Over the weeks that followed, they fell into a routine that could nearly be described as pleasant.
Granted, Ashfall wasn’t near so welcoming as Loftland. Every day it proved itself a greater nuisance than the day before, from sparse foraging to perilous screes to driving, icy rainstorms. The nights were a chorus of soft rustling and distant, snapping twigs, the mornings gray and dull, the evenings morose red. Mara went to sleep aching, woke up stiff, and went through the day with a constant pang of hunger gnawing at her gut.
There were the dreams, of course. Since Cinder, there were no more flashes of jealousy or anger, and no mention of the flash that had occurred. There was only Davy and a soft bed. A low voice and a steady heartbeat. Playful banter, if she was in the mood. Idle dreaming of the life they had both yearned for but never bothered to plan. A small cottage and their own chickens. A dog for Nick and a quiet future for them.
Even beyond the peace of the dreams, though, life wasn’t so bad.
They took a steady pace, stopping frequently to drink water and to eat, and for Eli to push a little healing magic at them if they needed it. For Mara, the trek was a steady discomfort but never a torment. For Nick, it was a grand adventure. She had never seen her son glow with such constant, unfettered joy, set alight by the constant cascade of new vistas, new rocks to turn over, new tricks of field craft, new stories, new hills to scramble up and slide down. Even Eli seemed to descend into something resembling contentment, though she could only see it in the evenings, when they sat beside the fire. And only if she let the silence linger.
On the easier days, they resumed their lessons in magic. They reviewed the basic theory of persuasion–namely its reliance on the receiving party’s own backlog of memory and emotional range. Basically, Eli explained, the more there to support the user’s agenda, the easier the push.
With that in mind, they focused first on the basics–capturing rogue emotion. It wasn’t hard to find opportunity for practice, as Mara’s inner sanctum crawled with rogue emotions, even on her calmest days. Fear, grief, anger. He taught her how to catch them before they ran free, how to follow the threads of each to their source and clip them off with her intent.
Once she’d grasped that, he taught how to sense persuasion. She thought that part would be easier, since his persuasion was so familiar, but it had no sense-able footprint when she was on the receiving end. To practice, he would hold a rock in one hand and nothing in the other. Then he would close his fists and ask which hand held the rock. On some rounds, he would send a push of persuasion, telling her she’d seen it in the wrong hand. On some rounds, he didn’t. Her job was to discern when his persuasion and her memory were conspiring against her.
She was very bad at the game.
It took her a week and a half to get the hang of it. A week and a half before she learned to turn her sensing inward to the soft, vulnerable space where her ribcage separated. In the presence of persuasion, she finally realized, that space always felt hollow.
When she started winning the rock game, they finally put the two skills together. With her permission, Eli sent small, innocuous orders at her–stand up, stop walking, sit down, pick that up, put it down–throughout the day, packaged with escalating quantities of persuasion. She had no warning when the orders would come, and her task was to pick up on her body’s warning and corral the persuasive push the same way she did her own emotions. For three days straight, she failed even to notice the orders until she’d already carried them out. But on the fourth day of practice, she felt it and from there it only took her two more days to successfully resist the commands.
Aside from the lessons, she and Eli spoke to Nick more than they spoke to each other, taking turns wrangling and entertaining him. But sometimes, when Nick was napping or distracted, she asked him questions. Questions about the Enclave–would there be a school for Nick? Would there be somewhere for her to work? Yes and yes. Questions about him–was he excited to return home? What would he do when they arrived? Not particularly, and he didn’t know. Whatever was asked of him.
It was in the comfortable tedium of Ashfall that Mara began to develop a nascent curiosity about her guide that was driven not by mistrust and fear but by amusement and affection. Just an itch, really, a nagging little pressure to fill in the empty nooks and crannies in her knowledge of him.
“What gods do you worship?” she asked one day, pulling the question from the cool, damp air.
“Hm?” He had his back to her, Nick draped giggling over his shoulders as they picked their way through a thicket–white vines with sharp black thorns and purple leaves. As a great believer in the intrinsic value of all life, it pained Mara that all she could ever see when she saw these brambles–Luxanna, unless she was mistaken–was that they were absolutely hideous.
“The gods,” she repeated. “Which ones do you worship?
“You know it’s illegal to ask me that.”
“Under Order law,” she scoffed. “Which hardly applies to us, given the circumstances.”
Free of the thicket, he swung Nick off his shoulder and set him on the ground, keeping hold of the boy’s hand as he regained his balance. “The old gods, I suppose.”
Mara nodded. She had thought as much. Half the stories he told Nick were tales of the old gods, sometimes adapted for young years but recognizable nonetheless. Gwyneth and the Hawk, only it ended with the hawk giving his mistress a stern talking to instead of pecking out her eyes. Ragadoth’s Tower, where everyone miraculously evacuated the building before it fell and the ruinstar grew, not from the corpses buried in the rubble but from the remains of Ragadoth’s abundant larder.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“The old gods abandoned us,” she teased. “Or hadn’t you heard?”
They’d reached a new patch of luxanna, crawling low and stealthy across the forest floor. Eli bent and snagged Nick by the back of his coat, eliciting a squealing giggle, and draped him once more over his shoulders. “At least I’m not a death worshiper.”
