Water lapped softly against a nearby shore. Something wet itched against the bare skin at the back of my neck. It’s nice and calm, I thought, now that the Festival is over.

I jolted back to full consciousness and sat up, struggling against the throbbing pain of my aching lungs. The grass was cool beneath my palms and bare calves, and I looked at it in surprise. Grass in the city?

No. We were outside the city. From afar, Amaranza looked like a distant cluster of candles, the odd Durim towers like sticks of wax on the crystalline lake. Smoke from the Festival still hung thick in the sky above the city.

Had Elani carried me out, somehow? I twisted, looking for her, and saw her crouched nearby.

“So, you have blightlung,” she said, picking at the grass in front of her.

She figured it out, then. I wondered if it would change our agreement, if she would realize we’d failed to procure medicine and maybe never would.

“How did we get out?” I asked instead.

“A man found us. I nearly bit him, but he explained you’d came into his shop earlier.”

The apothecary.

Elani continued. “I told him we needed to get you out of the city. I lied and said the Festival and all the people had overwhelmed you, so he helped me carry you out. Your spirit had vanished when you fainted.”

“Where is he now?”

“Getting us water, I think.” I heard a tiny snap as she ripped out another blade of grass.

“When were you going to tell me?” she asked. Another snap.

Her eyes found mine and she watched me for a moment. Her eyes had lost some of their depth, and I realized she was just as guarded now as she had once been when we’d met at the waystation.

I looked down at my lap. “I don’t know if I ever was.”

Elani opened her mouth to speak, but her ears twitched in Keléri fashion and she looked back to the grass, her long, slender fingers pinching off and then discarding the freshly shorn blades.

Footsteps approached a moment later, and I saw the apothecary trudging toward us from the lake. His white-blonde hair shone silver beneath the night-moon. Elani’s waterskin dripped in his hands.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked me.

“I’m alright,” I lied. My chest ached like I’d run the entire length of the Pebblewood. My pride was just as battered.

“Something to be said for that, you know,” the apothecary said, handing me the waterskin. “You’ve got it pretty bad. The blightlung. Worse than I had assumed when we met earlier.”

I nodded, my mouth full with water, and signed, my mother was sick. Two weeks only. Then died.

“I’m very sorry to hear that. Did she pass it to you?”

I swallowed. “She passed when I was very young. I didn’t know it was contagious.”

The apothecary spoke slowly as if each word was balanced between kindness and objectivity. “There’s not a lot of consensus on it, but there have been a few documented cases of contracting blightlung from others. It’s to do with the coughing, I suspect. Fortunately, there’s not a very high risk of transmission. Still, it’s… not exactly clear how it propagates.”

“You said something about the source of the medicine drying up,” I remembered. “Where?”

“Lorelai.” The forest of the Keléri Tribe on the western shore. Then, looking to Elani, “forgive me for assuming, but do you perhaps know of Forest’s End?”

“Sure. Northern town. People go there for the druid’s school.”

“Oh? I did not know. Well, it also happens to be the place where they process the reagents for making bluemoth elixir, which has turned out to be a pretty reliable way to clean the blight from one’s lungs.”

“But you said the source dried up, right?” I interjected.

“Unfortunately, yes, but I’ve not yet heard why. I would assume some problem with the bluemoths themselves. I mention going directly to Forest’s End because —” the apothecary trailed off, then adjusted his glasses. “Well, because you may not have long enough to wait for shipments to resume.”

I stared at the grass near my folded knees. Should I have felt something? Anger, fear, sadness? Mama had lived less than two weeks with the illness before she passed into Keth’s care in the Breathless Plains. She’d had bed rest and attention from every doctor in the region, but I had done nothing but aggravate the condition since I got it.

And the nearest medicine was on the other side of the island.

Elani stood up and wiped some dirt from her legs. “So we have no choice. We have to go to Forest’s End.”

“You don’t have to —” I started, but Elani cut me off with a sharp gesture.

