Aria sat on her sleeping mat, staring at her open hands. She had the strangest feeling, as though she had never seen her hands before, never known what they were capable of.
It was Abbas and Gavi’s turn to hunt tonight, so Ivy and Aria set up the sleeping mats, filled a pot with water, and chopped potatoes. Soon Gavi and Abbas returned to the camp, Abbas holding a large hare. Abbas was skilled at hunting, and on the boys’ hunting nights, they returned quickly. Ivy had always been their best hunter, and she was determined to beat Abbas’s speed at finding a meal for the group. Aria raised her eyebrows at Ivy—tonight may have been the fastest ever. Ivy smiled back at Aria, her face rueful.
Gavi shook his head with a smile as they walked to the fire.
“Abbas is the one you want with you on a journey,” he said. He opened his hand and showed Aria a cluster of what looked like tiny sticks. “Taste one,” he said.
She picked up one of the sticks and put it in her mouth. It was spicy, an explosion of flavor that reminded her of something she couldn’t quite place.
“He knows all the forest spices,” Gavi said, moving toward the cooking pot while Abbas dressed the hare. “Our food will taste like palace food on this journey.”
“I’m glad you came with us,” Ivy said to Abbas. “Not just for the spices. You’re a good travel companion.”
Ivy sat across from Aria, building the fire between them. She did it quickly, seemingly without thought, her slender hands assembling a little tent of thin sticks, then pulling a red rock starter out of her pouch, to spark the fire in a nest of grasses. Aria shivered, thinking of all the grasses they had seen burning on this journey. But this was not that kind of fire. This fire was small and friendly, without malice.
“It’s good to be here,” Abbas said in his mild way. His accent curved and lilted the words so that they sounded like a song, Aria thought dreamily. He went on. “I was tired of being indoors. I have always been on the move, all my life.”
“You are Gariah, right?” Aria asked, her voice surprising her. She hadn’t spoken much that day, and it was rusty. She cleared her throat. “Do all the Gariah travel all the time?”
“I’m from an outer tribe,” he told her. “We are the Karee, the moving ones. The Gariah live in the city, like the King. But many of them hate him also. Many fight from within, but he is very powerful.”
“I heard you are some sort of prince,” Ivy said, chopping pieces of root that Abbas had found the day before. They were nutty, filling the soup with rich flavor.
“I am a prince; my father is the Karee king. But we are a small people without a permanent place. So I am a prince of tents.” He stripped the meat from the bones of the hare, chopping it into a metal pot.
“Do you want to go back to them?” Gavi asked. The question had just occurred to Aria as well. Why had Abbas stayed with them, if he was a tribal prince?
His face grew sad as he walked to the soup pot, squatting to toss the hare meat into the water. “My people fight and lose,” he said. “They have fled to the far edges of the desert. I was captured and made a slave.” He stood up and flicked his long braid behind him. “I have seen the power of the World Whisperer, so I follow her now. I will help my people again one day, but beside the World Whisperer. I have seen it in my future.”
Aria stared at him, her hands empty and open. She knew she should be helping with dinner, but she couldn’t bring herself to move at all. She was bone weary, the kind of tired that you feel you will never recover from. She knew from talking to the others that they didn’t feel like this. It was the arrow that did this to her.
And there was Abbas, also talking about following her sister. Isika, who had abandoned Aria and sent her in a boat to die. Didn’t anyone care that Isika had sent her out? She caught herself. No, Isika hadn’t sent her out. Isika was only a child when Aria was outcast at the shore of the village. Isika wanted to be her friend.
But she hated you. They all do.
She didn’t know where the voice came from. It came out of nowhere, lately, whispering to her about her own unloveliness, the fact that nobody wanted her. She clenched her hands tight. When she looked up, Gavi was watching her.
“Having a hard time again, tonight, little bird?” he asked. The kindness in his voice was too much; tears sprang to her eyes and she nodded without words.
Abbas pulled out his pack of spices, so Aria knew it would be stew with zing again tonight, tasting like the far-off desert where Abbas came from. He was older than them, close to thirty, she thought. He was someone who had seen a lot, and for a moment, all the sorrow he must have known threatened to overwhelm her, but then Gavi came, sitting beside her on her rock. She sighed.
Gavi took her hand, and she leaned on his shoulder, exhausted from fighting the arrow, fighting her mind. Every few nights, when the arrow became too much to battle, he used his healing magic to help her. The healers in Azariyah had been baffled by this arrow, dug deep into her. They didn’t understand why they couldn’t pull it out. Before she left they had been confident that they had taken care of it, that she would absorb the poison and get rid of it. But she wouldn’t and she knew why they couldn’t remove it, though she didn’t know how to explain. The poison arrow was wedged in tight, near her ribs, into the place that had never healed, the part of her that had been sent away.
