Alira crouched to the earth, trying to pick out the Bloodborn tracks, but the sky had opened up in a downpour. The footprints filled, then overfilled and bled into one another. They dissolved into the muddy rivulets that snaked across the jungle floor.
Within seconds, they were gone.
She stood and pulled her hood tighter to keep the rain from dumping into her clothes.
Then she stared in the direction the Bloodborn had been going. She might’ve been able to track them through bent leaves and broken branches, but those, too, were being erased in the chaos of the storm.
The noise of the rain slapping through the trees was a roar. She’d been on a hunt with Whéuri the first time she’d experienced a jungle stormbreak. The huntress had made her stand in the middle of it, exposed to the noise and the wind and the wet and the fear until it was over.
Alira had thought it was like being stuck between competing waterfalls.
Kora dropped down from the branches and stood beside her. The girl’s eyes were hidden in the darkness of the hood. Alira imagined hers were, as well.
“We could just keep going in this direction,” Kora said over the splashing.
Alira was pleased that Kora had so quickly seen the problem. She’d be a great huntress one day. “Their path took several turns to get here. One more turn anywhere ahead, and we’d be off their trail for good.”
“What do we do?”
Alira frowned behind her face guard. She knew what they needed to do, but she didn’t like it. “Head home,” she said. “Get dry. Get help.”
Kora nodded. Then they both tightened down their gear against the rain and the coming run. Alira glanced up at the sky, took stock of the wind, and then set off at a steady pace along the jungle floor.
She wasn’t sure what she’d hoped to accomplish by tracking the Bloodborn. She might not be the scared girl she’d been when one of them had attacked her and Bela on that fateful night, but she still doubted she was much of a match for one. They had magick. She’d seen that with her own eyes, and the Stormborn here talked of it. Shadows in the jungle. Screams in the night. Scorched marks upon trees that weren’t made by a woman’s fire. She and Kora were good with their bows, but it probably wouldn’t be enough against a single Bloodborn magicker, much less the many they’d seen.
She wanted to find them anyway. They’d taken Whéuri and Bryt. It was the only conclusion she could make. But why? Bryt was dying when she and Kora had run. There was no saving him, not with the amount of Char he’d inhaled. Char killed mundanes. Everyone knew that. Alira suspected that when Whéuri took out her knife, it wasn’t really to defend herself against the Bloodborn. It was to spare her love more pain. And then she’d heard Whéuri’s scream through the jungle. That had surely been the moment when the Bloodborn had found the huntress. The scream had been the sound of her death. So why take the dead?
It didn’t make sense.
Nothing did. How did the Bloodborn have Char plants? Why had they grafted them to a Furywood tree? And did any of it have something to do with soulglass?
The rain had no answer.
After perhaps an hour, Alira spotted a slanted rock outcropping and routed toward it. To her relief, the slab of rock had enough of an overhang that the two of them could duck under it.
The storm’s wind still whipped around and under the rock, but it offered a chance to get out of the rain for a few minutes.
Alira shook the water off her shoulders, then pulled back her soaked hood and unclipped the face guard so she could breathe easier. Kora did likewise, taking in deep breaths.
Alira pulled out her water bag and took a long drink. Kora turned it down when it was offered and instead pulled out her own. Alira nodded, finished hers, and then walked over to the edge of the overhang, where the rain was running down and shedding off the rock in little streams. She held out the uncorked bag, filling it up.
“Why did she say that to you?” Kora asked.
“Say what?”
“The Song of the Black Hand.”
Alira pushed the cork back into the bag, made sure it was firm. She turned around. “I don’t know what that is.”
“What Whéuri said. I know those words. My … my mother used to sing them to me.” She closed her eyes as she remembered:
A shattered tree, a hearkened sea,
a tattered sail, a hardened gale,
and the gale scattered sail and sea.
A scattered hour, a sharpened power,
a battered land, a blackened hand,
and the hand shattered land and power.
It was true. They were the same words Whéuri had said. Alira didn’t think she’d ever forget them. But it didn’t mean she understood them. “What does it mean?”
Kora let out her breath. “It’s a Stormborn tradition. My mother’s mother sang it to her. My father’s parents, too, I suppose. Growing up, I didn’t think it really meant anything. The words keep repeating like that, making a kind of circle. But Whéuri clearly thought it did. And we saw the tree.”
“What tree?”
“The ‘shattered tree,’ just like the song says. The one that killed Bryt. ‘A shattered tree, a hearkened sea.’”
“It’s just a song,” Alira said, but her voice was quiet, and the waves of an open sea were in her heart.
“Maybe it’s a prophecy,” Kora continued. She gestured at the sheets of drenching rain. “Maybe it foretells something. The gale. A storm. Something great happening.”
“It could mean anything,” Alira said. “‘A tattered sail’? It’s nothing, everything.”
“It could mean you. You came from a destroyed ship of the Seaborn.”
Alira shook her head as she, too, gazed out at the sodden jungle. “We’ve got miles to run.”
Kora, thankfully, said nothing more of the song. She looked up at the sky. “It isn’t going to let up soon.”
“Ready to get wet, then?”
Kora pulled up her hood and cinched it tight. “Ready.”
Alira did the same. Then, just before she dove into the rain, she paused. There was something on the air. A scent, just barely apparent amid the heavier smells of the falling rain and the dampened vegetation around them. She sniffed, trying to catch it again, to make it out.
“What is it?” Kora asked. The girl was beside her, looking out into the downpour.
“Thought I smelled something.”
“Smelled what?”
Alira’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared. She turned her head side to side, scenting the rain.
There. Just a wisp of it. But enough.
Smoke.
And it was coming from the direction of home.