Fellen stared at the mass of shamble men and our slim path of opportunity cutting cleanly through them. It took her several breathless heartbeats before she managed to pull her gaze away and turn to me, smoothing a hand over the grass by her knee.

Pleading desperation bled from her voice and posture. “We made it, right? We’re in the Statue Garden.”

My mouth felt dusty and dry even as my gut roiled at the thought of slipping between the creatures. I didn’t want to do the last bit our trial anymore than she did, but we both knew it wasn’t over. So I pulled on years of training and stiffened my spine, drew my shoulders back, and ignored the weakness pervading my body as my mark burned and the goddess’s gaze slid just past my clawed shoulder. Failure and excuses weren’t acceptable.

I did my best to keep my tone even—implacable—so Fellen wouldn’t think there was any chance of convincing me to stay where we were. “The Beloved went all the way to the Grove to make her offering.”

Fellen scowled and pointed. “There weren’t hundreds of shamble men in the way when she did her trial!”

“The goddess won’t be amused if She hears you talking like our trial is harder than the Beloved’s was.”

“I’m not! I just—” Fellen cut herself off before leveling accusing eyes at me. “You were just as afraid of that shamble man as I was.”

“I—” My composure broke for a second at the reminder before I recovered. “That was then and this is now. We didn’t have to stay close to that shamble man to reach our goal before.” I snapped out an old mantra before I had enough time to process what I was about to say and stop it. “Ambition is nothing without discipline.”

However true the saying was, I hated the fact that she had ingrained it so deep that after all she had done, I still said it without thinking. I could burn out the loss of her abandonment, cut ties with the name she gave me and all notions of being her daughter in any sense of the word, and still her teachings were second nature.

Nor could I simply decide to rip them out by the roots and no longer use them. Rawley’s lessons were more of a supplement to what I already learned under her—and even if I hated the methods of her teaching, most of the lessons had been sound. As was the lesson that if I could walk through Flickermark’s nightmarish exit tunnel at the age of five with my eyes wide open, Fellen and I could very well walk down the path through the crowd of shamble men now.

Fellen didn’t look entirely convinced that reaching the Grove was worth the chance of brushing against a shamble man and losing her soul and chance of a rewarding afterlife. So I used the one tactic that she could never refuse.

“I challenge you.” Fellen’s panicked gaze snapped from the shamble men to meet my own steady one. As I spoke the focus in her eyes grew. “I challenge you to keep both of us from falling until we reach the Grove. If you keep from crying, screaming, or whimpering during that time then you win.”

“And how would you win?”

“I’ll lead. If I make more noise than you or let one of us touch a shamble man than I lose. If I don’t, then I win.” I considered before adding, “If we both meet our conditions then it’s a tie, but if one of us collapses for any reason than it’s an automatic loss.”

Fellen narrowed her eyes at me, “Since you’re deliberating baiting me, I get to add a condition: I get to keep my eyes closed the entire time.”

It was always interesting to watch Fellen’s competitiveness overcome her fear. I kept a slight smile of victory from my lips and answered as firmly as before. “Fine. Let’s go—waiting won’t help us.”

Fellen hesitated for a moment before flashing me a fierce smile as we struggled to our feet. “I’m going to win.”

I smirked back. “Not if you keep talking.”

“You can’t stand on your own—all I would have to do is drop you.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

She gestured to her closed lips before shrugging one shoulder playfully.

I rolled my eyes and let her antics go. They were just a distraction from what we were about to do. I knew she wouldn’t actually drop me.

I knew.

But I made sure my good arm was wrapped snuggly around her back, just in case, under the guise of giving her more support as well. Fellen trembled as we shuffled toward the thin path. I shivered too, but I pretended the cold night air caused it. She balked when we were a few feet away from the path, her breath coming in short bursts.

I looked over at her and saw her eyes were still flared wide open. “Close your eyes.”

She didn’t hear me. Her entire focus was on the waking nightmare in front of of us. I understood her fear, felt it churning in my own gut, but the last dregs of our stamina wouldn’t last forever. We needed to move.

With a grunt of effort and a flashing blaze of pain from my clawed shoulder, I used my free arm to slap a hand over Fellen’s eyes. She jerked her head back in surprise, but I gritted my teeth and kept my hand in place before biting out, “Close your eyes and focus on me. I told you I won’t let them touch you. Just focus on me and keeping us upright. If you do that—even if this challenges ends up as a tie—I promise I’ll recognize you as a worthy rival.”

