They left Portal just after dawn on August 5. As they climbed the barren hills to its south, one could still see the town—a patch of olive green on a white-gold plateau—from quite a distance.

Farisa wondered for a moment whether she and Mazie, rather than march on into this heat, should have stopped there and begun new lives under names the world had never heard before. But by sunset, she was happily reestablished in her present moving place. Out here, farther away from known adversity and into the unknown kind, was where she and Mazie belonged, with sweat on their arms and fifteen miles between here and where they’d woken up.

As they climbed, the climate grew more temperate. The hills were green at eye level by the tenth of August; white-flowered wild meadows and morning fog soothed the eyes. Days remained hot, but nights required sleeves. As the slopes were gentle, it never took a long time to find grass for their animals. Such conditions let them cover twenty-five miles, sometimes thirty, each day. Garet’s prescribed pace, though eager, never felt oppressive.

Although they were ten thousand feet above sea level, this long flat valley sat between rows of mountains three miles higher on both flanks, so one felt small. Summit glaciers shone as bright as a paladin’s armor. The contrast made their own environs—a flat buzzy marsh, where green jays and silver nuthatches squabbled over choice trees and where dragonflies lazily circled—seem uncannily hospitable, almost like it shouldn’t exist.

Farisa asked Garet, “We’re coming up on Gatto Pass, right?”

“You’ve been reading my maps, huh?”

“I have. Something to do when I’m on watch.”

“That’s good. It minimizes the trouble in case you have to replace me.”

“Impossible.” She knew that without Claes’s courage to drive them forward, or without Garet’s warm humor and knowledge to keep them intact, this group would have fallen apart hundreds of miles ago. “No one can replace you.”

“I thank you for saying so, but what we’re doing out here isn’t the safest use of one’s time—for any of us. You can do everything right and still lose people. We did last time.”

“It won’t happen,” Farisa said. “It can’t happen.”

The rest of the day, she found herself looking around to count their number, to make sure they were all still there. One, two, three, four-five-six, seven eight nine. Ten, including Ouragan. Then she counted the huskers and untas; Lucy, wounded in battle, was still the slowest among those, but was healing with the mage’s help. Four huskers, seven untas, one cat, and nine people. Twenty-one. She wouldn’t have liked the number to be twenty. One, two, three. Four. Five, six. Seven. Ei—where are you?—eight. Nine people. One cat. Eleven animals who were actually useful. In this place, they were all indispensable, even Talyn and Kanos, who had helped them avoid an orcish ambush more than once. They would not “lose people,” she decided; she simply would not allow it.

#

The trail continued to rise; they were over thirteen thousand feet on August 20, and Claes’s theodolite said they were just south of the twenty-sixth parallel. The sky was overcast, which meant it could rain here, but the high wind and exposed rocks suggested that it didn’t happen often. Vegetation was mostly moss and red-orange lichen, with a few bluebells mixed in.

That evening, after a long scrambling climb, followed by a difficult setting of camp due to wind, Garet announced that he would be walking one mile more to a lookout point, and invited the others to join him. Claes and Talyn were busy cooking dinner, but Runar and Farisa followed him.

At the outcropping, the low sun broke white through the clouds, and the wind reached a brisk thirty knots. One could see, over the cliff, barren lowlands four flags hotter and a world away. Buzzards flew in straight lines; out there, there was nothing to circle over.

Garet said, “If no one’s going to tell an old man what to do, I’m going to smoke.”

Runar said, “You smoke? I didn’t think you were the type.”

“I used to. I brought three.”

“Three packs?”

“Three cigarettes. Last time I was here, I promised my men I’d smoke one if I was ever here again.” He struck a match, but the wind blew out the flame. “And here we are.” He struck again, with no result. “If only the weather would cooperate.”

Farisa said, “Hand that to me.”

Garet gave her the matchbook.

“No, the cigarette.”

She tapped the end with a finger. It lit.

Although he accepted the cigarette, Garet gave a disapproving glance. “Are you sure you should be doing that, Farisa?”

“Are you sure you should be inhaling poison smoke, Garet?”

“Palpablo.” Garet inhaled; the cigarette’s lit end brightened. “Poison it is, but one won’t kill me.”

A flock of swifts tore through the crepuscular sky. The sun seemed to melt on the horizon like a cooking egg. The sound of a coyote howling mixed with the wind.

Farisa asked, “What was it like, when you last came through here?”

“Very much the same, and also quite different.”

“How so?”

“The place itself never changes. These hills are exactly how I remember them. Same colors, same smells. It is I who have changed. Standing here, I can still hear the voices of those who came with me. The stories we told, the arguments we had.”

Farisa said, “Arguments? Of what kind?”

“Oh,” Garet laughed. “It was more than thirty years ago. I came up here with... Samru was his name. Not only a fellow traveler, he was a friend. He could see what the Global Company was becoming, and he asked me: If defeating the Global Company hinged on one thing, the sacrifice of your own life, would you do it?”

