Eliska opened her eyes and stared up at blue sky above her head. Tree leaves swayed at the ends of branches up there.

She glanced around and froze when she saw Yann sitting next to her.

He smiled down at her, but his lips kept twisting all the wrong ways. “Hello,” he murmured.

She opened her mouth to say something—and stopped. She picked up her head and looked around.

They were alone. She lay on the ground with her cloak draped over her. Wesh lay asleep in the grass nearby, but it was the middle of the afternoon.

She frowned at the surroundings. They sat at the edge of a small stream. She frowned even more when she recognized it. “Um…where are we?”

“We’re somewhere in the Ancestral Empire,” Yann replied. “Do you remember the Dark river?”

She furrowed her brow. “I remember it, but….”

A shriek startled her into sitting the rest of the way up. She grabbed her cloak to hold onto it.

The noise came from some kind of creature at the edge of the trees. It took Eliska a minute to register that it was a girl about her own age.

This girl looked nothing like a girl. She wore a filthy dress saturated with some kind of black tar. No one could see what pattern the dress had been originally.

The same thick, black sludge clung to her hair, skin, and hands. She lurked in a crouch under the tree branches across the area.

The Watchmen must have been camping here for a few days now. They’d trampled the whole stream bank. Their tracks led off in multiple directions, but none of the men were here now, not even Yvan.

“You fell into the river,” Yann told her. “It cast a spell on you. You went out of your mind and walked straight into it. You even used your magic to stop us from saving you. That girl pulled you out. We don’t know who she is or how she did it. She’s been hanging around watching us take care of you ever since. She won’t go away no matter what anyone does to try to drive her off.”

Eliska stared at the wild girl. The wild girl only made fleeting eye contact with Eliska before the girl went back to shrieking, snarling, and pawing her way through the bushes.

Eliska gulped as the puzzle pieces snapped into place. She remembered the Dark river. She didn’t remember anything after that.

“How long have I been out?” she husked.

“Three days,” Yann replied. “Wesh has been working on you. He told us last night that you were coming out of it and that you were just asleep now. You were out cold the rest of the time.”

Her hand flew to her head and she groaned. “Three days! We could have gotten ambushed in that time.”

“No one wanted to leave while you were in danger.”

She glanced at him and saw him gazing at her with an expression wrenched with misery.

“I’m so sorry, Eliska,” he croaked. “I should have told Wesh sooner that you got hurt. He said it didn’t matter, but I still should have told him. I never should have taken the chance that something like that would weaken you.”

She stretched out her hand to take his and she opened her mouth to say something, but right then, Vidal came back from somewhere.

She yanked her hand away before he saw her about to take hold of Yann’s.

“Well, look who’s alive and well,” Vidal exclaimed and collapsed on the grass. “We didn’t think you’d wake up so soon. Are you hungry? Neils caught another hog.”

Vidal’s voice woke up Wesh. He lifted his head and frowned. “Huh?” Then he saw Eliska sitting up.

“My dear!” he exclaimed. “You woke up early. I didn’t expect you to.”

“Thank you for taking care of me,” she replied. “I don’t know what to say except that I’m sorry I slowed everyone down.”

“Never mind, never mind.” He scooted over and started touching her on the shoulder, on the head, and on the back.

She felt him probing his magic into her and checking her the way he would have checked her for injuries.

She tolerated it. She never would have expected any of these men to go to so much trouble over her. She definitely didn’t expect them to delay their travels for three whole days because they were worried about her.

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Yann looked away and straightened his expression. Whatever might have passed between them evaporated when the other Watchmen returned.

They gathered around the fire while Neils skinned and gutted his hog.

He grinned at her. “We’ve been doing things the old-fashioned way. Wesh is useless when it comes to all this outdoor stuff.”

“I was a little preoccupied,” Wesh fired back. “I’m not completely useless.”

“Do you know how to skin and gut an animal with magic the way Eliska does?” Niyazi asked.

Wesh squirmed. “Well…no….but I’m sure I could figure it out.”

Neils held up his hands and leaned away from the hog. “Here. Let’s see you give it a shot.”

Wesh looked away. “Another time, perhaps.”

The others laughed at him. Their interaction had become so much more casual and familiar than Eliska remembered it.

No one made a big commotion about her waking up. They went about their business as if she’d only just woken up from a nap.

The wild girl kept interrupting their conversation at random intervals. The Watchmen ignored her, too—right up until the moment when Neils started to divide the cooked meat.

Vidal got to his feet, gathered a bunch of leaves to form a bowl, and Neils deposited a portion of the meat into Vidal’s hands.

He carried the meat out into the trees, laid it on a bare patch of ground, and left it there. The wild girl waited for him to leave before she crept out of the undergrowth, snatched the bowl, and took the food deeper into the bushes.