She stilled, and a moment later I felt her eyes close. I let my hand drop. I was sure that if I had any more blood I could bleed, my shoulder would have been weeping it. The wounds throbbed deeply, aching, and I had to focus for several long moments to keep from crumpling from the pain. Fellen took the time to slow and even out her breathing. When she finished she nodded sharply and I shifted us into a shuffling sidestep, since once we stepped onto the path it would be too narrow for us to walk side by side.

I did my best to ignore the gaunt features of the shamble men on the edges of my vision as we stepped into the long thin gap between them. I focused on keeping us in the middle of the path and where I was about to step. The last thing we needed was to roll an ankle on a loose pebble—neither of us currently had the strength to recover from the fall that would cause.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel like I was walking through a horrible forest of gray flesh and ghoulish faces that were like peering into the Ever Dark. The shamble men were all of varying heights, but their features were androgynous and identical, so you might guess one might have have been a child or adult when they died, but you had no way to know who they might have been. I didn’t even catch sight of the goddess’s marks on the inside of any wrists.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

For the entire shuffling journey, I was primed for the slightest movement, ready to throw us out of the way of a reaching hand or dodge the attentions of a suddenly turned head. Fellen was the same, rigid, and tuned into my slightest change of movement.

But not a single shamble man moved. They truly were like statues. If it hadn’t been for the one we saw in the ravines, it would have been easy to believe that somehow, for some reason, whisper women had brought large slabs of gray stone here and carved each shamble man from the rock. The only sounds to disturb the air were our gasping breaths and the rustle of wind.

It set my teeth on edge.

The stillness gave the unnatural scene even more of an uncanny air.

No one knew why the shamble men were attracted to the Groves, only that if one was spotted it was always in the direction of the closest Grove—unless they were about the goddess’s business. Some rumors said that they were drawn to areas that had concentrations of the goddess’s power, but we couldn’t prove that Flickermark or the other Trials held anymore of Her power than the other landscapes and things She created. Those rumors also always led to someone pointing out that there weren’t any reports of shamble men mobbing the Seedling Palace, which would have as much of a concentration of Her power as the Trials, or the goddess herself. Another source of unsettling speculation was that no one knew what real use She had for the shamble men; there were only myths like the one about the first storm of the cold season, but even the thought of the hundreds of shamble men from the Statue Garden roaming the landscape was enough to give even the most harebrained person pause.

By the time we were halfway down the path, my legs felt like stone. Once I stumbled and only Fellen’s vice-like grip kept me from stumbling headfirst into a shamble man’s torso. That scare gave me a burst of energy that kept me going near a normal pace for a few more feet, but during the last quarter of the path our pace slowed down to a crawl. I couldn’t make my feet move any faster.

I did consider actually crawling, especially when I felt Fellen’s limp worsen, but I doubted I would be able to keep myself from collapsing onto the dirt path once I no longer had Fellen’s support. And more than that, the mortification of showing such weakness in a place designed specifically to worship the goddess pushed me to stay on my feet.

It took me longer than it should have to notice when the corpses enclosing me on either side changed into large tree trunks. I stumbled to a halt as soon as we made it into the perfect circle of giant pine trees, Fellen still waiting for the worst to happen behind me.

“We made it.”

Her eyes flew open—and we crumpled to the ground as her strength gave out. She started to laugh and cry at the same time. Knowing that if I didn’t keep moving I wouldn’t have the strength to do the last crucial step, I tried to use both hands to pull out my prayer needle, but my clawed shoulder protested and I was reduced to fumbling for it with only one hand. I got it out just as Fellen realized what I was doing and followed suit.

She grinned at me, a little manic. “I won.”

I shoved my skirt out of the way and pricked my mark. “We tied.” Thankfully, a few drops of blood welled. I let the blood fall near a tree root. “Please accept my small offering.”

It soaked into the ground for a few breathless heartbeats before flaking away. I didn’t get to see if Fellen’s offering was accepted as well. As soon as I saw the blood flake away everything went dark.

--

I became aware of softness and warmth. At the fuzzy realization I was laying on a comfortable pallet under a fur blanket, I almost slipped back into sleep, but then I heard a clinking sound too familiar for comfort.

The sound of healer’s beads.