“Yes,” Farisa said. “Yes, I would.”

Runar kicked a pebble down the rock face. “You’re sure of this? No hesitation?”

Farisa’s gaze followed the pebble farther than she had seen it go. “If God exists, I believe She is just.”

“What if there’s no God? No reward, no punishment, nothing after death at all?”

She remembered that conversation with Raam, thirteen years ago on the boat to Tevalon. If it didn’t seem like there might be no hereafter, death would have lose its stakes; ergo, God had to hide the existence of the supernatural. “Then I suppose I have to define the meaning of my life where I stand, while I stand.”

“Meaning?”

“The Global Company kills five million per year through war, hunger, and preventable disease. If—afterlife or none—giving my life saves half a billion others, that wouldn’t be the worst use of it, would it?"

Farisa remembered Raam’s game-theoretic argument for the existence of God—the game-theoretic case that, since evil can do all the things good can, that all signs of progress should be counted as miraculous, though she realized she now could oppose it with doubt in progress. They had come a hundred and fifty miles beyond the end of civilization and still failed to find her father. She decided it was only tolerable if she decided the search itself, not the result, mattered.

Runar said, “You argue well.”

Garet said, “And you’re sure God’s a ‘She’?”

Farisa laughed. “Not at all, smartass.”

“There are people in this world who will tell you with conviction that God created the Global Company. Cyril Bell himself believed it to be the case. What did he call himself, again? The Messenger of the—”

Runar finished his sentence. “—of the One True Maker.”

“Even though he destroyed all religious traditions, he refused to give up belief.”

Farisa conceded, “Like all false gods, the Global Company becomes both truer and more powerful, the more it is believed in.”

“My thoughts are with yours,” Garet said. “I would give my life to end the Company. Of course, I don’t have as many years to give up as you do.”

“We don’t know that,” Farisa said.

“You, Runar?”

“I’m not sure.”

Farisa’s neck tightened as she glared at him.

“I’m just being honest.” Runar swatted a gnat away from his face. “It would matter how we kill the Company. Once it’s gone, what does the world look like? Also, the Company won’t be removed with one death—it might cost us ten million good people, and then we won’t have enough left to run the place.”

“You also make a strong point.” Garet handed his cigarette over to Runar, who took a drag.

Mazie, in her habit of sneaking up on people, interjected. “I have something to say.”

Runar handed her the cigarette but she waved it away.

“Please,” Garet said. “Say it.”

“I’m one-eighth Vehu. I never knew my great-grandfather, but he grew up on a dori. I’m told there were rich years and poor ones, but the dori never let one of its own starve. There’s no reason that life can’t exist for everyone.”

Garet chuckled. “Surely, you don’t think the principles of a dori can scale up to a society of millions.”

“It’d be a challenge, and it wouldn’t happen quickly, but in comparison to the system we have, even a five-percent success would be a major improvement.”

“You are not wrong,” Garet said.

“I rather like the idea of a global dori,” Farisa said. “We could invest our lives in creation, rather than building devices to destroy what others have built, as we do now.”

Runar said, “The problem is that so many people rely on destruction for their sense of purpose. If the world has no fires for them to extinguish, they’ll set one.”

“It’s funny,” Garet said. “The Global Company argues we live in the most peaceful time humans ever had. Nations are dead, religion is almost gone. If it is peace, though, it is one wherein every time wages increase by a grot per month, rents go up by two. More Ettasi households had electricity in the ‘70s than today. To this old man, it feels like one of those summer afternoons when, even if you don’t see a single cloud, you just know the sky’s going to bust out a hailstorm. You just don't know when. Or what the world will look like after it is gone.”

Twilight had become dark enough that, looking out, Farisa could no longer see the bottom of the desert.

Mazie said, “There is no peace for the poor. Whether it’s soldiers from the other side of the world who take your house, or a landlord and sheriff, is merely a matter of paperwork. It makes no difference. The real fight has always been between the people and the people’s enemies, and—”

Runar completed the sentence. “The people’s enemies have the most money.”

“Exactly. They probably always will. It’d be best to move beyond the need for it.”

“That’ll take a long time,” Runar said. “I was a gambler. I was good at it, until I lost my edge—as we all do at some level of stakes.”

Garet guffawed. “You tell me that now, out here?”

“It’s different in a card room. I should have known when to stop. Still, that feeling of money—of weight—is addictive. There’s always a color of chip you haven’t seen.”

Wind blew Garet’s smoke in Farisa’s face, and she noticed the old man had become pensive as they watched the western sky fade.

After a minute, she said, “There’s something else on your mind. Isn’t there?”

“We’ve had good luck, this trip. The last time I took the Road, we were down to six when we got here.”

“Six out of...?”

