I ran and ran, but the blight slowed me. My lungs eventually cycled enough air to clean out the poisonous white ash, but my throat and chest still burned. I stopped well before Eiden. The three boulders Oman and I had claimed waited for me just off the path like a hidden sanctum, the field of grass shimmering silver-blue in the light of the midnight moon.

I crawled atop one of the boulders and hugged my knees to my chest. Exhaustion threatened to overwhelm me, but I forced my panic down first. I would develop blightlung. I knew that for certain.

I pressed my palms into my brow and clenched my teeth. Getting home was step one. Dad mustn’t see me, but midnight had come and gone. He’d be asleep. Then what?

Medicine. Five years after Mama’s passing, a medicine was created to counteract blightlung. Amaranza was the closest city – I could go there. Mama had survived for two weeks with the disease, so I had about as long. If I left now, I could be in Amaranza in less than three days.

I took a steadying breath. I could do this.

Eiden slept as I slunk into town like the thieving, rodent-like microraptors we called kobo. A scavenger. I moved through the residential street toward the trade street, toward the T-intersection where the Eidenhall waited. The trees seemed to nod at my approach, bending to shelter me from the curious night-moon, even as the wind held its breath in the silence. A door slammed somewhere in the trade street opposite.

The antechamber still smelled of food, and my stomach growled loud enough to reach the kitchen. Nothing moved, so I relaxed and put an ear to the wall outside the private quarters I shared with Dad. His loud snores rasped steadily, so I stepped inside.

By the moon’s shallow light, I saw something resting on the table. I padded forward, timing my steps with my Dad’s loud breaths. On top of the table, ready and waiting for me to return from the mountain and claim, was a sword. A baldric made of leaves treated and pressed into a waxy, leather-like “foliather”, hid the weapon’s blade from view. A matching belt accompanied the baldric.

Distracted, I picked up the weapon. Even sheathed, the simplicity and heft of the weapon had a realness to it at odds with the night’s surreal events.

Dad’s warning of strangers on the road stopped me before I returned the weapon to its place. I hadn’t earned this weapon. Technically, I was still a child.

I twisted my lips in frustration at the dishonesty and tucked the weapon under my arm. I hadn’t earned it, but if there were dangers on the road, that wouldn’t matter. I dug my pack out of my footlocker, padded to the kitchen to pilfer travel-appropriate food, and left.

Eiden’s town fell away behind me as I passed the fenced peka’ri pens, bee orchards, and other scattered farms at its outskirts. The distant silhouette of a man, round-shouldered and paunchy, leaned against one of the pens. His head seemed to turn from its study of the Red Moon to me. He spat, loud enough for me to hear over the crunch of dirt beneath my feet.

I ran and didn’t look back.

~*~

Bright daylight filtered through my heavy eyelids. My chest was stiff as freshly quenched bronze, as though hammers had worked over it while I slept. I hadn’t thought of it last night, but I could appreciate now the foolishness of not bringing any blankets with me from the Eidenhall.

I groaned and cracked my eyes open. A man stood in front of me, just inside the shade of the way station.

I yelped in surprise, and the man held up his hands in a placating gesture.

“Easy, easy,” he said.

It took me a moment to recognize he was from the Durim tribe. A shaggy, stout-legged baka hooked to a small merchant’s cart waited for him, and a Keléri woman with fiery copper-red hair tended the animal, watching. I relaxed.

The man stepped closer. “Hey, it’s okay, you see? Do you need help?” His squat head was cocked sideways. He extended one of his insect-like primary arms, offering me a hand up. His smaller, second pair signed it’s alright.

“Sorry,” I croaked. I gripped the man’s chitinous, three-fingered hand. “Just startled. Thank you.”

“Oh, don’t need to thank me,” said the Durim man, hauling me to my feet. “Didn’t know if you were sleeping. Just surprised to see a youngling laying all alone in the middle of nowhere — and on a hot day like this! Figured something was wrong.” Heat stroke, he added in hand-language. His secondary hands flashed through the words before he’d finished speaking vocally, as if thinking two things at once. “So, you okay?”

I twisted and stifled a wince. “I’m okay,” I lied.

“Hurt?” the man prodded.

“Just a little disoriented. How far is Eiden from here?”

