They ran.
Alira didn’t know where they were going, but she knew it was away from the Bloodborn—away from Bryt’s haunting screams.
They had to dodge and weave between trees, crash through drapes of vines and walls of brush and branch. Alira’s arms were laced with cuts. And even with the guard up in front of her face, she could still feel the sting of sweat running through the tiny scrapes across her brow. Her eyes blurred with tears from the pain, but she ran. She ran and she did not look back.
Not until Bryt’s screaming suddenly stopped.
She’d pushed Kora ahead of her when they’d fled, but the sudden silence made the girl stumble to a halt. Alira stopped too. Panting, crying, they looked back through the thick jungle. There was nothing to see but the jumble of green and shadow and the unmistakable signs of their passing.
“Gods,” Kora gasped. “Gods, they’ll find us.”
It was true. A Stormborn child could track such a trail.
Alira’s chest constricted with fear, but her fist tightened on Whéuri’s bow, which she’d been carrying in her hand. What would the huntress do?
Kora’s eyes somehow caught the movement. It choked something in her. “Whéuri. What about Whéuri?”
“She’s dead,” Alira said. Saying it made her want to throw up, but if it wasn’t true yet, it would be soon enough. She flipped the bow around her body to free her hands. “They’re both dead.”
Kora’s eyes were full of shock and horror. She shook her head and put her hands to her ears as if that would make it all go away.
Alira ignored her for the moment. There was no outpacing the Bloodborn. She knew that. When she and Bela had been attacked those many months ago, the Bloodborn woman had used some kind of magick. For all Alira knew, they could move the trees themselves, as Mabaya once had. Or burn a hole through them, as Tukaha had done before she’d been killed by the woman.
That meant they needed to hide. Somewhere.
Her eyes darted, searching the shadows. At last, her gaze fell upon a wide Furywood trunk not far away that was draped with enough vine to let them climb to its first crowning. Not much. But a start. They’d be harder to track off the ground. And they’d have better positions if it came to a fight.
“Up,” she said, turning to the girl. She reached out and grabbed Kora’s shoulders, shaking her so that she’d focus on the moment and not her fears. “We’ve got to climb up.”
Kora was wide-eyed and weeping, but finally she nodded.
“Hurry,” Alira urged, and she pulled her toward the tree, trampling through the brush. There was no sense trying to cover their tracks here. The Bloodborn would know where they’d gone. Their only hope was that the monsters couldn’t follow.
They had just reached the trunk of the mighty tree when a scream pierced the air in the distance behind them. A sound of incomprehensible pain. A sound that came, Alira was sure, from Whéuri.
Kora started to climb, and Alira followed close behind, gripping and kicking her way up the bark and vines.
When Whéuri didn’t scream again, Alira said a silent prayer that she’d taken a Bloodborn bitch with her into the final dark.
They reached the first crowning, and they made quick work of cutting the vines they’d climbed. Then Alira pushed Kora to climb farther up to the second crowning. There, she pointed to a wide branch-path that led not away from the Bloodborn, but back toward them.
Kora shook her head in fright, but she knew enough not to protest aloud.
Alira leaned to her ear, their face guards touching. “They’ll assume every other direction but back,” she whispered. “Slow and silent. Back and up, by whatever path least likely to leave a trace.”
The girl was frozen for a moment, and Alira put a hand on her arm and squeezed it with a reassurance she did not feel.
Kora nodded. Then, to Alira’s relief, she padded forward along a branch in perfect, trackless silence.
*
They were three trees back and two crowns farther off the ground when they saw the Bloodborn moving below.
Kora, slipping along the branch ahead, saw them first. She stopped in mid-step and melted down into a crouch, little more than a bump in the wide wood. Alira did the same, slipping Whéuri’s bow off her back in the same motion.
It took Alira only moments to track Kora’s gaze and spot the shapes moving below.
There were a dozen of them: black shapes moving in a line, following the path that their crashing run had made. Their heads moved side to side in a careful watch. Their inhuman laughter was no more. They moved like shadows of wind-touched trees. Silent as ghosts.