“Ten. Two were slain by orcs just before Portal; two were so rattled by the fight, they decided to stop there and turn back. I don’t blame them."

Runar said, “How many survived the whole trip?”

Garet held up fingers. “Three. One had made it clear he was only interested in Switch Cave treasure. He disappeared in one of those side alleys—you’ll see what I’m talking about, when we get there. My guess is that he fell into an orcish latrine.”

Runar winced. “Drowned in shit?”

Garet nodded. “I hate to think of it, but probably.”

Farisa said, “It would have been quick. It’s hydrogen sulfide that does it, and at a killing dose it wipes out your sense of smell, so you pass out unawares... if that makes you feel better.”

“It doesn’t,” Runar said.

“That took us down to five. We lost one in the Ashes; we had only made it one day, the second time I came. The heat is such that you have to drink water constantly, almost so much it makes you sick. He couldn’t keep it down. We woke up and he was gone.”

Farisa said, “What happened to the other one?”

“That was Samru. We lost him on the way back. There’s a dense forest ahead of us. It’s said to be haunted, but I’ve never seen a ghost in it. Still, he wandered off and we never found him. I’m afraid to say it, but he probably froze to death.”

“Froze?”

“Aye. It was November, and we were much higher than we are now. It’s the sudden drop in temperature that kills people. It’s five flags during the day, so you forget that it’s winter and let your guard down; when night falls, it drops to one flag, and with no coat in the rain and wind, you’ve got about four hours. We never did find his body. I’d guess it was eaten by rock calamars.”

Mazie shuddered. “Rock calamars?”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ve passed a thousand of them. I’ve seen six. If I spot a seventh, I’ll show you. They aren’t dangerous, unless they feel threatened, as they’re strict scavengers. Skrums, on the other hand, are nasty.”

Runar said, “What’s a skrum?”

Garet finished his cigarette and stepped on the butt.

“We should go back to camp.”

#

They had climbed into green highlands, so mornings had a pleasing chill now, as they had climbed into green highlands. They could not match the pace Garet had wanted to set, due to the forest’s thickness, but the pleasant temperature meant they could make all efforts, despite benign soreness and mild fatigue. Everyone woke up two hours before sunrise. Loads and tasks were divided on Claes’s call alone, not because he wanted to be dictatorial, but because they all understood it would be most efficient this way. He had set an eight o’clock curfew for the group but no one—not even him—observed it, seeing as the day’s chores, with every daylight hour spent on movement, were rarely complete before nine.

Garet, after a rushed breakfast, pulled Farisa aside. “How is your...?”

“My health?” Why was it that no one ever named the Marquessa, or even finished a sentence pertaining to it? “I’m fine. I’m well.”

“Of course. I was asking about your unta.”

“Lucy?”

“Yes, her. How much can she carry?”

She had been working to heal Lucy; the spells required less work than she had expected. The hardest part was convincing the unta to sleep near the tent, so the mage could work at night, even though the others complained of the smell. Healing was difficult—she had never put her mind through such delicate movements as these glyphs required, but the mental motion seemed to be working, because the unta’s body had repaired itself at thrice its natural speed.

“She’s on the mend. I’d guess she can do fifty pounds.”

Kanos interjected. “Fifty and a rider?”

Farisa said nothing.

“A Portal yearling can do twice that,” Kanos added.

“Then go back and get one.”

Farisa suspected Garet’s question conveyed that something was troubling him, because idle chitchat had fallen off more than a hundred miles ago. There’d been substantial orcish traffic here, so they avoided unnecessary noise and took extra efforts to conceal their fires at night. Creeks and rivers had been fished dead upstream; Saito and Eric often came back from the water with one tiny fish, full of bones, or none at all.

Around two o’clock, when they usually would have stopped for a brief lunch, Garet stood on a log and whistled. “I have to share difficult news,” he said. “We are running out of food faster than I expected.”

“This is not to accuse anyone of waste,” Claes said. “No one here has been a glutton.”

“I sure have not,” Farisa said. She had weighed just almost a hundred and twenty pounds in Cait Forest; she guessed she was now down to 110.

Garet said, “As you have noticed, the lakes and rivers here are empty. Orcs in the highlands take their pickings.”

“We have months of flour and dried meat,” Runar said.

“It’s going faster than it should,” Garet said. “It seems that rats are getting into our carriages and eating the food.”

People looked at each other, faces drained of color.

“The good news, if you can’t tell, is that these woods have had one hell of a rainy season. We’re going to forage today, because there’s plenty of food, here and now, if you know where to look. Wild cabbage is good, the darker the better. The mushrooms will be excellent.”

“I don’t like mushrooms,” Eric said.

“You do now,” Garet said.

“Don’t eat anything till he’s had a look at it,” Claes added.