She sat on her haunches and devoured it in wolfish bites.

“What is she?” Eliska asked.

“We don’t know,” Wesh replied. “She doesn’t speak any language that we can understand.”

“She doesn’t speak any language at all,” Rien added. “She’s a wild animal. She only hangs around for the food.”

“You know that isn’t true,” Wesh replied and turned back to Eliska. “She keeps coming into camp every now and then to check on you…..and she keeps trying to talk to Yann.”

“He’s the only person she does try to talk to,” Barsali added.

Eliska looked back and forth between the men and the girl. “That’s strange. I wonder why she’s so interested in me.”

“Maybe she’s just worried about you falling into the river,” Wesh suggested. “She rescued you.”

“But why?” Eliska asked. “I sense that she has great magic. She could have gotten herself killed by going into that river.”

“I sensed the same thing,” Wesh replied. “I was wondering if you could tell us why she did it.”

She spun around to stare at him. “Me?! What makes you think I know why she did it?”

“I wondered if you knew her—if you recognized her from somewhere. I wondered if she remembered you from your wanderings and decided to save you for something you might once have done for her—or something like that.”

Eliska stared across the clearing. “I don’t recognize her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before. I think I would remember her if I had.”

“You might not remember her if she was sane before,” Niyazi pointed out. “She could have been intelligent, graceful, and beautiful the last time you saw her.”

“Which explains why she keeps trying to talk to Yann,” Vidal finished and the Watchmen laughed.

“That’s enough,” Yvan snapped.

The Watchmen finished snickering over their joke. Yann looked away. They must have been giving him a hard time for the last three days about the wild girl trying to talk to him.

“If I had to guess, I would say she understands the connection between Yann and Eliska,” Wesh suggested. “The two of you were under the river for a long time before she pulled you out. She may have sensed something then, so she may be trying to tell him something about your condition.”

Eliska looked down at her hands. She still felt numb all over. “She can’t tell us, so I guess we’ll never know.”

“Maybe she’ll leave us alone as soon as we move on and stop feeding her,” Rien chimed in.

“We’ll keep feeding her as long as she hangs around,” Yvan decided. “If she’s that out of her mind, she’ll probably forget about us long before we forget about her.”

“Not if there’s food involved,” Neils pointed out. “She looks pretty hungry to me.”

Eliska found herself studying the wild girl. The girl fascinated Eliska for some reason.

Eliska spent a few years of her early childhood tagging after other travelers and eating whatever scraps they threw her or trash they left behind.

She understood that kind of madness. She saw herself reflected in that girl out there—a girl driven insane by loneliness, confusion, and desperation.

Eliska didn’t tell the Watchmen that. She didn’t recognize the girl and yet Eliska recognized everything about the girl.

That girl out there was a mirror reflection of Eliska herself. That girl could have been a magical projection of Eliska’s memories. Did the Dark river create this shade to haunt Eliska with memories from her past?

She didn’t tell Wesh, either. She didn’t want the Watchmen to know about that.

The girl’s howls, snarls, and insane shrieks confirmed the truth. She wasn’t Eliska.

Eliska never made sounds like that. She stayed silent for years and never spoke to anyone. She never sank that far into the realm of lunacy. She came close a few times, but not quite.

Neils served her with her share of the food. She didn’t have to join in the conversation. The next time she looked up, she didn’t see the wild girl at all.

Eliska suffered a pang of both relief and longing. She didn’t want the wild girl to just evaporate into the shadows. At the same time, the wild girl haunted Eliska in terrifying ways.

She didn’t want to see that picture of herself right in front of her—the picture of just how far she’d strayed from her own sanity.

“We’ll stay here another day while Eliska regains her strength,” Yvan was saying. “Save some of the hog meat for our travels or get another one before we leave. We can work our way north to get past the Dark river before we cut west again.”

“We don’t have to stay,” Eliska replied. “I feel strong enough to travel.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Omer told her.

“Don’t push it,” Barsali added. “You might feel fine sitting here eating your food. Hiking across country all day will be much harder.”

“You’ll need more strength than just hiking across country,” Wesh chimed in. “That river is cutting straight through the Ancestral Empire. If that river made it this far inland, other Dark forces could be at large in this Island. You’ll need all your power to fight them.”

“We already know they’re here,” Yann pointed out. “We’ve seen them elsewhere besides the river.”

She couldn’t look up at him. So he must have told the others about the Darkling attacking her.

She regretted asking him to keep it a secret. That wasn’t fair to him.

She shouldn’t have hesitated to tell Wesh herself. She should have confided in him.

Wesh and Yvan both deserved to know about any Darklings this deep inside the Ancestral Empire. They needed that information to plan the group’s course and strategy.

She let the whole group down by keeping that to herself.

End of Chapter 23.