The next day, Gavi woke Aria and Ivy at dawn. Abbas was already up, going through his paces, swinging his staff in arcs with the rising sun illuminating him. Abbas always woke earlier than anyone else, practicing staff work, or archery, or footwork. He seemed to be perpetually in motion and always aware, and Gavi was beginning to understand how disciplined he was, to continue in that way. He paused to watch the warrior prince for a moment.
Spines and stones, he needed to learn from Abbas. Abbas looked up as though he could sense Gavi watching. He whirled one more quarter circle and lunged with his staff, then relaxed, placing the staff point down and leaning on it.
“Can you teach me how to do that?” Gavi asked.
Abbas’s eyebrows shot up and he smiled. “Yes. Should we start now?”
Gavi laughed. “No, not now. Today we need to pack up and test our fire theory.”
He was more than ready to move, to get to work on the problem of the fires with a new theory in mind. He had barely been able to sleep after Aria opened up the concept of poison fires for him. Nearly every house with walls also had a fire in the fields nearby, and he couldn’t stand the thought of so much poison just sitting there, unchecked. They would send it back to the Great Waste, where it belonged.
“Nenyi help us,” he whispered.
They ate cold soup and packed away their bedding, then they were walking down the road. Aria’s braids stuck up on one side of her head after the hasty morning, and Gavi smiled at her, though she didn’t see him. His face fell as he thought of the arrow that hurt her. He could feel it every time he took a moment to send healing magic toward her. How had she hidden it so the healers sent her on the journey? What could heal it? Would her poison theory work in the fields? Would Gavi be able to put fire out with his hands?
It wasn’t long before he had a chance to try. Mid-morning, they came upon a long, long wall that had erupted around a large earth house, one with enough space for a big family. All around the house were fields of short, newly planted bean seedlings, and streams of smoke lifted into the sky from spots scattered through the field. Short flames flickered in every direction, and as they watched, the flames burned higher. Aria met his eyes and nodded.
“It’s true,” Gavi said. “They burn higher when we see them.”
He waded into the middle of the field, the others following, avoiding the fires as they walked, then stood, looking around at the rows of beans and flames.
“Now’s the time to test Aria’s theory,” Gavi said. “A theory my gut believes is right. So let’s go. North, East, South and West, kids.”
Gavi went West, his face toward the distant, invisible sea. He walked toward the first column of smoke he saw and immediately he felt it, the hot hand of poison fire. The flame leapt up in response, becoming real, singeing the edges of the plant, until the little thing wilted and fell. He stared at it in consternation. How could he not fear this thing?
Behind him somewhere, he heard music. Ivy, walking to the south, was singing.
“Out of the cracked earth
Out of the fire
Out of the flood and storm
Out of the desert
You bring light
You bring light”
Gavi began to sing as well, and he heard Aria’s sweet voice joining from the northern side.
“Oh the earth cries
Oh the scorched cries
Oh the floods cry
Oh we cry
You bring light
You bring light”
Gavi bent down, cupping his hands as though he was catching a frog, and placed his hands right on the fire. He felt the bitter taste of poison, smelled the burnt edges of it, and the fire went out. He stood up, gleeful, looking around, but they were focused on their own fires, so he went on to the next one, and they went on that way, their song floating around them, winding its way around the field until all the fires were gone. The sun was high in the sky.
All four of them sat on the side of the road, exhausted but jubilant, until Gavi shook himself.
“We need to take down the walls and release the people from poison so they can care for their lands and the fires don’t come back,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse from singing and smoke.
Ivy nodded and jumped up, clapping her hands. There was a long streak of soot down the side of her face. She grinned at them.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked, and Gavi was so thankful for her irrepressible spirit, the Ivy-ness of her, that he jumped up and hugged her. Soon he felt a little hug by his side—Aria—and a hand on his shoulder, and the four of them were clinging to each other. They turned—Gavi saw Ivy wipe tears away with the palm of her hand—and began attacking the walls, pulling them to dust, then pulling down the second walls which sprang up after, the shame walls, Jabari called them. It was hard work, after they had spent so much time on the field already. But they sang, and it made the work go faster.
“You bring light.
You bring light.”
Inside the house, a family had been trapped in the poison for months, doing nothing but eating and sleeping. They were thin from exhausting their food stores. Three young children sat on a bed at the edge of the room, and Gavi had to hold back tears at the look in their eyes when he walked in. They knew immediately who the seekers were and ran to them, shouting and crying.
“You’re here!” the oldest said. She couldn’t have been more than nine. “We knew you would come.”
Looking around, Gavi saw the mother sitting on the floor in the corner, rocking back and forth with her ser on her head. He saw the father in the other room, lying on the bed they shared. And there were more people! Perhaps the children were cousins, because there were also another man and woman, and two elder people.
He and Ivy went from person to person, touching their foreheads, calling them back from fear and shame. Abbas and Aria played with the kids and began cleaning, sweeping away the dust of the months of being locked inside with poison, uncaring and bleak. Gavi turned away from the last woman, who smiled at him, and threw open the wooden shutters that covered the windows on the earth walls. He was shaking with exhaustion.
The people knew what to do. They had been poisoned before, one of the men said, but a long time ago, so they had never met Gavi, though they had heard of him.
“You have?” he asked, incredulously.
“Oh, yes,” the woman next to him said, holding one of the children in her lap. “Everyone knows of the rescued son of the elders, white-skinned, with a gentle, healing touch and hair like the sun.”
“Gavling, you’re famous!” Ivy said, laughing.
Gavi was floored. He had lived in Jabari’s shadow all his life, and to be honest, he didn’t mind it there. In Jabari’s wake, things were a bit easier. Jabari plowed through everything and it was easy to walk behind him. To hide away in the vegetable gardens and let his brother do the work. But he had never known that people talked about him, knew who he was. He looked at Aria and her eyes were shining at him.