“Right.” Garet pointed. “The brown fungus at the base of these trees, that’s worth collecting. The white mushrooms with the blue spots, I’d avoid. They won’t kill you, but they’ll make you sick enough to cost us three days we don’t have. The blueberries here are better than anything you’ll find back home, and I recommend the cherries shaped like tiny pumpkins.” He distributed canvas sacks. “Don’t eat the white berries.” He bent down to pick a step off a shrub. “Those absolutely will kill you. I wouldn’t even let them in the bag. If something is even touched by the white berries here, do not pick it up. Are there any questions?”

“None from me,” Runar said.

They’d gone so long without fresh food, and spent so many days pressing the ground into the space behind them—sometimes, with hours passing absent of thought on why they were doing this, as if it were an eternal state—that everyone seemed excited to do something other than walk, to the exclusion of Kanos, who seemed to consider foraging beneath him.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Talyn asked, “Are there orcs out here?”

Garet scratched his white beard. “I wouldn’t worry about them, not out here and not while the sun is high. The danger here is getting lost. The ground is flat here; this kind of forest looks the same in all directions. Every group must take a compass. Claes will stay here with the animals.”

“I’ll fire a shot into the air every thirty minutes,” he said. “If it isn’t upsettingly loud, you’re too far away. When I fire three shots in succession, we reassemble. Pair up. No one goes out alone. You have two hours. Go.”

As asked, they headed off in different directions: Garet and Saito went south and slightly west; Runar and Kanos, west and slightly north; Talyn and Eric, back north parallel to the trail they’d just taken. Farisa and Mazie went…

“Oh-eight-five is our heading,” Farisa said. “So we want to go back on—”

“Two-six-five,” Mazie said. “You don’t need to chew my food for me.”

“Speaking of food...” Farisa crouched and snapped a brown, petal-shaped mushroom off the bark of the tree. “First of the day.”

“Good find. Put ’er in the bag.”

At first, the forest struck the eye as a thicket of indigestible browns and greens, but when the women slowed their eyes, they found something worth putting in the bag every fifty yards of so: edible dark berries on a knee-high bush, a patch of wild onions or cabbage, a cluster of white fungal bobs on a decaying log.

“I have to ask.” Mazie gave a naughty smile as she picked up a purple-capped mushroom.

Farisa looked at her. “Ask what?”

“Were you the one misbehaving?”

“Misbehaving?”

Mazie’s eyebrows popped.

“Gross, Mazie.”

“Sometimes a girl needs to...”

Farisa shuddered. “In the tent? No, never.”

“I’ve met all kinds.” Mazie laughed. “No, I thought I heard you wander off. That’s what I do. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and have to go back a hundred yards. I guess I’m not the only one who does. I guess I overheard someone else.”

“Don’t tell me this kind of thing, Mazie. I don’t need to—”

“There’s no shame in it.”

“There isn’t, but... that kind of thing is personal.” Farisa paused to pick off a cluster of lemon-colored berries.

Mazie chuckled. “You’re telling me... not even once?”

“I haven’t been able to...”

“Come, Farisa. The word is ‘come.’”

“That. Not since April.” Farisa stopped to think; she realized it might be fun to make Mazie as uncomfortable as she was, so she added, “I’d need a quarter mile, if I could. I tend to be on the loud side.”

She put her hand on Farisa’s shoulder as she laughed; Farisa's chest filled with electricity.

“I think I really, really like you,” she said.

“You think?”

“I know.” Farisa laughed. “I know I do. But we should get back to work.” It was still mid afternoon, but in these dense woods, the hour rung like twilight. “Light’s fading.”

Mazie squeezed Farisa’s hand and whispered in her ear, “I think I feel the same way.”

Farisa heard a branch break. Talyn, not far off, had seen them; she shot a disapproving glare before walking away.

They continued to forage until they heard Claes’s three gunshots. Their canvas bag had grown much fuller than expected, with several pounds of mushrooms and berries in it. As soon as they returned to the trail, they encountered Talyn and Eric, the boy carrying a bag noticeably lighter than theirs.

“Let’s balance out our bags,” Mazie said.

Talyn put her hands on her hips. “Why?”

“Ours is nearly full. I don’t want anything to fall out.”

“Is this charity?”

“Talyn,” Farisa said. “It’s not a competition.”

Eric said, “This stuff isn’t heavy. I don’t mind carrying more.”

Talyn raised her voice. “Very well, then.”

Mazie transferred a few items to Eric’s bag. They walked in awkward silence until Talyn looked at Farisa. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

“Well, I’m right here.”

“Better to have this discussion in private.”

“Mazie’s my friend. I trust her.”

“It’s better for everyone that this discussion happens in private.”

“Eric,” Farisa said. “Go ahead with Mazie.”

Once they were gone, Talyn scoffed. “Does it have to be so obvious?”

“What is obvious?”

“You have eyes for Mazie.”

Farisa put her chest out. “Really, you’re going to lecture me on—?”