“You don’t know the way, Ren, and you’re getting weaker. Besides, I’m going that direction anyway.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like the village is hidden – I’m not incompetent.”

“I’ll give you two a moment,” the apothecary said, pushing himself to his feet and striding away.

Elani watched him step away as I rolled to my feet, then whirled on me and signed, we had a deal. Remember?

If I die, I give you permission take spirit, I gestured in response. I’d meant it as a joke, but it felt grimmer than I’d intended.

You’re not going to die, Elani replied, her slender hands flashing.

I glanced toward the apothecary. “This disease is only going to get worse,” I whispered.

“Look, I’m not heartless. So you’re sicker than I thought, fine. But I still promised you I’d help you get your medicine. Even if that takes a little longer than I thought. I can’t exactly let you die, Ren.”

“Well, it wouldn’t do me any good to die with it, anyway. I don’t think I’d be very well-remembered if I let the spirit vanish like that.”

She smacked my arm with the back of her hand, fingers whiplike. “You’re not going to die! You’re stupid, but not that stupid.”

“Well, I’m full of surprises,” I said, gesturing to my chest. “Anyway. Forest’s End. How do we get there?”

“We can take the road to Poro Udoro. It’s a small town, halfway to Forest’s End from here. No, closer. If we’re lucky, they’ll still have the elixir. If not, we continue on to Forest’s End with little time lost.”

“How long?”

“It’s about as far from here as Eiden. Two days or less. Then half that from Udoro to Forest’s End.”

It had already been three days, and we needed at least another three. My mother died in ten while at rest. I’d be arriving in Forest’s End by the sixth day after putting my body through more stress than I usually put it through in a week.

“Okay.” I took a calming breath, then repeated the affirmation once more to myself.

The breath did little to help thanks to the blight’s sharp prodding. It sat like a weight, a painful phlegm I couldn’t clear out. I imagined roots like thistles worming their way into the mechanisms of my lungs, strangling me from the inside until I could no longer draw breath at all.

“What else can you tell me of the medicine?” I asked when the apothecary had returned. “Is it difficult to make?”

“It’s very simple, actually. I think it’s discovery was so recent only because the powder from the moth wings was an unlikely ingredient. Other than that, there’s very little to it. I could write you a list, I suppose, of the other elements, but they’re all common reagents.”

Elani pulled out her journal and a thin charcoal pencil and jotted notes as the apothecary described the medicine to her.

Meanwhile, my excitement mounted. The less difficult it was to make, the more likely it could be brewed in a hurry. With proper instruction, we might even be able to do it ourselves, assuming we found the reagents. It was just a matter of the bluemoth dust’s availability.

“Anything else?” Elani asked, looking up from her journal.

The apothecary shook his head. “If you need a place to stay…”

“No, best if we get on the road while the night is new,” I said, looking to Elani. She agreed.

“I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”

“You’ve probably saved my life,” I admitted. “And, um, thank you for getting me out of the city, too.”

As Elani and I made our way westward once more, I wondered if Dero the Dark or Vazira the Flame had ever been indebted to so many others.

~*~

We had not gone far the night Elani and I had left Amaranza behind. I had argued I could continue a few more miles, but Elani had traveled these stretches many times. We could get further tomorrow by resting tonight, she insisted.

She was right, of course. When I had awoken, I was surprised to find I actually felt relatively good, but for the blight; my body was acclimating to sleeping outdoors, I assumed, though I still longed for my bed in the Eidenhall and for longer, quieter sleep. While I still found bizarre, tiny aches in my muscles as I stretched, I found myself looking forward to the routine of breaking down camp and making breakfast.

We hiked all through the morning, only stopping for lunch at midday. Elani never gave up her attempts at teaching me to bottle it.

“You’re not a very good teacher,” I told her once. We camped in the shade at the edge of a meadow boxed in by pine forests and odd, tower-like rock structures. Karsts, Boro had called them. The road cut through the center of the meadow, a sprint away.

She huffed. “And you’re kind of an idiot.”

“Well, you wouldn’t train a house-mutt by telling it to ‘just do it’ over and over, would you?”