“Oh, I’d say maybe —” he turned and studied the road behind him. His hands mumbled, three hours? Maybe four? Then, aloud again, “Maybe less, not sure! I don’t come this way often! You’re from there?” Going there?

“I’m heading to Amaranza,” I said, pulling a gulp of water from my pouch.

“Well! You’re a long way from there yet. Yep! Not so bad if the weather stays pleasant, though!” the man said.

The Keléri woman came up beside the man. She was only a year or two older than me, and half that of her traveling companion. Like others of her Tribe, she wasn’t much taller than four feet, with eyes and pointed ears that were half-again as large as even the most distinctive Enling’s. Her wild mane of curly, red-orange hair fell nearly to the dark brown of her wiry elbows, so vibrant it could have summoned fire kavi.

“Everything okay?” she asked the Durim. She flicked a sidelong glance at me.

He nodded with a grin. “I was just about to invite this young one to join us! We’re all going the same way. Yep, could make the trip much easier for you, little Enling!”

The young woman turned her full attention to me and shrugged. “We’re both going that way anyway. I’ll be staying in the city for the Festival, though he’s moving on to the mountains.”

I’d forgotten about the Festival. Yet, as tempting as company was, I couldn’t shake my dad’s warning from last night: You can’t trust your neighbors anymore, let alone a stranger.

The Durim man bounced his head up and down. “Festival of Lights! Wish I could watch, yep, but I can’t stay.” You’re going for the Festival?

“I… I – well,” I tried, but I didn’t have an answer. What was my plan exactly? I had no money, and the only thing I’d brought to trade was the sword. These weren’t “strangers on the road,” it was a merchant and his friend. I needed medicine, and now it was clear I needed help as well.

I stuck my hand out. “I’m Ren.”

~*~

The young woman had given her name as Elani. Her companion was Boro, and they had met a few days ago on the road from the island’s capitol. The mercantile stock was mostly Boro’s charge, plus a few glowing spirit-bottles Elani had stowed – she had tried to offer one in exchange for the ride, but Boro insisted conversation was the only trade he would accept.

Despite their arrangement, Boro said little for the first few hours, preferring instead to hum bouncy tunes to himself as he steered the baka cow along the clover-lined road. Elani and I rode in the back of the merchant cart among sacks of tubers and crates of Var’ra-gathered jeweler’s shells. She sat facing backwards, the way we came, while I sat along one of the wooden sideboards, both of us mostly ignoring each other after our initial introductions.

My silence was rude, and the civil instincts honed from my years as an innkeeper’s son screamed at my disregard of manners. Yet the bottles of kavi secured to Elani’s pack near her feet mesmerized me like a hearth fire on a quiet night. I could feel my eyes glaze over, yet I couldn’t look away.

She had three: a sky spirit like a floating streamer of golden light, a spherical water spirit, and a fire spirit like a crimson mass of vapor. They drew me in, and it seemed their glow pressed up against the crystals restraining them until their incorporeal forms filled my vision. I almost felt I could hear them.

“So, Ren,” Elani said, and I snapped out of the enchantment. Her voice had an edge, no doubt exasperated she was the first to break the silence. “Why were you sleeping alone on a way station bench in the middle of the day? You didn’t steal that sword and run, did you?”

I shook my head. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“We have kind of a long way.”

Her large eyes watched me with a mixture of open curiosity and caution.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I ran away.”

“You ran away from home? Maybe we’re more alike than I thought. I think I spend more time bouncing between my father’s shop and my mother’s zoo of a home.”

“It’s my first time, uh, running away. I think maybe I panicked.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Why?”

I blinked. “Why what? Why did I panic?”

“Why did you run away?”

“Because –” I stopped. Many thought blightlung was infectious, but I knew better. “Because my Dad is sick. Very sick. I’m a good runner, so I thought maybe I could get to Amaranza in time to get him some medicine.”

“You have nothing to trade,” Elani pointed out. And you are not running, she added in hand-speak.

I looked to the sword in my lap. “I didn’t earn this. It was promised to me, but I left before it was considered mine. I don’t know if that counts as stealing, but it’s all I have.”

“Yeah, you panicked,” Elani agreed. “But maybe you can earn your keep with us. Are you any good at spirit-catching?”

I laughed at the irony. “I’ve never caught one in my life.”

Elani raised an eyebrow.