“No. Whatever is in your mind, that’s yours. Whatever you do in private, I don’t need to know about. I don’t want my son to think it’s normal.”

“You don’t get to decide what Eric thinks.” Farisa spotted a white puffball and bent over to collect it. “Besides, he’s not your son.”

“I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to figure out that you’re ‘that Farisa’. I’m not surprised. Mages cook their brains. Of course, you’d be homosexual by now.”

Farisa stopped at a bush to gather some blueberries. “These look good.”

“I did send the Company the pack of lies you asked me to, but it won’t work. You’re the prize mage. Given what you did to Rychard Bell, they’ll never stop coming for you.”

Farisa asked Talyn to hold her bag as she pried a tough fungal lip from a tree’s bark.

“Every step, you make your life harder, you know that? I could have made your life easier.”

“Easier?”

“I know you hate the Global Company, but have you ever asked yourself what they really want from you?”

“I already know that.” Farisa hastened her pace. “They collect mages for their horrible experiments.”

“Don’t be daft, Farisa. These aren’t the Smitz days. The Company studied magic and found it doesn’t come to much. You can light a candle by looking at it—so what? Without the best medical care, which the Company can provide, there’s less than a fifty-fifty chance you live to see my age.”

“Then enlighten me. What could they possibly want that I haven’t thought about?”

“There is, I suppose you could call it, nostalgia for the witch-hunting days. You’re a symbol, no less and no more. You’re a chapter left unfinished. Do right by the Company, though, and they’ll give you a freestanding house on the Eastern Horn, all help paid for, for the rest of your life. If you change your mind about your... preferences... you’ll have your pick of Company husbands. If you don’t want one, I’m sure they’ll look the other way while you live quietly as a cu—”

Farisa, who had knelt to uproot a wild onion, looked back. “Really, Talyn?”

“Country girl.”

Farisa knelt to uproot a wild onion. “Cunt eater is what you meant to call me.”

“Well.”

“It doesn’t matter. If I may be honest, I don’t believe you. The thing I did that made me a symbol, I don’t remember, because I was less than two years old. What use would I be to them now?”

“You’d have to give appearances. You’d praise the Company. You wouldn’t even have to write your own speeches. From their perspective, it would be a perfect story of redemption. Your family rebelled, but you have seen the light. You’re the last symbol of defiance—”

“I’m not a symbol of anything. I’m just me.”

“You’re a foolish girl. It could have worked out very well for you. It still could. Of course, it is written in your name to resist. Farisa, fariza, virtue. Stubborn; inflexible to the point of uselessness. You symbolize a purity the Company will never achieve—for that reason, they want you all the more—but you lack the wisdom to see that you can symbolize something and not incur the constraints of being it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

Talyn put an unwelcome hand on Farisa’s forearm. “You’re unwise, but you’re not stupid. You know that even if we beat the odds and take the Road as far as it goes, there’s a ninety-five percent chance it just ends. If Switch Cave doesn’t kill at least one of us, the Ashes will. Call this a summer adventure. Claes has assembled a competent team, I’ll give him that. Your lot may set a southern record: seventeen-point-four degrees, seventeen-three... who cares? In the end, we’re all going back north. It’s in your interest to know what your options truly are.”

Farisa paused. “You’re right.”

Talyn’s mouth opened in a muted smile. “There would be a stipend, of course. For bookkeeping purposes only, you would be on the Company payroll as an employee. They’d probably slot you in as a Z-3.”

“Would they go to Z-2?”

“For you? I’m sure they would.”

Farisa scratched her chin. “I was a Cait Forest girl—well, sort of—so I know life on the Eastern Horn gets expensive. Would they give me a quarter million to start on?”

Talyn chuckled. “A quarter? They’d go a full unit.” The woman’s hands touched both of Farisa’s shoulders. “You’d be able to go anywhere you want. You’d have no want of beautiful clothing and lovely friends. You’d be invited into the highest circles of society.”

“It would make my parents so proud.”

“See? There’s always a—”

“Oh, wait. They’re fucking dead, and who killed them? Your fucking Company.”

#

The trail continued to rise, but the trees were thin due to rocky soil and uneven terrain. The few conifers in sight, however, were quite tall. Rats were now gnawing on their spare clothing and, more worrying, still pilfering food in small amounts every night. At least the creatures had been decent enough not to leave many droppings.

They saw few of the mileposts that had dotted the Road up to, and shortly beyond, Portal—they were more than two weeks’ travel beyond the city now, and signs of civilization were absent, though the main trail remained easy to follow for the most part—steep mountains, swift rivers, and narrow hillside ledges left only one way to go.

Farisa heard Garet fall back to ask Eric, “How are you faring?”

“Hungry.”

“We all are. Other than that?”

“Good, I guess.”

“You’re not feeling the altitude?”

“I must have acclimated.”

“You must have,” Garet said. “Would you believe we’re at fourteen thousand feet?”