“So you’re a house-mutt?” The corner of her lip pulled back in a smirk.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

I scowled. “Let’s go.”

By the second day, it was as if we had awoken in a new land. The morning fog faded to a light haze, and the rocky pillars dotting the landscape were larger, outgrowing the scattered copses of trees. The spires now reached hundreds of feet into the air, the light grey rock of their sheer sides dressed in bright green foliage like scarves and skirts. Amaranzan pines, palms, and narrow clusters of bamboo grew wherever they could find purchase on terrace-like outcroppings. Golden kavi glittered at the tops of these spires, where the monoliths reached tall as any towerwood.

No winds or birds could have possibly carries the seeds of so many trees that high, I realized. Gala herself, the Ancient of Life, must have placed them there before the Tribes awoke, and they’ve been growing ever since.

I could almost see the gods’ hands in the environment around me, once I looked. The forests were no longer just matters of happenstance and environment, but intentional gardens shaped by Gala’s caring hands while Dromo the Earthsculptor offered a glimpse into his imagination with every spire of rock.

Mama’s hometown was here, somewhere in western Eletha. Renda’vel, the City of Wind. The spires there were so large that my ancestors had built their homes into a pair of them with help from their Durim and Keléri neighbors. My parents had been waiting until I was older before taking me to see it.

Our path eventually turned away from the titanic pillars as we went north, toward the great volcano. Bamboo eventually replaced the fields of flowering grasses around the trail, and their thickets hid the spires completely from view. Soon, the fields of my Tribe’s homeland would give way to the sprawling woodlands of Lorelai.

I took a deep breath, ignoring the pain to savor the clear, floral scent of the air, and wondered if this was the life of an adventurer. A life of constant travel through unfamiliar places, never staying long enough to get used to anything, each day offering new discoveries.

Yet, people lived here. They might even think Eiden strange and different, our towerwood trees in the Pebblewood a showcase of Gala’s power.

I nearly laughed out loud. The Pebblewood might be wondrous to a newcomer, but Eiden was strange to no-one.

Elani fixed me with a curious look.

Nothing, I signed, still smiling, and looked back to the bamboo. The high-ceilinged forest of my childhood did not have the same closeness as these woods. Here, I did not feel small. I felt cozy, hemmed in by imperfect walls of bamboo. Even the ground seemed plush, covered here and there in flat, raised blankets of woodsorrel.

I walked to one of the bamboo, curious of the barkless, stem-like trunks. It knocked against its neighbors with a hollow, wind-chime sound like the ones my hometown made of coconuts. I gripped one that had died and fallen against its neighbors.

“It’s light!” I called in surprise. With one hand I lifted its entire length from where it rested atop the soil. I bounced it up and down, craning my neck back to see the tip wiggle and jerk twenty steps away from the ground.

“Elani, look at this!”

She turned to look, then responded with a noise in the back of her throat as if I’d just asked her why the jungle fowl crossed the stream. I shot back a flat, disappointed stare and dropped the bamboo with a thump. If I’d just brought Oman along, we might have enjoyed the most awkward sword-fight of our lives.

“We’re almost to Udoro,” Elani said. “Maybe you can impress some of the children there.”

“We are?” I perked up. I had worried my inhibited pace would lose us hours, even costing us a day.

Elani pointed to a stone marker ahead of us, sitting comfortably at the side of the dirt road. The sand-colored marker stood three steps high, carved into a rounded shape with a simple face near its top like the one in Amaranza. However, this one’s face was reminiscent of a Durim; It had no nose, and the mouth was wider than an Enling or Keléri’s. The marker’s domed top completed the unique likeness.

The rock proudly displayed a few notes about the road. Udoro was less than ten miles away. We’d make it by nightfall.

Elani suggested we stop to eat not long after we left the marker behind us, and we made our way into the woods for some privacy. She preferred the untamed wilderness to way stations or smaller roadside benches for some reason, but for my part I enjoyed the feeling of roughing it. And, I realized with some embarrassment, it meant I did not have to worry about my ineptitude with spirits revealing the purple kavi’s existence.

