As the night wore on she felt her eyelids growing heavy. Sleeping to the sounds of fervid growth and the screaming growl of the lorgen. Before she could pass truly into slumber she was shaken awake.

“Now is not the time for sleep dreamling.”

“Why?”

“What do your people call it? Your manifestations?”

“Riding the dream…”

“Well. Very well.” He cleared his throat. “There are peoples like you or I who live in Kildjia, in the Shimmerdooms—not many, mind—but enough. I was once among them. I lived with them and broke their bread underneath the rainbow night. They called them ta’avun. Spirit walkers. They believed their spirit walkers could access maea through dreams. They are right or at least not entirely wrong. In dreams childling you are unbound. From your conception, your will…”

He shook his head.

“Anyway the Kildjians there call it riding the dream. But I’ve always wondered. Because sometimes in your dream you are different. Perhaps stronger, perhaps stranger too.”

Kova stifled a yawn, though she was considering this. She was exhausted. The day she lost her home. What was she now? She had been listening, but she hadn’t heard any more of the flower-song since she’d left Setrana.

There came a shout—“Ho!” and the line pulled up. Suddenly the forest had grown quiet. They were in a ravine in the root structure, riding a large and wide ridge with other roots threading around them. Water rushed at the bottom of the ravine. She couldn’t tell how many moons were out, but it was plenty and the light was bright and fragmented. Ahead of them there was a group of lorgen standing on the path. Facing the group. One of them began to shriek.

“No!” Ryfkha barked hoarsely. “We move—they will skirt us.”

A ragged set of cries went up as the warriors of Setrana took up their weapons and prepared. Then someone—Jhoir—unleashed a low arrow that skittered down the rootpath between them. It spooked the beasts, who gave a combined screaming whine, glancing around before receding into the gloom.

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The men stood still after that for a moment, letting out their breaths. Kova thought it counted as their first battle and it was significant. All their paths were now twisted. When yesterday she had played in the murk blissfully. She wondered what Rakatl was doing now. It was likely he was sleeping, and her mother as well, as she should.

“We could turn down another path for a time,” B’renki said finally.

Ryfkha cleared his throat. “No. They are still here. They know where we are. Kova acts as a candle for them, a magnet. Ahead or behind, it makes no difference.”

She had shifted to ride behind Ryfkha in the saddle for now, facing backward. She began to see glints in the dark. She rubbed her eyes. She was dirty, tired, hungry and thirsty. She tugged on the waterskin strap looped diagonally from one shoulder to pull it up from her hip, uncapped it and sipped quietly. The glints weaving in pairs and trios.

They were eyes. Lorgen had three eyes as did dracari and sky terrors, situated equidistant across their heads. Quadrupedal, dark green tendrils rippling from their shoulders and down their bodies, their jaws too were three-hinged like the other moonforest avians she had ever seen. But lorgen did not fly, their home was the stout branches underneath the canopy and vines and brambles and peat fens and moonfruit groves.

She had never felt their hunger before, though she knew the lengths they went to try to catch dracari. She felt it now. A burning deep within them, but firstly within her. The maea effervescent from her, tumbling out like a mist, as though she was steaming after stepping from a firespring.

She was lifted, and had the vague notion of someone moving her. When she opened her eyes, it was her father. She closed her eyes again and pressed against him.

“Be vigilant. She will dream. She has never really stopped I think. I will stay close.”

Her father did not say anything. He just nodded grimly. Ryfkharnu canted the drelnai away.

“Good night, sweetling.”

Her father’s voice. They stalked now through silent glades of sporegrass, lit with everbloom and glowing funguses, green motes rising into the night. A wind rose, a breeze at first, that tugged at her hair, carrying smells from the places they had passed. Memories of home rushing back. It was already far away. Setrana, its name on the wind, fragmenting quickly into myth.

She would return. When she could. It was said that Mycarah would return once he came of age. He would never receive his third stripe though. Nor would she. Just, perhaps, as a visitor. She longed to sit cross-legged and clean with Rakatl and the other children in the skyhollow and listen to the husk tell them of the lost ages of the world, and roam the water meadows sometimes instead, and sit again in the trees basking in the solace of a quiet afternoon.

What was left was much different than that. Now she slept in motion under the light of the moons.