“I would,” said Farisa. She smiled. “It’s beautiful up here, though.”

“That it is. I only wish this place didn’t make the animals skittish.”

Untas were robust in harsh climates, but despised narrow spaces and loose footing. Often, Farisa had to give Lucy verbal encouragement and pats on the side to get her through tight clefts or around difficult corners. The unta’s healing, as well, was slowing; Farisa hoped this would improve in the lowlands.

They were inching across a single-file ledge on the flat-sky afternoon of August 24 when Farisa heard an explosion behind herself. Suspecting dry lighting, she spun around to see that their rearmost husker had stumbled and fallen. The lopsided carriage hung over the ledge, and the animal’s hooves gave insufficient traction to stop beast and wagon from going over. The husker, terrified by its sudden weightlessness, kicked uselessly while emitting a vulpine scream a thousand feet long.

Runar returned fire by rifle. Across a ravine, two orcish heads spewed blood like popped pimples. Farisa fired her pistol in the cannoneers’ direction as well, but failed to score a shot, as both orcs were down. She looked down at the broken husker, though she needed no visual confirmation of its death, given the height of the fall.

“Fuck you!” she shouted at the orcs. “Fuck you to hell! Fuck your whole clan! I hope you shit-ass fucks enjoy being fucking dead, you fucking... fucks!”

Mazie, as if scared of what Farisa might do, put her arms around the woman’s waist.

Garet said, “Any more?”

Saito used his two-handed spyglass. “I don’t see any.”

Runar said, “I dusted both cannons, so they’ll backfire on the next one to use them.”

Claes said, “We should move this train along.”

Runar got behind a rock and looked through his rifle scope. “I’ll keep watch.”

Garet shook his head. “Orcs have guns now. That’s new.”

Farisa realized that the fallen carriage contained some rare books Nadia had given her. “What about the pack? We need to go get it. It has my—”

“That carriage is as gone as the husker pulling it,” Claes said.

“No. I have to...” What if Nadia’s dead? Her children are gone; what if her only trace in the world is what she left for me? “I have to get something down there. I absolutely have to—”

She looked for a path to the wrecked wagon and began descending. The granite rock face would be too risky, but there was a shrub-laden slope she could use, if she watched her footing, so she worked her way down as a chattery sound broke out on the valley floor.

Farisa looked down to see a gray figure atop the carriage, ripping the canvas covering apart. “That’s our stuff, you shit-cunts!” She held a protruding root as hard as she could and fired her pistol with her other hand. “Help me kill these motherfuckers!”

“Farisa,” Garet said. “There’s no point. There’ll be fifty of them in a quarter hour.”

“Get up,” Claes said.

Farisa looked around. She realized Garet was right. There were now several orcs around the fallen wagon, and the ones tearing open the husker’s belly would not hesitate to do the same to her.

The others, still on the ledge, were all staring at her, as if she had lost her mind.

“This is why I don’t like to travel with women,” Kanos said to Runar.

She climbed forty-seven of the fifty feet she’d descended, taking Claes’s offered hand to make the final leap to the ridge.

“Once we are in a safe place,” he said, “and not before, we will take stock of what we have lost.”

Their path continued snaking through the mountains until evening, when it curved into a black forest. The clouds above Farisa were not severe, but she hoped they would darken and thicken and produce the storm of a thousand centuries to drown all of the murderous, grunting monsters involved in the trap that had taken down their husker wagon.

When they set camp, they performed their evening chores by rote, waiting to hear Claes’s account of their losses. When he pulled the group together at what would have been dinnertime, his lip twitched.

“I told you all to balance our food supplies among the husker carriages every day.” He raised his voice. “Every fucking day. Do you now know why I demanded you do that?”

“Kanos took that job,” Mazie said.

“It’s everyone’s job, Mazie.”

“Tell him that. He won’t let anyone else—”

“I don’t want to fucking hear it.” Claes stopped and spread his feet. “We’ve lost a third of our lamp oil, half our water, and more than half of our food. I suppose it doesn’t matter. We go forward with what we have. We’ve not got other choices.”

“We’ll cut rations by one-third,” Garet said. “The animals will find food on the ground, so we’ll cut theirs by two-thirds.”

“Can we hunt?” Runar asked.

“You don’t need my permission, but there’s not much game up here. There’s enough orcish traffic to scare off the animals.”

“Fuck,” Farisa said. “Fuck, fuck fuck.”

They all looked at her, as if concerned she would say something to worsen their bad situation.

“It’s... it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s my problem and mine alone.”

Lucy, the injured unta, had become a picky eater. The other animals would eat anything green, even fallen pine needles, but Lucy still winced in pain whenever she bent down, and between this and her limited appetite, Farisa found it hard to keep weight on the animal, even while sneaking her a handful or two of delicious oats, meant for human use, per day. This delay in healing had not come from a lack of Farisa’s trying; each night, she’d use a small spell to help the animal heal—as a result, her own sleep was never enough, and her stomach muscles always hurt.