“I didn’t have the talent for it as a kid, so I guess I stopped trying.”

“Wait a second – how old are you?” Are you not a youngling?

“Seventeen, but –”

“Wow,” Elani said, easing against a knobby sack of taro and crossing her arms. The sun made the black, fuzz-like fur covering her body glow a warm red-brown, and I could just make out the camouflage patterns dappling her shoulders. “I thought you were younger. Your Tribe does that rite of passage thing with the swords, right? So that blade was supposed to be yours, but you took it early?”

“No,” I huffed, “It —”

“Easy, easy, I’m not saying you stole it. Have to pay for the medicine somehow, right?”

“How old are you, then?” I asked.

Elani smirked, flashing a Keléri-sharp canine. “Only nineteen. But I didn’t bother with a rite of passage. I’ve been traveling alone back-and-forth across the Elethan Plains since I was – great Gala, what in the Depths is that?” Elani nearly flew from her seat as if her yellow kavi had exploded at her feet.

Boro whipped around at the sudden alarm. His eyes widened almost to match Elani’s, and the cart stopped with a creaking of wood.

“What?” I asked dumbly. I was already turning.

A familiar violet spirit, a perfect sphere the size of a small plum wrapped in lavender-hued vapor, floated an arm’s span from my shoulder.

“I thought you said you’d never caught any spirits before,” Elani muttered.

“That’s not – I mean it couldn’t be, it’s been hours! I didn’t even give it anything…” I trailed off.

The prayer! I’d meant the slingshot as an offering to Tesamet, the goddess of magic. I’d meant it as a tribute, a token of gratitude in exchange for luck. A symbolic gesture, not an effort at bonding!

“The rumors say these are a midnight spirit,” Boro said. “A midnight spirit.”

Elani spoke with the slow assuredness of one to whom everything suddenly made sense. “You captured one, didn’t you? You captured a purple spirit, and you ran away so you could be rewarded.”

I tore my eyes from the kavi to face my accuser. “I didn’t know I captured it at all! I haven’t seen it since last midnight.”

“You didn’t know a kavi rode dormant in your own body?”

“No! I told you, I’ve never caught one before!”

“Alright, easy does it, yep.” The wagon creaked and shifted as Boro eased himself out of the rider’s bench. He walked around the wagon so he was across from me, and addressed Elani and I both. “Times like these are full of uncertainty. Uncertainty leads to doubt, and betrayal. The Stranger relies on this discord in our communities. It is the harvest he reaps even as he sows more of it.

“Young Ren, if what you say is true, then I have a question to ask of you.” Important, serious, he signed.

I felt Elani’s eyes shift to watch me carefully. I was being tested.

“Does your purpose in bringing that spirit to Amaranza align with the goals of the Stranger or his Followers?”

“No,” I answered with relief. “I swear by all the Pantheon; I did not know until this minute that I had a spirit in my possession.”

“Let alone the spirit,” Elani muttered.

“Good!” Boro said, and his easy smile returned. He clapped his secondary hands together like a schoolteacher satisfied with his class. “Then let’s be back on our way, before old Pesha here eats so much clover she grows unable to pull our cart. Gala’s groves, that’s a pretty spirit though, yep!”

The cart jostled as the baka – Pesha – resumed her slow pace. The spirit hovered along beside me as though it were just another passenger, albeit one which wasn’t quite within the confines of the sturdy wood rails.

Elani crept forward from her spot at the front of the cart to crouch nearer to the spirit. “How did you do it?” she asked.

“It appeared right above me. I was leaning up against a godstone late at night, and it appeared from nothing, just over my head. I – well, my dad had been sick that day, not to mention it was the day of my rite of passage, so I had a lot on my mind.

“So, I prayed to Tesamet. I thought the spirit was an omen, I guess, and so I offered her my thanks through the kavi. As a show of sincerity, I left my slingshot at the base of the godstone. And then I left.”

That actually got Elani to shift her attention away from the mythical spirit floating behind our cart. She looked at me with a look of complete disbelief. “This thing’s been hiding from the entire island for a decade. You found one by chance, then not only walked away from it, but caught it anyway? By accident?”

I threw my hands up. “At least I have something I can trade for medicine.”

“No! Absolutely not. Are you stupid?”

“Younglings, we are friends here,” Boro said over his shoulder.