My eyes flew open. I would have sat up too, but the blanket was too heavy. I was inside a medium sized tent with a low fire burning in the middle. A pot rested in its embers while the smoke disappeared out the opened hole in the tent’s roof. On the other side of the fire Fellen lay on a similar pallet with a fur blanket, still asleep, and between our feet sat a healer.

She looked to be a few years older than Rawley with pale pinkish skin and auburn hair braided back into a bun except for the pieces her healer’s beads hung from. She wore a normal wool dress over her thin frame, but the backs of her hands—all the way down her deft long fingers—were covered in dark gray tattoos. They were abstract, full of straight lines at a variety of angles. The healer was stitching a small pouch together.

She looked up from her work with a smile and spoke in a softened voice. “You’re lucky girls. Not many would survive what you have.” She paused before her tone became more critical. “But I doubt others have the type of boon you must carry.”

I ignored her implicit question to croak out, “How’s she?” as I cast a glance over to Fellen.

She reached back to where a bag and a water skin were resting against the tent wall. Taking the water skin in hand, she made her way to my side. The healer propped me up and brought the water skin to my lips.

“Drink sl—” She cut herself off when she saw I was already doing what she would have said. I didn’t need her to tell me to drink slowly or take small sips. That was one of the basics. She eyes the tuft of hair that had fallen onto my forehead. “I wondered.”

I glared balefully at her over the water skin. She chuckled. I hated how helpless I felt. It was like no time had passed in between now and when my foot had gotten infected near the beginning of the warm season.

She helped me lay back down before gesturing over to Fellen. “You’re lucky she didn’t bleed out more and that Hana was sent for me. Though you were further into the goddess’s gaze than her.”

She set about checking my wounds in a cheerful, but orderly way, and it was then that I noticed that all my wounds were dressed well and that I was wearing a new child’s dress that was a bit too big. As she checked them my wounds ached and itched, but my mark didn’t burn and the goddess’s gaze no longer hovered.

She updated me as she went. “I’m sure you still feel as weak as a newborn babe, but you’re recovering well. There’ll be some scarring, no helping that, but you should be grateful it’s not worse for what you put your body through. You’ll have to spend some more time here until you’re able to walk on your own, but then we’ll send you on your way.”

I started. It had taken me weeks to recover enough to walk any meaningful distance without assistance last time, and the cold season would be well underway by then. We wouldn’t be able to cross the hills without dying from exposure or a snowstorm.

She noticed my alarm and smiled gently. “Relax. We won’t save you just to send you out to freeze. Especially not after you completed a trial given by the goddess herself. The whisper women have ways to get you where you need to go.”

I doubted that the whisper women would use their ability to transport through shadows just to transport Fellen and I to Grislander’s Maw.

The healer noticed my disbelief and snorted. “How do you think I got here from the Seedling Palace?”

I stared at her, eyes wide. “You were at the Seedling Palace?”

“Someone has to make sure the whisper women, Seedlings, and fire starters stay healthy.” She shrugged. “My family has done the work for generations.” She became amused again. “Or did you think the whisper women did the healing themselves? That’d be a sight.”

I’d never even considered that whisper women could get hurt. What would be foolish enough to attack them?

She finished checking my wounds. “Well, you can bleed again, and your wounds are scabbing, so I’ll take that as a good sign. Though, given the severity of your wounds, you should have bled out before your friend.”

I reminded myself that I wasn’t keeping my mark’s blessing a secret anymore. “My mark doesn’t let me die.”

Her eyebrows rose as she pursed her lips. “Well, that’s certainly unique.” She grinned at me. “Looks like I get bragging rights over Morgan since the most unique situation he got transported out to help with was the transformer girl.”

I didn’t know how to process her lack of a reaction or how different her demeanor was from what I was used to. She patted my hip comfortingly.

“You get used to odd things when you’re the main healers for whisper women. If we still got shocked by every little thing we wouldn’t get our work done.” She glanced over at the pot in the fire before seeming to think of something. “Oh, I’m Ressia by the way. The gruel should be ready in awhile—not the most exciting I know, but it should help you recover.”

“Gimley.” I looked past the fire. “And that’s Fellen.”

She nodded. “Well, get some more sleep. I’ll wake you when the food’s ready. No point in letting you miss an actual meal now that you’re stable enough to wake up on your own.”

I stopped her before she rose to her feet. “How long was I asleep?”

“A couple days. Though that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sleep more.”

I nodded in understanding and she moved back to her earlier spot to pick up where she left off on her pouch.