Kiva waited for Po to fetch two Forsaken men and bring them to the pit. After they came, they all began to walk to the place where Kiva sensed the Strangers had landed. As they began to walk, morning broke around them, the light of the Great Mother warming the edge of the horizon.
Kiva stopped, lifted a flat hand to signal her followers to stop too. She closed her eyes. She sensed that the Strangers had landed somewhere to the south and east of the village; getting there from the pit, which was due north, had brought them close to the village, to the grassland just beyond its border. Kiva opened her eyes again and looked to her left, saw the rise jutting into the air some thousand paces away.
They still had a long way to go, but Kiva sensed something right where they stood. Some disturbance.
“What is it, Vagra?” Rehal asked. “Are we close?”
Kiva shook her head. “Someone’s coming. They’re afraid.”
“The Strangers?” Thruss asked, unable to hide the fear in her voice.
But it wasn’t the Strangers. At that moment, two Vagri children came over the nearest hill, panting as they ran through the waist-high grasses, their faces streaked with tears. They stopped and cowered when they saw Kiva and the people with her.
Kiva walked to them, a hand held out.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said to the children, a boy and a girl. “Tell me what’s happened.”
Their eyes were glassy, looking past Kiva, and their breaths were panicked gasps. They were in shock. Whatever they’d seen, it hadn’t just scared them—it had terrified them.
Kiva turned to the older child, the girl, and hooked her finger under her chin, tilted her head up softly.
“Look at me,” Kiva said, then waited for the girl’s eyes to focus, her breath to slow. “You’re safe now, okay?”
The girl turned to the little boy and touched him on the shoulder. He raised his eyes to his sister, then looked at Kiva. Kiva gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile.
“What are your names?” Kiva asked.
The girl nudged her younger brother.
“Ferrin,” he said.
“And you?”
“Edela,” the girl said.
“Those are nice names,” Kiva said.
The children angled their eyes toward the ground.
“Now,” Kiva said, “tell me what happened.”
The girl spoke.
“We snuck off in the morning, before the Great Mother rose. We were out in the prairie, just walking.”
“How far? Which way?” Kiva asked.
“To the west,” Edela said, waving off in the distance, “maybe three or four lengths beyond the edge of the village. The Great Mother had come up, and we were about to turn back. That’s when we saw them.”
Kiva’s body went tight. “Who?”
“I don’t know. Creatures I’ve never seen before. They walked on two legs, like us, but there was something different about them. Something strange.”
“I want you to be sure. Try hard to remember. It wasn’t just one of the Forsaken that you saw?”
The girl shook her head. “No, Vagra. I’m sure of it. They wore strange clothes, blue coverings that clung tight to their bodies. And their skin was the wrong color; it was pink, like the color of the sky, but paler.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
Kiva nodded. “Good. What else?”
The girl squinted. “One of them carried something. I don’t know what it was. It looked like a stick. But fire leapt from the end of it.”
“He tried to hurt you?”
The girl nodded. “Yes. He pointed the stick at us and a bright light came toward us. But it missed us—it hit the ground and burned up the grass.”
Kiva sucked in a breath. It was all so much like her vision, the one that had come over her at the pit.
“Children, may I …” She hesitated. “I need to touch you to search your minds. I need to see exactly what you saw. May I do that? It won’t hurt, I promise.”
The boy looked to the girl. The girl met Kiva’s gaze and nodded.
“Yes,” she said.
Kiva reached out her hands and placed them dead center on the children’s chests, palms flat. She closed her eyes.
In a flash, she was inside their minds, seeing what they had seen out on the grasslands.
The sight of the Strangers as they came over the hill.
The boy from her dream—the same one, the one with the deep blue eyes.
Matthew.
Another boy standing and leveling his weapon, fire leaping from the end of it.
The children ducked and turned away, lifting their heads only when they saw the flaming orb of white light hit the ground and vaporize the grass just next to them.
They looked up to see the two figures struggling in the distance, Matthew grabbing at the weapon.
Kiva came out of the vision with a shallow gasp. For a moment the world pitched and she put a hand on her chest to steady herself.
“Thank you,” she said to the children after she’d found her balance. She stood. “Go home to be with your father; he’s probably worried about you. Stay in your hut today. Everything is going to be fine.”
Kiva rose and watched the children as they walked toward the village, then turned to Thruss, Rehal, Quint, Po, and the two Forsaken men. They’d heard everything.
“Po was right,” she said. “We have to kill them.”
Kiva shook her head. “No.”
“But Vagra, you heard—”
“I heard exactly what you heard,” Kiva said. “But I also saw something—something that none of you have seen. I saw exactly what those children saw. I saw one of the Strangers fight the one who attacked them. I’ve seen it in my visions as well. We have an ally among them. The Ancestors have shown me this.”
“So what do we do?” Po asked.
“We stick with the plan,” Kiva said. “Come on, let’s go.”