The tribe was quieter inside of Flickermark. The sheep even seemed to bleat less. Softly echoing footfalls became the main sound along with the scrape of the travoises against the ground. I knew it partly had to do with the fact everyone was concentrating to make sure they didn’t trip and fall in the dark, and that no one would want their conversation to be heard by the entire tribe, but the silence always made me keenly aware of the other reason for the tribe’s state.

Flickermark was a sacred place, and even though we were only passing through, the very air seemed to demand that we act with solemn respect towards it in acknowledgment of its history and why it was created. It wasn’t a place that invited gossip or trivial conversations, petty rivalries or signs of affection. Either you followed in the Beloved’s footsteps and found the path through the darkness to the Statue Garden or you got out. We focused our attention on getting out.

Still, whether it was a trick of the maze to help us lose our way or not, the monotonous similarity between the ravines created a kind of forced introspection. It was easy to let your eyes glaze over and get lost in thought when your surroundings barely changed. Even with the advance team, when we needed to be focused and repeatedly comparing the constellations we could see with the ones drawn with the pathways on the map, at different points everyone fell into an introspective daze—though everyone always came out of it whenever there was an intersection. When only two or so people could see the map for the current section at a time when we walked, it made it easier to slip into not paying attention and leaving the concentrating to the others.

Some people fared better with the forced introspection than others. I was used to long quiet hours and unchanging surroundings from my time studying healing in Levain’s shop, so Flickermark was a variation on what had been normal for me until a few months ago. The quiet and repetitive surroundings did more to help my concentration than hinder it, and when I did focus more on my thoughts I wasn’t as likely to get lost in them. Rawley also kept her composure well. I think her specialties in tracking and traps gave her the ability to not be distracted by her thoughts during long, tedious periods of waiting or boring surroundings. Instead, she seemed to absorb every little detail of what went on around her while staying focused on her goal. I only caught her being distracted once during the entire first night we traveled through Flickermark—after I had to stifle a grin when Fellen stumbled and nearly face planted when the ground suddenly dipped.

Fellen was one of the people who didn’t seem to be handling the quiet and twisting pathways as well. She wasn’t the type of person who took well to having to entertain herself. She oscillated between looking bored, annoyed, and anxious. Her left hand stayed near the sling I made her, though whenever she noticed that she would look like she was contemplating throwing it in a river. At least, she was smart enough to know better than to ask Nole for a lesson as a distraction when her mentor was currently holding the map and doing the most to keep the tribe on track through the maze.

Instead, our…rivalry found a new outlet. Neither of us wanted to deal with consequences of an outright fight again, and I was willing to ignore the other girl as long as she left me alone. But then Rawley sent me to get some of the dried dung we used for small warmth fires after the first night in Flickermark. The tribe had settled in the curve of a ravine and no one looked thrilled at trying to sleep while the sun was starting to lighten the sky—even after a long day and night of travel. I collected several of the dung in a bag for the purpose and brought them back to where most of the advance group at settled near the front of the camp, just behind a couple of sitting Pack sentries. Fenris had gone to rest in the Pack’s tent in the middle of camp.

I set the dung down in a small pile in the area between the huntresses’ tents, and when I looked up Fellen was there. She met my gaze with a smug smile before she snapped her fingers and the dung began to burn. The challenge in her eyes was clear: just try and prove that you’re better than me. You’ll only prove yourself a fool—after all, you can’t even light a fire.

I had to sit at her stupid fire and warm myself with the others as Rawley bid. The days and nights were getting colder, and wind tended to cut strong down in the ravines, so even with all the walking we did it didn’t keep the wind’s chill completely away for long. Popular thought was that if you warmed yourself by a fire and then went to sleep you'd be less likely to wake up with aching joints and sore muscles the next day.

I knew I shouldn’t rise to her bait, but the longer I sat at that fire the less I could stomach the smug look that glimmered in her eyes whenever our gazes happened to connect. Different pranks came to mind to wipe the superiority right off her face, but my conversation with Rawley and my mind’s eye conjuring up an image of her looking disappointed shut down that line of action. No doubt if anything happened to Fellen in the near future, my mentor would quickly connect it back to me, whether I had a hand in it or not. In the end, we settled for having contests. Along with silently mocking and insulting each other. Flickermark might not be the place for petty rivalries, but ours became…all consuming during our time in the maze.