And I am fast losing weight, too. She was afraid, if she came upon her reflection, she would see a face so gaunt she might even regard it as ugly.

Meager rations, the following days, brought a chill to the morning. Garet’s thermometer said it was three flags, but Farisa would shiver even while wearing a leather jacket. Their legs pounded out miles their bellies could not afford; the effort brought only minimal heat. Once the stinging sun broke the fog, usually around ten o’clock, she’d find herself sweating, hot on the skin but muscles still slow as if frozen.

At night, she would wake up and, by lantern light, scrounge the forest for something her unta would tolerate. Often, the animal would nibble on a leaf or stem then spit it out, forcing Farisa to sacrifice the share of dinner she had put aside.

Orcs had become a recurring menace, but after the cannon disaster, they’d only seen the gray-skinned creatures alone or in pairs. Farisa felt an urge to murder all of them, in revenge for the fallen husker, but Claes advised her to save bullets, and Garet had grown concerned about noise.

Toward the end of August, they were missing their daily mileage target far more often than making it, and no one seemed as bothered as they would have been two weeks ago. Hunger’s lethargy blunted fear. The miles were a struggle; they pushed their bodies through a fruitless wilderness—Garet and Saito had looked for forage, finding little, because either orcs or prior travelers had picked it all off—knowing nothing awaited at the day’s end but half a square of hardtack.

Lucy had also been moaning in a low frequency that troubled the listener’s lungs. The unta’s ribs were palpable and fur was falling out in clumps, exposing mottled bare skin.

“You’ll heal, Lucy. It’ll take time, but you will. We will get ourselves somewhere better than this.”

Farisa had lost track of the date; she had known it by her nightly journal entries, but been unable to write lately. She did not like the feel of a pen in her now-bony fingers.

On what she would later deduce had been the last night of August, they camped in the leafy crack between two rock faces. No one lit a fire; no one told stories. Farisa found herself shivering, skin cold, as soon as the sun went down. Her hand smelled of unta. Inside her shirt, her stomach looked hollow and the skin was starting to shrivel.

In the middle of the night, she woke to Lucy’s moaning, louder than it had ever been ever before—it had stirred her dreams for days, but now it seemed to shake the world. The sound had now mixed with a coarse, crackly panting. She rushed out of the tent to see a mash of white berries under her mouth.

That’s why she’s not healing.

“You can’t eat those, Lucy!” She gathered the slop of half-chewed berries in her hands, then discarded it half a mile away in the woods and washed her hands in a narrow stream.

“Those are bad, Lucy. No white berries.” She wagged her finger, then realized the ridiculousness of this, because no one could talk to an animal. No one but.... She went into the blue, so tired and hungry the whole space felt vertiginous and frigid, and lingered only long enough to put a short, clear message in Lucy’s mind: Never eat the white berries.

She barely made it back to the tent—her mind was losing grasp of the starved body that belonged to it, so her attempt to enter another’s nearly flattened her. She slept atop the sleeping bag, clutching her aching belly. She had a series of frantic dreams, tossing about as if afflicted by influenza, and found herself standing, again in that half-sleeved teacher’s dress, in the Cait Forest classroom. She parsed and translated the same sentence over and over.

Ka-mysir uzza nyin ploto.

(Ka-mysir (uzza (nyin ploto)).

(Not-ever (eat (berries white))).

The students were awake, but they were not listening, not learning. The teacher felt like a ghost. Never eat the white berries, she was telling them. Do not eat the white berries. Not-ever eat berries that are white. Same, different. They did not understand the word order, and perhaps she was not explaining it correctly. Do not eat the—Cait Forest will burn if—Lucy, don’t do it, I know you’re sick, but don’t eat the white berries, don’t eat the—it’s a sleep you don’t come back from.

She woke at dawn in a cold sweat. A hurricane had erupted in her guts. She knew, even before she had left the tent to see, that Lucy had died. The unta’s eyes were closed and a foamy red spittle poured out of her mouth. A fresh pile of white berries, mostly uneaten, lay underneath.

#

“It’s a good thing,” Kanos said as they packed up their tent for the morning. “She was slowing us down.”

Farisa spread her feet apart and made fists. “Fuck you. I bet you killed her.”

“I did not.”

“Garet said that kind of berry doesn’t grow here. We passed their range a hundred miles ago. So how did it get here?”

“How should I know? Someone took them while foraging, and while no one ate them, thank the gods, the animal—don't take offense to this, but animals are stupid—got in.”

“We will figure this out later,” Garet said. “We’re pressed for time, but we can spare an hour to give this one—”

“Lucy,” Farisa said.

“—a decent burial.”

Kanos spat. “Are you serious?”

“She’s a war hero,” Farisa said. “She took a Globbo bullet.”