It was a strange feeling, to be recognized, to be away from Jabari and still be seen. He wasn’t sure it was a comfortable feeling, but it flickered in his heart and didn’t go away.
They slept there that night, barely making it through dinner before they were asleep. The healing from poison was complete with the offer of hospitality, so it was crucial that the family offered them food and a place to stay. This family was more than happy to. They recovered quickly, jumping to make things more comfortable for the seekers. When the seekers refused to take beds from the family, the family found mats that they cleaned of dust, and Gavi was asleep as soon as he lay down.
The next day, they set off, aching and happy, content to walk along the road, looking for another place to help. Right away, they put out a tiny ring of fires in brush that didn’t seem to have a family attached to it.
They were at a crossroads, when Gavi saw it. Down the road was some sort of disturbance, dust kicking up and barely visible people, tiny in the distance. In the plains beyond, he saw more dust.
“Abbas,” Gavi said, his voice low. “What is that?”
Abbas turned to look and his whole body tensed.
“That is a Gariah force,” he said, his voice an intense whisper. “What are they doing on Maweel land?”
Ivy gasped and Aria’s face paled. Gavi felt a swooping sick feeling in the center of his stomach.
“What do you mean a Gariah force?”
“The army of the Gariah,” Abbas said, staring into the distance with one hand shading his eyes. “Soldiers, with horses.”
“They’re moving toward the city,” Ivy said, panic in her voice. “What is happening, what are they doing?”
“I will go closer,” Abbas said. “I want to see who is leading them. The leader of the force will give us an idea of what they are doing. An attack commander will let us know they mean to attack, but if they are a discovery force, we will know they are spying.”
Gavi felt the blood leave his face at the mention of attacking and spying. In his lifetime there had been a lot of poison, but never a real battle. He felt dizzy, but stepped forward anyway.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
“What about us?” Ivy said. “We just sit here?”
“Someone needs to stay with Aria,” Gavi said. “She’s not going anywhere. She’s too young and not well, besides.”
For a moment, Aria looked as though she wanted to argue, but she also looked a little pinched around the lips. After a moment she nodded. Ivy, on the other hand, spoke short, intense words with Gavi, telling him why she should go with Abbas instead of him, and in the end he won, but not without pulling out his leader status. He didn’t like doing it, but he was sure of three things: Aria needed to stay, she couldn’t stay alone, and he needed to see what was happening with that force.
Just before he and Abbas walked off, Aria spoke.
“There’s something… I don’t know. I don’t feel at all well about this. Be careful, you two.”
“What do you mean?” Gavi asked.
“I feel something… I don’t know what it is. But something is seriously wrong.”
Gavi and Abbas walked down the road until they felt they were too visible, and then they continued in a copse of trees that followed the side of the road for a long way. Abbas waited and watched every few minutes, but it didn’t seem as though anyone knew they were there. As they drew close, Gavi got a clear picture of Abbas as warrior prince, trained for stealth and battle. It seemed that Abbas always knew where to step, how to get from place to place without being seen, especially as they drew nearer to the large cloud of dust that hid the camp.
Gavi felt strange things in the forest, movement and creaking, as though the trees were uneasy. And he could taste it himself, the horror of the Great Waste. He tasted intense fear and a great sense of loss. The nearer they got, the more Gavi felt as though he could hear the earth crying. He was puzzling over this when Abbas put a hand out to stop him.
“They are setting up camp now,” Abbas said. “Stopping for the night, I think. If we watch, I may be able to tell who it is, just by the color of their tent.”
They waited while the men on horseback dismounted and joined the men on foot. They gathered in a loose circle, unpacking and setting up short white tents. Abbas pointed out a couple of men who had left the camp and were walking toward them.
“Scouts,” he whispered. “We’ll have to leave soon, so they don’t find us.”
The scouts drew closer. Gavi could see their faces under their sers. He wasn’t sure if the Gariah called their head coverings sers, but they looked the same as what Gavi had worn all his life to protect his head from the sun.
“We need to go,” he whispered. He could see the satchel that one man had slung over his shoulder. It wouldn’t be long before the men stumbled on Gavi and Abbas in the brush.
“Just a moment, they are raising the leader’s tent, I can almost…”
Gavi waited, his heart beating in his throat as the Gariah scouts drew nearer.
Abbas drew a startled breath, suddenly, and said, “Let’s go.”
Together they turned and ran back through the brush, as quietly as they could, not daring to see whether they were pursued. After they had run a while, Abbas threw out a hand and they halted, crouching behind the trees. They heard nothing. When Abbas stood up to look, they could see the scouts heading back to the camp. Either they hadn’t seen them or they were too lazy to pursue, or they didn’t consider them worth pursuing. In any case, no one followed and Gavi was thankful.
They walked the rest of the way back to the others, Abbas deep in thought. Gavi was dying to know who the tent belonged to, but sensed that Abbas wanted to reach the girls, and talk while they were all together. They nearly tripped over Ivy and Aria when they reached them, sitting by the side of the road next to a well, in the shade of a hoona tree.
He and Abbas drank and they all filled their flasks, sitting and resting in the shade. Gavi felt that the wait was unbearable as the tension grew and grew. Finally Abbas spoke.
“I don’t understand it and I hate to bear this news, but the leader of the force that is going to Azariyah is to be feared above all men.”
“What? Who is it?”
Gavi knew it in his bones, as the earth shifted underneath him, crying out against the force of Mugunta in the world, knew it even as Abbas drew a breath to speak.
“It is King Ikajo, the Desert King.”