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I beat her the very next day, during the odd hours between when everyone in the tribe woke up and the sun actually set enough for us to see the stars and continue on our way. Rawley had given me the task of mending some clothing and equipment while she tinkered with a simple rodent trap. Nole saw and decided to have Fellen do some mending as well while she sharpened her knife and spear. I got my mending done quicker—and with smaller, more even stitches—than Fellen. She still had a child’s dress and a shirt to go when I presented my folded pile to Rawley.

We competed on getting the most praise from our mentors, completing tasks faster than the other, figuring out answers to different situations and questions that were posed to us during our training quicker and more completely than each other. We competed to see who could stretch farther, notice more, throw more accurately with the sling. Sometimes even walking or eating became a competition, and we were told more than once to enjoy our food rather than inhale it.

I didn’t doubt that Rawley and Nole knew what was going on, but as long as we didn’t come to blows or get in the way they let the competitions continue. I think they gave up any idea that we might get along and decided that the competitions were better and easier to keep an eye on than forcing us to be more covert with pranks or more hostile actions. In fact, the competitions pushed us to invest more in our training and we both began to progress more than the Pack apprentices who were around the same stage of training as us.

Ours wasn’t the only ill relationship to heat up, either. Fenris looked ready to curse out Rawley by the middle of the second night, while Rawley never let the Pack Leader’s comments faze her—which only seemed to infuriate Fenris more. Fenris hated it that Rawley never hesitated to question her when my mentor saw a flaw in a plan she made or Fenris didn’t explain herself fully and expected to get by on her position. Normally, the Pack Leader did good work even if she was pretentious in the doing of it, but if she did make a mistake Rawley was usually the first to call her on it. Rawley also didn’t make a habit of calling her by her title and that seemed to rub Fenris the wrong way the most. She was definitely the type that thought since she had earned the title everyone else needed to acknowledge it with every waking breath. She put on airs and I could tell that Rawley wasn’t the least bit impressed by them. My mentor preferred skill and and insight over lip service.

In short, they were a bad match, and Nole or Yolay often got stuck with holding the map so that Fenris had to deal with Rawley as little as possible when they were deciding which way to go when the ravines merged and split. Despite the bad match ups in the advance group—Yolay also took to coolly pretending I didn’t exist and some of her disapproval of me leaked into her interactions with Rawley—no one allowed their personal relationships and opinions get in the way of their work. Getting the tribe through Flickermark safely was more important.

Everything went relatively well during the first and second nights, though everyone had a quicker temper from the changed sleep schedule and attempting to sleep during the day. Tent walls could only keep out so much sunlight. The third night of winding our way through the ravines was when we hit the first important snag when it came to following our map.

An upper portion of one of the ravine walls had collapsed, and the rock fall had blocked our way forward. Fellen was sent back to let the tribe know and have them wait while our mentors, Fenris, and Yolay swapped ideas about which path we should backtrack to and take. There were multiple paths that led to Flickermark’s exit while only one led to the Statue Garden. The trick was taking a path that didn’t lead too close to the southern side of the maze. We didn’t know the star patterns there, and rumor was that the maze had mists and other effects there to ruin a person’s sense of direction, along with some of the nastier creatures that had taken to calling Flickermark home. We had no desire to cross into a bane pack’s territory.

I was sent to scope out the rock fall and see if there was anyway for the tribe and the herds to cross it without someone getting a leg caught or slipping and cracking their head open. Four large boulders were the main obstacle to us continuing on our way while smaller rocks filled in some of the holes between them. The left most boulder looked like it fallen straight down and some of the smaller rocks around it had been created on impact. It was firmly stuck in its position and its pointed top offered no help in climbing across it. The smallest boulder was on the right, and it hadn’t rolled all the way to the wall, but the last two boulders looked like they had once been one flat rock that had broken across that smaller boulder. The right piece had wedged itself firmly between the wall and small boulder, leaving only enough of a gap for a child to wriggle through, while the left side had done the same to the middle of the path with the help of some smaller rocks that were still at least twice the size of my head. The boulders themselves were at least twice my height. Perhaps some of the taller adults and the huntresses could leverage themselves up and over to the other side, but there was no clear way that I could see that would allow the herds to get past the barrier the rocks made.

When I went back and gave my report, Rawley let me know that they had come to a decision. We would go back to the last intersection and take the path to our left. It was a new way that we hadn’t gone before but, if we watched the stars carefully and compared them to what we could see on the paths we knew, we should be able to make our way back onto our typical path through the maze further in.