Elani’s ears flicked in annoyance. Are you stupid? she signed.

“I need medicine more than I need some spirit,” I argued. “Besides, with the left-over coin I can help my Dad at our inn.”

“Ren, these spirits don’t even officially exist yet. The political ramifications of a captive violet kavi are unprecedented! The Stranger’s made it clear these things are the centerpiece of his goals, and there are enough people desperate to bring one to him that you could be in real danger.”

I looked back the way we’d come, but all I saw were scattered palms, the thin river of road vanishing into the horizon, and the purple kavi following us. Following me.

“How do I hide it?” I asked.

“Here,” she said, clambering adroitly back to where she had been seated and pulling a small bottle from where she’d bound it to her traveling pack. It was lit from within by a gaseous cloud of glowing red vapor. A kavi.

“Since you’ve never caught one before, I’ll explain. Bottled kavi are still captured, or ‘tamed,’ I guess. It doesn’t matter who originally caught it. This is the whole reason the spirit trade is able to exist,” she explained.

She pulled the stopper from the bottle and dumped the spirit into her hand. It pooled in her palm like a heavy cloud. It sat there for a moment, then sunk into her skin and vanished from sight.

“I just bound the kavi to me again, see? It’s hidden, but it’s there, ready to be used. Then, if I want to, I can call on it, and…” She took a breath, and the spirit streamed from her palm like crimson smoke from an extinguished candle. “…it’s visible again. Now I can see it, and because I don’t want to accumulate spellplague for no reason, I’m going to put it back in the bottle. Now you try.”

“How am I supposed to tell it what to do?” I asked. “You didn’t exactly tell me how to do any of what you just showed me. What if I accidentally tell it to go away, or something?”

“I don’t know what to tell you; I never thought this was something that needed to be taught. I’m not a teacher. You just feel it.” It is intuitive, she signed with a shrug.

I closed my eyes and held my hand out to the idle spirit, then envisioned it streaming into my open palm like Elani’s did. I even imagined I could feel it, like putting my hand through cold mist.

I peeked through my lashes. The kavi hadn’t budged.

“I feel like an idiot,” I said, glowering at Elani. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Elani leaned back and folded her arms. “Well, keep trying, I guess. You’re lucky nobody else has seen it yet, or word would spread so fast across Kol Viri you’d be practicing this in front of the Tribal Council. Or whatever weird, dark cave the Stranger squats in when he’s thinking about waking up the Ancients.”

“Maybe you should bottle it, too,” Boro called. “Spellplague can be a nasty business, yep. Last night was many hours ago; Long time to be bound to a spirit.”

Elani nodded in agreement. “One of the first things you learn when you when you start catching and using spirits: don’t hold onto them too long. Too much of their magic leaks into you, and you start getting weak, feverish. Eventually you stop acting like yourself. Then you go faewild.”

“I know, I know, but…” I wish I could say I had a good reason to disagree, but I didn’t. I was nervous from my Dad’s warning about strangers on the road, but what sort of an excuse was that? They’d helped me so far.

Yet removing the spirit from the safety of my possession and into something as fragile, as easily stolen, as a catcher’s bottle seemed too great a risk. Whether I could trust them or not, whether I suffered spellplague or not, the safest option was keeping the spirit bound to me.

Besides, any spellplague I had accumulated would fade away once I removed the spirit from my body. The blight would only get worse.

“Well, can’t you buy crystals or something to counteract spellplague?” I tried.

“Sure,” Elani said. “But they’re expensive. Bottles are cheaper.”

I sighed and let the conversation drop. Elani seemed happy to comply, and so we fell back into our customary silence as Boro whistled a new tune. Whatever thoughts Elani busied herself with she put down in a notebook she’d pulled from her pack, while I watched the countryside roll by from within the shade of my cowl, thinking of home, and Dad, and even Oman.

It had been stupid to run away like I did. What good was it to shield my Dad from fear of the blight if I left him with fear over my disappearance instead?

It was all too late. Too late to spare my pride over sabotaging my own rite of passage, too late to stop myself from playing at heroically saving my home from the blight, and too late to get help from the people I trusted.

I could have handled the rite of passage, done only what I was meant to do. I had overreached, like a child jumping into too swift a river current, and now I was drowning as blightlung and the seventh spirit pulled me under.

As if jumping off a bridge proved my maturity.