The bamboo was scattered enough for easy travel between their stalks, but looking into the distance suggested an impassable wall of green, beige, and faded yellow. Here and there, tiny emerald motes of light drifted up from clumps of furry grass, or hovered near the fresh leaves of the bamboo.

Kavi of life, of Gala, of green magic. We used them for gardens and farms to promote growth and inhibit disease, for infirmaries to aid in medical work, and for talismans that promoted health or strength. Would that I had just found one of those to stick with me.

Before long, we found a small, makeshift hut, likely used by travelers before us as a way station of sorts. The lean-to appeared abandoned, so we cleared out some of the fallen leaves inside and made it ours.

I turned to Elani as I unbuckled my sword and placed it inside the shelter. “You said you capture spirits often, right? For your father?”

She nodded, not looking up as she cleared a space outside to build a cooking fire.

“Why not try to capture some of those?” I said, pointing at the green motes.

“They won’t exactly help us make lunch.”

“But they sell well, right?”

“Sure, Ren, but I don’t usually sell them to make money. I give them to my father, so he can make us money with his enchanting.”

I frowned. “That’s kind of a waste of your talent, isn’t it?”

Elani dropped a sigh into the pile of sticks she’d been arranging. “You want me to show you how to properly capture kavi or something, is that it?”

“I didn’t mean to make you upset. I’m sorry. Forget it.”

She grunted and went back to her work with the fire. After so many days alone together, I had expected us to become better friends. She had even seemed to turn a new leaf in Amaranza when she discovered I had blight lung. Softened, I thought.

Conversation didn’t seem like the right choice, so I looked around for something else useful I could do. Earlier, she had pointed out some of the edible insects and shoots inhabiting the area, so I cast about in search of them.

I’d barely gone from view of the traveler’s shelter when Elani came up to me. She held the unused bottle we’d practiced with in her hand.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Spirit-catching. Don’t throw this one, alright?”

I brightened, happy to accept this facsimile of an apology. “We’re going to catch some spirits?”

“Might as well, right? The apothecary said these greens aren’t useful against blightlung, but having some anyway can’t hurt.”

We picked out a spot near a tight cluster of bamboo. Life kavi floated aimlessly around the stalks, leaves, and shoots, drawn to the vibrant new growth, just as golden sky kavi were attracted to high, windy spots.

“Okay,” Elani said. She lowered her voice so it hardly rose over the sounds of the forest around us. “You know about the offering, right?”

I nodded. “Do we have anything they might like?”

Elani pulled out a few odd items from a pocket in her pants. “It’s hard to tell what a kavi might like, so it never hurts to collect weird things,” she said.

I looked at the assortment of items, all of them small rarities of the natural world. She had a tiny bottle protecting a five-leaf clover; an acorn the size of my thumbnail, so smooth it seemed to reflect the colors of the forest back at me; a tiny seed split open to reveal a sprout, also bottled; a grey feather shot through with a brilliant cyan.

“When I first found the purple one,” I said, “I hadn’t meant to capture it. I left the slingshot as a gift to Tesamet and prayed for luck. I’d never done that before, but that probably helped, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Elani said. “But I don’t think so. It might have just liked your slingshot – you considered it valuable, so sacrificing it honored the contract.”

“Oh.” I frowned, disappointed I hadn’t discovered the secret to spirit-catching. I pointed at the items Elani had displayed. “Well, which should I use?”

Elani shrugged. “That’s the trick, isn’t it?”

I plucked the feather from her hand, pinching the quill between my thumb and forefinger. She selected the clover, dumping it from the protective vial she’d kept it in, and stowed the rest safely away. Then she crept forward, much as I had done when I’d first seen the purple kavi atop Mt. Tasa.

She held the clover out to a nearby life spirit as it floated amidst a tuft of grass. The spirit seemed not to notice, so she slipped the clover back into the vial and pulled out the acorn.