The Bloodborn would see where the trail ended. The only question was what they would do then. What they could do then. Could they climb as Stormborn huntresses did? Could they fly?
Alira’s hand once more tightened on the grip of Whéuri’s weapon. If the Bloodborn could fly, then by the goddess, she’d grant one an arrow straight to the chest. She’d make Whéuri proud.
Kora made the gentlest of clicks, the sound of a bird’s beak pocking wood. When Alira looked over, she saw the girl gesture toward the last of the Bloodborn.
The woman was carrying something, but it was hard to see it clearly. Something small.
No bigger than her fist. Alira narrowed her eyes, trying to make it out.
Then the Bloodborn passed through a pocket of open space. The light glinted and shined off the thing.
A crystal. And not just any crystal.
Soulglass.
Alira was sure of it. Twice previously, she’d seen one. Just hours before the bombs of the Windborn took Bela’s life, they’d gone with the evoker Tukaha into an ancient temple, and there they’d taken such a crystal—moments before a Bloodborn magicker had attacked them, murdered the evoker, and nearly killed her and Bela. Later, after the Windborn had destroyed their ship and left Alira stranded here on Myst Mahaki, she’d seen Bryt and Whéuri recover another soulglass from the temple. She’d never known what it meant, what it was, but she knew it was important to them. She’d seen how the Stormborn elder, Amaru, had lifted it up as if it were beloved.
“Take peace,” Alira whispered, her words no louder than her breath given voice. They were the elder’s words, what Amaru had said as she’d held the soulglass before her people. “All find rest.”
“All find rest,” Kora breathed.
Like hidden hawks, the two of them watched from their high perches while the Bloodborn moved on out of sight.
Only when they were gone did either of them move. Kora went first, uncoiling herself from her position on the branch and carefully creeping forward to the next Furywood crowning. There, she slunk in silence to the other side of the trunk, putting one more shield between them and the departed Bloodborn. Alira followed and found the girl crouched on a branch, leaning back against the trunk. Kora’s eyes were closed. Though she made no sound, tears ran down her cheeks.
Alira got down beside her, wiped the tears. When more came, she opened her arms, and Kora fell into them. The girl made no sound as she mourned. It wasn’t the first time that she’d had to wail in silence.
Alira wanted to cry, too, but she somehow felt Whéuri’s eyes upon her, the rebuke of her dead teacher. Giving in to the emotion would be letting go of her control, and she couldn’t afford that now. So she held Kora close as she cried, held her as she thought a mother would. And as she held her, she looked past her, out at the jungle, thinking about what to do next, looking for signs of life.
Kora stilled, sniffed, and took a shuddering breath. As her back stiffened, Alira let her go, let her straighten up. She looked into the girl’s eyes. They were reddened from crying, but they were determined.
Alira nodded, squeezed Kora’s shoulder, and then stood. She looked back in the direction that the Bloodborn had gone. There was no movement still.
Kora stood beside her. “What now?” she whispered, leaning close.
Alira blinked, then gestured in the direction of Bryt and Whéuri.
“Back?”
“I have to know.”
Kora nodded, and in silence, she tiptoed along the Furywood branch in that direction.
They’d been in a race before, full of life as they’d run through the trees, almost heedless of their heavy steps. Now every movement was calculated, and death hung over them like a thick fog that had to be pushed through by sheer force of will.
Before, they’d been hunting. Now, they were hunted.
Moving so slowly, it took them an hour to cover the distance that their earlier panicked run had managed in mere minutes. The sky, when they glimpsed it between trees, had begun to darken. A storm was coming.
Kora, moving ahead, was the first to recognize where they were. She settled down along a wide branch, exactly where they’d crouched with Whéuri when they’d looked down and first seen the strange growths upon the Furywood’s roots. Already it seemed a lifetime ago.
Thunder shook through the jungle. Distant but looming.
Alira reached Kora, took a deep breath, and looked down—down the long lines of the enormous trunk, down to the wide roots gripping into the earth, where the Char dusted the plants that had been grafted into those great fingers of living wood, where Bryt had inhaled that horrible yellow dust and Whéuri had pulled her knife as the Bloodborn had come.
The clearing was there. It was empty.