Gavi’s magic felt like her real mother stroking her forehead when she couldn’t sleep. Like her mother’s voice, as she sang in the evenings. After she had been sent away, Aria had cried and cried for her mother. She had wept until it felt like she would die. She longed for her in a way that she had never longed for anything since. And some tiny dream in her, that she would see her mother again, died the day she found Isika again and her sister told her their mother was dead.
She bowed her head as Gavi’s magic soothed her. It filled the empty spaces, and she felt hope returning. Maybe there was a place for her. Maybe she wouldn’t always be cast off and abandoned, motherless. She remembered her foster parents, how they took care of her, loved her, joked with her. She smiled.
“Little bird?” she asked, her voice hoarse. “I’m more like a little broken duck, with an annoying cry.”
“There’s our girl,” Gavi responded. “But no, you’re our little bird. We need to keep you well until we figure this out and you can fly again.”
Tears sprang to her eyes again. Gavi was so kind. A lot of time had passed while she dreamed of her mother’s voice. The soup was bubbling. Her stomach rumbled at the fragrance. Ivy bent over the pot and began to fill bowls. Gavi was still holding Aria’s hand and she felt even more strength coming from him. All at once, the circle seemed friendly again, and she couldn’t wait to eat and talk over the day with them, the way they did in the evenings. She loved her friends, and she loved Maween. She pulled away and looked at him.
“Thank you,” she said. His eyes had flowers in them. Most people in Maween had dark brown eyes, but Gavi’s were blue like the sky, with rays that bloomed out from the dark centers.
He smiled, touching her face, once, lightly. “It’s an honor to help you, Little Bird. You’re stronger than you know.”
He stood and took a bowl from Ivy, wandering over to another stone and perching on it, his long arms and legs folded up. Ivy came and offered Aria a bowl of stew, and she took it, holding her face over it, breathing it in. It smelled like far away, like running across the desert, like being under night skies.
“Thank you, Abbas, for gathering things for us to eat,” she said. He looked up, his earrings gleaming in the firelight.
“You’re welcome. Little Bird. It suits you.”
“Yes, it does,” Ivy added. “And this soup is ridiculously good. How are you even real, Abbas? Gavi, a prince has made us soup. We’ve really come up in the world.”
“Well, an almost-queen makes us our bowls, so you’re right,” Gavi said.
They all laughed, even Aria.
After they had finished and were sitting around feeling the excellent feeling of being full, Gavi asked the question Aria had been wondering about.
“What do we do?” he asked. “We have walls and fires, everywhere we go. Do we ignore the fires and work on the walls? Or do we need to put fires out first? Or do we have to do it all?” He shook his head.
“I think we should split up at each house,” Aria said. “I will take care of the fires, and you can take care of the walls and the people inside.”
They were all shaking their heads at her, instantly.
“Nope,” Ivy said.
“No, Aria, we’re not splitting up. But it doesn’t work for us to do it so slowly. What is it you do, when you’re putting those fires out? How do you keep from being burned?”
Aria looked down at her hands again. She thought about it. Part of her wanted to hold it back, to keep it as her own gift, something special for herself. But then she thought of all the fields burning, slowly dying, with the people locked inside their houses by walls and poison, losing everything. So she tried to understand what she was doing, when she put the fires out.
“The fire is not actually hot,” she said slowly. “Though it tricks us… I think I see it as it truly is. Malicious. Poisonous. But not a true fire. It burns because we let it. Our fear of it gives it heat.”
She looked up to find them all staring at her.
“Who are you, Little Bird?” Gavi asked. “How did you know that?”
She flinched, wondering at the question, but he saw her face. “I’m just kidding with you, I know who you are, Aria Rescued One. But this is amazing, that you understood this. Of course. A poison fire is not really a fire, just as a poison wall is not really a wall. It is fear that makes it real. Fear of something that isn’t actually there.”
Ivy was shaking her head, her eyes wide. “We have to write this down or something, Gavling, she’s cracked some kind of code. She’s a genius.”
Aria grinned at them. “You two are crazy,” she said.
“Crazy in love with you,” Ivy said, and Aria laughed then.
Abbas broke in. “I don’t actually understand yet. Forgive me.”
Gavi looked up from scribbling something in a small book he always carried with him. “The walls we see can be broken easily, because they are not real walls, they are poison walls. It is fear that makes them real. Fear of others, fear of the poison that makes them. So when we come and we do not fear them, when we have this gift, we can pull them down, turn them to dust.”
Abbas nodded, his dark eyes thoughtful.
“These fires are the same, but this time, the fear gives them heat, makes them real. They burn because we see them. That’s why they can sit there for so long without actually burning anything away. But when we see them and fear them, they turn into real, burning, hot fire. So the answer is to go to the fire without fear. To fight them as poison, not as fire. The way we take down walls as though they are nothing.”
“Because they are nothing,” Aria said. And maybe it was because they were around the warm, real fire, maybe it was because Ivy had said they loved her, maybe because Gavi had just used his gift to heal her, but she felt a sudden, hot surge of hope that they would overcome the poison, even the poison arrow in her. Because they would not fear.