“Are you implying I am?” She balked with indignation, although the assessment was accurate. Perhaps because the assessment was accurate. “What would give you that notion?”
One hand occupied with Nick, he waved the other at the vines through which they tiptoed, carefully not to snag their clothing on the thorns. “Your plant obsession, for one. All plant people worship the Depths.”
“That’s not true!” It very much was.
“Maybe you don’t all start out that way, but once you get to fretting over the dirt, it’s a steep slide into Depths worship. And I’ve never met someone who frets so much over dirt as you do.”
“I don’t fret over dirt.” She very much did.
“You’re telling me you couldn’t tell me right now what plants would grow best in the soil we’re walking on?”
“Well I wouldn’t go so far as to call this soil,” she said, scuffing her boot through the sooty powder that covered the ground. There’d clearly been a wildfire here recently. The trees were scorched, the groundcover all but nonexistent. “It’s still mostly ash. It’s no wonder we keep running into these brambles. Hardy vines and berry plants are always the first to repopulate after a wildfire.”
“Mmhm,” he hummed, swinging Nick back down. “As I was saying…”
She scowled at his back. “Alright, you can have that point. But just so you know, I had you pegged for a pagan weeks ago, so you’re just as transparent as I am.”
“Is that so?”
“Mmhm,” she mimicked. “Don’t think I haven’t put the pieces together. That story you told, when we first entered Loftland? About the deer?”
“What about it?”
“What kind of deer was it?”
He didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
“It was a Rho deer,” she answered for him. “A wounded Rho deer. You could have killed it, stashed the body, come back later. The antlers alone would have set you up like a king. And instead you saved it? Nobody would have done that who didn’t worship the old gods.”
“You don’t worship the old gods,” he said tightly. “You respect them.”
“I’m right though?”
“Aren’t you always?”
And so it went, day after day. They walked, they wrangled Nick, they talked, they trained. The days clipped themselves together into weeks, and before long the terrain began to change once more. Steep mountains tumbled down into rolling hills, the air growing thick and warm. The trees shrank, the soil softening beneath their boots.
Mara wasn’t sure the exact day that she caught the first glimpse of the Great Ribbon, a tiny wedge of silver-blue glistening at the sharp divot where two distant hills met. Weeks had passed since leaving Cinder, but she’d stopped keeping track of the days. She pointed out the faraway glimmer, and Eli confirmed it.
“We’ll reach the bank early tomorrow,” he said, dropping back to walk beside her. “Make a camp and get some rest. We’ll cross after dusk.”
He hadn’t shared that aspect of the plan with her yet, perhaps because he knew that it would prevent her from sleeping once she heard it.
She’d been dreading the Ribbon, in a background simmering sort of way, all along. She found water frightening, in no small part because she didn’t know how to swim. The thought of crossing during the day, when she could see, had frightened her. Crossing at night, when the water was inky and unknowable?
She tried to keep her fear to herself, and failed miserably. That night, after Nick had gone down, she sat cross-legged by the dimly glowing darknight fire, prodding at the dirt beside it with a stick and thinking about drowning. Eli sat beside her.
“Are you nervous about the river crossing?” he asked without preamble, leaning back on his hands.
“Of course I am.” Forcing a deep, calming breath, she shook her head. “I don’t know how to swim. I’ll get us all drowned.”
“No, you won’t. I have a plan.”
“Does your plan involve a boat?
“I’m afraid not,” he said, a smile in his voice. “But it also doesn’t involve anybody drowning.”
“Not even on accident?”
“No. The worst case scenario for my current plan is that we get swept downstream to the rapids and bashed to death against the rocks, in which case we won’t have the chance to drown.”
A laughed burst out of her. “Oh, good. What a relief.”
“I knew you’d think so.”
Mara waited, but he didn’t say anything more. She poked him in the leg with her stick. “I’m ready to be comforted now. No jokes this time.”
He reached out and snagged the stick from her hand, using it to stir things about in the fire until the glow emitting from the pit flared.
“I won’t let you or Nick drown. I also won’t let you get bashed to death against the rocks, or picked up by an Order patrol, or freeze to death, or any other calamity. It’s going to be unpleasant and cold and probably frightening. But I’m confident I can see you safely across.”
She studied his face in the low, yellow glow of the darknight fire. He looked sincere. Almost painfully so, his mouth bracketed by little grooves of tension. “No calamities?”
“None I can’t see you through.”
“Okay.” She still wasn’t going to sleep tonight, but she did feel a minute lightening of the tension in her neck. “Thank you.”
“You’re alright for your shift?”
Mara nodded. If it was an option, she’d let him sleep through his own since she wouldn’t be able to rest anyway. But letting him sleep wasn’t in her power, since she never had to wake him. He always stirred to life just when her watch was ending, like some clock had buzzed in alarm inside his head.
He bedded down as he always did, stretched out alongside the fire, close enough that she could hear him breathe. And when, three hours later, he roused from sleep with his usual uncanny accuracy and relieved her, she slept as well. Soundly. And she dreamed of Davy, telling her not to give up.