grooves in the surface, half obscured by slimy moss. Looking around, Carin saw some coarse grasses growing in an uneven plume not far away. She plucked a double handful and began to use them to scrub at the stone face, wiping away the slick green layer and exposing bits of grey underneath, discolored from their long-worn slime.

“Runes,” Sart said.

Carin’s first finger traced a horizontal groove across the center of the stone. Cut deep, it had endured for hundreds and hundreds of cycles. From it, three lines cut downward, long on either end, shorter in the middle. “Avarn,” she said. To revive. Avarn also meant to water, and the rune itself was a symbol of rain falling from a cloud.

She looked up to see hunger in Sart’s eyes and something else she couldn’t quite describe.

“Avarn,” said Sart. “This spell your ancestors wove. You said it controlled five things. Water was one of them.”

Carin nodded, tracing the rune again. Her flesh seemed to yearn for the stone, to seek something within that it had lost, perhaps. She tried to funnel the humming like Sart had taught her, to spindle it inside her.

As a child, Carin had liked watching Novah ve Haveranth spin bavel into thread, watching her feet work at ingenious pedals and turn a rapidly spinning wheel that took clouds of fluffy bavel and made it into the finest plied thread in the Hearthland.

Trying to spin the hum that buzzed at her bones and skin felt like her feet kept falling off the pedals and the wheel locked up.

She thought of what Culy had said, that anything that happened after the breaking of the stone would be laid upon her shoulders. Looking at Sart, she wondered how much of the woman’s camaraderie was true and how much would turn to smoke as soon as something began to go wrong. She liked the short-haired young woman, but Carin was not sure if trust was a value she could afford any longer. The memory of the ialtag came to her mind. Carin missed the easy understanding of their communication, how they were able to impart whatever it was they thought or felt into a single touch. No ambiguity. No confusion. Just an open channel of thought.

“We should try and break it if that’s still your plan,” Sart said.

Carin jerked her fingers away from the stone as if they had encountered something sharp.

“I need to think,” said Carin.

“Forget what Culy said.” Sart bent to touch the stone herself, dark eyes shining with hope. She straightened a moment later, digging some green moss from beneath her fingernail. “If you think this will help restore whatever has been lost, it is a chance worth taking.”

Carin thought she agreed, but after moons upon moons of trekking across the world, weariness wore her like a cloak. She considered what Sart had said as they rode away from Lahglys on Tahin’s back. That there were colors here, that people found a way to survive. Carin could do the same, could adapt. Her body had changed in the past nearly twelve moons. Whatever comfort had clung to her bones before the Journeying had long since gone. Her stomach was flat and rippled with muscle, her breasts smaller but tighter. She had already reshaped herself to fit this new land; surely she could continue to do the same.

For the first time since crossing the mountains, Carin wasn’t sure what she had in her to risk.