The spirit flashed and dove toward the acorn as soon as she held it out. It enveloped the acorn then sunk into Elani’s palm much as the red kavi had done outside Amaranza. Both acorn and kavi had vanished.

“That’s really all it is?” I asked her.

“Even if you do everything right, it all comes down to luck. Best we can do is increase our chances,” she said, flicking her chin toward the feather in my fingers as she bottled her new kavi. “To be honest, two tries is lucky even for me.”

I looked around for another kavi, and found a ribbon-like one floating in circular patterns around a thick clump of moss blanketing a small boulder. The moss there was twice as pillowed as its neighbors, and notably greener.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Elani asked.

“Um?”

“Your kavi. One at a time, until you know what you’re doing.”

I hesitated. By now, I’d spent hours trying to transfer the purple spirit into the bottle. The moss spirit continued its lazy circles around the moss while I focused again on the spirit hiding away inside me. My hand hovered near the readied bottle, palm up as Elani demonstrated. My eyes flicked back to the green kavi drifting in circles, and I wondered if it would vanish when my purple one appeared.

A soft purple reflected off the glass of my bottle and I turned to see the kavi hovering nearby. Summoning it was easy as lifting a hand over my head. Its tether connecting it to me was as easy to pull in as a string on a kite, but that night in Amaranza made it clear it wouldn’t always respond.

“Alright,” Elani said, “maybe just catch it directly with the bottle, like a butterfly.”

The violet spirit made no attempt to escape as I guided it through the bottle’s glass mouth. I tamped down my excitement and quickly plugged the bottle. Inside, the spirit bobbed about in the center, the lavender mists it produced swirling in gentle patterns against the glass before dissolving.

I looked to Elani, her large eyes bright with interest as she watched the bottled kavi. Dad’s warning against strangers niggled at my mind like a hovering bee, yet Elani was no stranger, even if she fell short of being a friend.

I held the bottle out to her, and she took it gently in both hands. Her long fingers curled around the glass as though its contents held a lifetime of fortune. It very likely did.

I turned back to the green spirit in the moss, only for Elani to stop me with a startled “oh.”

The catcher’s bottle in her hand was empty. Fear and anger flared within me for only a second before I saw that the plug still stoppered the bottle. Instead, the spirit had floated back to my side.

“What happened?” I asked.

“It just… floated out. The bottle must defective after all, or…”

“You said a bottled kavi is still captured, right? It just lets you transfer ownership?”

“Yes, but look, it still treats you as its owner.”

I held a hand out as it approached, which it ignored. I took a few steps backward, and it followed. It was still mine, somehow.

“Well, let me try the bottle again,” I said, approaching Elani.

She flipped it over, inspecting the runes etched into its surfaces. “It doesn’t look broken,” she said, “so I’m not sure how it could have…“

I reached to take the bottle from her, but she moved it out of reach.

“What are you –”

She grabbed my arm and hissed a staccato “shh-shh-shh.”

She let go and looked out into the forest. Her ears twitched.

I strained to hear whatever it was her superior Keléri ears had picked up. Nothing seemed out of place, the only movement the breeze atop the sea of palms and bamboo. The green kavi winked out of sight.

I glanced back to Elani and signed, what do you hear?

“Not hear,” she murmured. “Smell.”

Nothing revealed itself other than loamy soil damp from the morning’s fog and rife with the vegetable fragrance of foliage. I knew Elani’s Tribe had sharper vision and hearing, but smell, too?

The scent hit me a moment later like a disguised octopus creeping up to a basking crab. The odor was sour and sharp like that of a scared millipede. The other half-dozen green kavi floating around us vanished.

“What is that?” I groaned, holding a hand to my nose.

“Just get your sword out,” she said under her breath. She swapped the green kavi she’d captured for a red one she pulled from a bottle.

“I left it at camp,” I muttered, dread running its finger down my back to the place my sword should have been. “Elani, what exactly is coming?”

“I’ve never smelled this before. But I think… I think that’s a kro’daka.”