show all the World the girl within. Her daughter stood frozen in the cold light. And then she wasn’t. The girl was suddenly different, wrong, frightening, and terrible…
The hunter cried out but it was too late. The girl threw back her strange head, hair flying all around it, and shrieked. The embers in the fireplace came to instant life, blazing, and the house was aflame, the bodies, the covers, the mattresses, the screaming intruders, the hunter’s clothes, her hair, her throat full of blood and smoke and fire-
The Middle
Enkindra woke with smoke still in her throat. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands, expecting to feel ashes on her skin, but there was nothing aside from the regular detritus of sleep. The moss mattress was unburned and she was wrapped in a cover that was not soaked in blood.
“Mother?” Next to Enkindra, her daughter yawned and resituated her pillow. She patted the girl’s shoulder and told her to go back to sleep.
She got out of bed, sure that sleep would not come to her again that night. Her heart did not race as it had in the dream, but her face was hot as though still on fire. She went to the water bowl on the table and splashed a few handfuls on her face. Then she spat mud onto the dirt floor.
Her hand was covered in dirt and now, so was her face.
Enkindra looked to the girl curled tightly in the now filthy bedclothes. She should have told her to wash off the dust but it always upset the girl so. As it had in the dream, this recent behavior still disconcerted her.
Morning was breaking somewhere far above the foliate ceiling of the woods. Another day had dawned and Enkindra went outside to meet it.
A Tale of Fear
I shall not waste my fear on the unknown
with so much already in my acquaintance to spend dread upon.
- Thoran of Mount Enror
Kimber laughed and held tighter as the wind endeavored to shove her from her perch.
They had not died in the night nor on the next day, the balance of which was spent on the ground within the circle of woven highgrass. It was Kipi who had given up on rest in favor of food and it was the green beast’s snorting and slurping that announced the lunch hour. Kimber had levered herself up and found the creature nose-first in a woven package that had not been in the clearing the night before. Another had been left intact and she had made her wary way around to find it filled with strips of meat and a hollow shaft of bone that had been broken off something larger.
Unable to resist troublesome curiosity, she had put the tube to her lips and blown. The grass beasts’ song piped through it, bringing the veser and the Elanaite scrambling to their feet. Kimber guiltily launched the thing into the highgrass behind her and busied herself with the food.
They had eaten without cooking, fearful of setting their entire camp ablaze, and while Cho had wrestled a few strips from her beast, there was not enough for a real meal, especially with Bre’et’s insistent demands for his share. In the end, it had been the pattering beginnings of an afternoon rain that had gotten them to their feet.
Kimber had expected to walk and to push their way through the stalks again but it was a day that challenged expectations. The crashing stalks of the previous night had fallen away in a northward path, not as straight or easy to travel as the tunnels they’d trekked before, but blessedly free of the constant pushing, slapping, and tangling underbrush. Kipi had once more been pressed into duty as forward guard and they had started on the day’s journey in a ragged line, the green beast, the small woman, and Kimber behind her, while the veser trailed and lingered wherever he wished.
They were not on the trail long enough to lose sight of the clearing before Bre’et was at Kimber’s back, nudging and bumping insistently. She’d turned and ruffled his stiff mane, unable to begrudge him the attention he insisted upon. Without warning, he’d pushed his head into her stomach, flipped her up onto his neck, and bolted along the track. Cho had dived out of the way and Kipi had slashed at his retreating feet. Kimber had held on for her life.
Now, saved from bruising by a folded blanket, Kimber enjoyed the breeze, the view, and the speed. If she closed her eyes, she could believe they might run forever, neither to nor from anything, merely sprinting for its own sake. Cho was probably unhappy at being left behind, but when she’d tried to force her way into the lead, the black Child had leapt cleanly over the Elanaite and her mount, kicking shreds of grass back with obvious contempt. As when they had fled the grass beasts, Kimber was only a passenger. She’d kept apologizing until Bre’et took her out of ear shot.
The stalks dove away on either side of the broken trail, each crushed out of the way by an unseen hand. Unseen and unexplained. They had both left their escapes a mystery. Kimber assumed a tale of obliging Bane would not improve her standing in Cho’s eyes and whatever had happened to the Elanaite, she had been delivered unharmed, as Kimber had kept herself believing all along. So she had simply gathered up the claws that she must have dreamed had been sticking from the Elanaite’s back and put them in the pachaak’s pack with a wary watch on her fingers, and for the moment, that was enough.
In the rush of running, she imagined she heard Hasana’s words. Not yet, he had told the veser. Not yet. Now was not the time for revelation.
The rolling waves of highgrass began to ebb, sinking down to the tops of the veser’s ears, then to his shoulders so that Kimber could see what lay ahead.
“What do you see, rel?” Cho asked, her voice echoing through the intervening stalks, a hundred little voices that insisted on forgetting Kimber’s name.
It seemed at first that they had returned to meadow wastes once more and her gut gurgled unhappily at the prospect, but the green expanse beyond was not as uniform as its cousin on the opposite shore of the sea of grass. Made blurry by distance and falling water, if she squinted hard, Kimber thought she could make out a drop and heave in the land.
“There’s a break in the earth, like some great irrigation ditch.”
Cho snorted a laugh. “Doubt the Faer would enjoy the comparison. It must be Big Valley.
“From the Tale?”
The highgrass finally gave way, not grudgingly but in unconditional surrender, disgorging the travelers onto the meadow grass and into the unadulterated pour of the storm. Bre’et shook, trying to rid himself of the clinging water, and nearly unseated his rider.
The valley stretched east and west, farther than even her vantage point would allow her to see. The farther wall was steep, gouged from the rock by the long rush of the river at its center. The southern wall must have collapsed upon itself sometime in the past, allowing the grass to clamber over the destruction and hide it beneath of verdant rug. Only the river and the vertical precipice stood as sentinels against the meadowlands hostile advance.
“Look,” Cho commanded. Her beast waddled forward so that the Elanaite could point out into the distance. “See the dark patches in the rock? Those are the caves where the sisters and their people lived.”
Kimber put a hand up to shield her eyes from the rain.
“There are people on the ridges,” Kimber said, trying to decide if she was seeing now or then.
Kipi moved forward,