“She was the first of us to die at Company hands,” Garet said. “One can hope she is the last. Yes, we are going to bury her.”

The group had only three shovels, so Garet, Claes, and Farisa started digging. Runar fastened a hand spade to a long stick and helped. Mazie and Saito, to pay respects, watched, offering to take over the work, but the four diggers were too focused to hand their shovels over. They carried on until they were striking rock.

“Three feet is as deep as we can go with the tools we have,” Garet said. “It’s enough.”

Farisa’s face shook as they put Lucy in the ground and covered her.

Prayer counted most in private. May her merit in this life be reflected in her next.

“It’s already eight goddamn thirty,” said Kanos. “Didn’t you say last night we had twenty-five miles to cover?”

“We’ll make it,” Garet said.

Lucy had been carrying sixty pounds of food and tools; they redistributed that load to the huskers before setting off. Here, the forest was flat and dull, giving no sense of progress as they put themselves through it. There were no flowers or fungi; the trees themselves, sickly with discolored burls, looked halfway dead. It seemed plausible, at the day’s end, that they had traveled in a circle, but Garet announced at sunset that they had in fact made twenty-two miles.

“Twenty-two’s good,” he added, “but let’s try for thirty tomorrow. The faster we move, the faster we find food.”

Farisa struggled to sleep. She had put so much of herself into the healing of an animal who was now gone. She had done all that work, bringing herself to a state of fatigue in which she would be useless in an ambush, for nothing.

I put everyone at risk to save a dead animal. They’d all be safer if I weren’t here. I should probably just wander off and....

To wake at three o’clock and heal Lucy had been a routine, but there was no Lucy. There was no use in foraging, as nothing within ten miles of here would nourish a person. She went outside, her lantern dimmed to use minimal fuel. An eerie green light filled the forest; she could turn off her lamp and go by foxfire and stars alone. She came to a pond, a steep karst sinkhole that had filled long ago, its waters black in the color of night, and tested its depth with a fallen tree limb longer than she was tall. It did not reach the bottom.

She heard Mazie’s voice. “Don’t.”

Farisa pressed her lips together.

Mazie’s hand touched her elbow. “What are you doing out here?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“I am on watch.”

“Isn’t it Kanos’s shift?”

“It’s mine.” Mazie took Farisa’s hand and pulled her away from the pond. “Kanos always offers to take it, but I never let him. I’m not lazy, unlike certain other people.”

“She’s traveling with a child.”

“Who isn’t even hers.” Mazie turned Farisa’s body so she faced camp. “Kanos never does anything for anyone but himself. When he takes on other people’s chores—”

Farisa looked up at the star-knotted sky. “Fuck.”

“Let’s get you some sleep, Farisa.”

“Fucking fuck fuck.” She swung her arms at nothing. “How did I not see this? He takes over Talyn’s chores. He takes Runar’s watch sometimes. He started doing this when ‘the rats’ began to eat our food, which is also... when Lucy started to get sick.” Farisa’s forehead smacked into her palm. “How did I not see this? I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“Come on.” Mazie pulled Farisa toward camp. “You need to sleep. Whatever you decide, I’m with you, but you’re in no shape to do anything right now.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

They went back to camp. Farisa managed to scratch an hour of sleep off what was left of the night. The next morning, five miles down the road, Garet discovered a foraging spot, and although this one did not offer as much as the previous forest, they found tiny puffballs and tall bushes with edible red berries. Here they could gather enough food to exercise the mouth; it would not evict hunger’s gray-green shadow from their stomachs, but it was not nothing.

Farisa came upon Kanos from behind. “I know you killed her.”

“Your stupid unta?” Kanos zipped up his pants. “What makes you think that?”

“You forced her to eat those white berries.”

“I forced her? You’re telling me I forced a half-ton animal—?”

“Kanos, I know.”

“I made the berries available. I will not apologize. No harm was meant to you, but she was slowing us down, so I decided, for the good of the group—”

“She was getting better.”

“Not fast enough.”

“So you poisoned her?” She stepped close enough to Kanos to see the tiny blood vessels in his eyes.

“I couldn’t have the others know—”

“—that you shot her, so you let her die slowly. Horribly. Do you lack the decency to kill like a man?”

“If you speak to me that way again, your cat is next.”

She walked away; when twenty feet of distance separated them, she turned around, closed her eyes, and twisted his guts. “Would you like to shit yourself, Kanos?”

He winced. “Enough.”

“If you touch even one of Ouragan’s whiskers, I will boil your fucking face.”

Farisa felt a clap on her neck. Jets of pain tore through her body; her eyes seized shut, as if doused with blackrue. Her throat closed. Blind and choking, she swung at Kanos, but her fist did not connect for some reason, and when her eyes opened, she realized Kanos had not come any closer, but was still several yards away while his eyes glowed with that strange blue color she had never seen but in the mirror.